Since we got our first blogosphere link from a blog which I do not read regularly, I think I owe a response.

Win Fitzpatrick of Homeobox responded (in this post) rather negatively to my post on paternal nullification (as did all of the commenters on Matthew Yglesias, despite Matthew's generally positive response (Matthew? Matt? Yglesias? I'm still not comfortable reading posts which refer to me as "Snyder"). So I figured I'd clarify the argument for paternity annulment, since my original post was rather cursory.

The argument is not that men have exactly as much of a right to annul paternity as women do to an abortion. The argument is that every argument for abortion has a analogue (albeit sometimes weeker) which argues for paternalt annulment. I'm not claiming that a right to control your bank account is equivalent to a right to control your own body, but that doesn't mean we don't have some right to control our bank accounts.

The question at hand here is why is it reasonable to force a man to pay for the rest of his life for a child which he did not want to have. If you argue that by choosing to have sex he has agreed to live with the consequences, then you are on slippery ground because you could make the same argument that a woman agrees to part with certain rights to control her own body when she chooses to have sex. Perhaps the argument for men is weeker, but that doesn't make it incorrect.

We don't make sperm donors pay child support, why should we make a man pay child support when he thought he was engaging in non-procreative sex?

If sex does not commit a woman to bear a child this produces, then why does it commit a man to pay for the child this produces? (Notice I am not saying that bearing a child is the equiavlent of paying for a child, only that the act which produces the commitment is the same.)

I'm not saying that you can't come up with a good answer to that question, only that it is very difficult to come up with a good answer to that question which does not also give a decent argument against abortion.

I wish I could find a link to the article which made this argument originally, it was quite a brilliant article, and I don't want to pass off these arguments as if they were my own.