Comment by huytersd
2 years ago
Why are you trying to play off your limited anecdotal evidence as universal? It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization and continues to be so. What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now. I can understand people that want to adopt but that’s a conscious decision they made on their part.
> It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization
Technically this is appeal to tradition. Certainly it's true that our various worldly cultures are strongly influenced by this idea, but factually speaking... before paternity tests, there was literally no way to know for men if a child was their paternal child, especially in societies with very little physical attribute variance. Therefore , it's not really true that "it's the most important thing," because we've never been able to tell for certainty who a child's father is until very recently. Even with physical attributes, our knowledge of genetics is relatively recent in human history, so there's probably lots of false positives / negatives (with hair or eye color for example).
> What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now.
This doesn't make sense in the context, is this a red herring or a strawman or similar? I believe the discussions is around situations that would normally involve a paternity test, which to me all essentially double checking whether a woman could have been impregnated by some other person than the expectant father.
It’s the same thing. If a man has sex with a woman and the government then drops off a foster child 9 months later, that’s no different than being expected to raise a child fathered by another man with the same woman.