Rights of fathers and the biology of fatherhood

The contribution of the mother and father to a baby at birth, seen to scale

Sadly, any woman saying anything bold and controversial on the Internet is like flypaper for misogynists and MRAs, who are usually the same people. If the woman happens to be good-looking, the boys take out the heavy artillery.

I was bored, so I watched Laci Green's sex-positive video about condom use. I'm far out of that demographic, but I like watching Laci Green no matter what she's saying. 

Only an ex-Mormon can have a smile bigger than those glasses.

 From there, the subject was sidetracked to tangent issues. One of those were the issues of fathers' rights. One guy wrote this:

"Women don't create life, they carry it like an incubator.
Men make the life,sperm is the cell that carries all the information."


--A. I. Natsumi

This was either an extreme case of ignorance or a troll. But it gave me an opportunity to write my thoughts on fathers' rights.

Most men aren't this ignorant, but most also presume the child is biologically fifty percent theirs because they provided fifty percent of the genetic material. This is what they were taught in high school biology. This is also simplistic to the point of being incorrect.

While it's true that males provide half the nuclear DNA, the nucleus is not the only DNA in a human cell. All the mitochondrial DNA is the mother's. And that's the great majority of the DNA in the cell. The mother also provides all of the cellular machinery, all of those organelles that make a cell function.

Also, all the bacteria that is vital to the baby surviving comes from the mother. It's been determined that there are many more symbiotic bacterial cells in and on a person then there are human cells. (Bacterial cells, however, are much smaller.)

So, if you look at design and material provided, the male is a minority partner in creating the child.

I'm not saying we should take our cues from nature in this matter, because nature is terribly immoral and unethical.  I'm saying that fathers can't justify their custody rights based on nature either. At birth, the father's contribution compared to the mother's is not half-and-half. 

Of course the father is essential in starting the pregnancy. IMHO, this matters if the parents started the pregnancy deliberately, but wouldn't be a factor in an unplanned birth.  

With MRA's and misogynists, there's never been a truer statement than "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics."



BTW, visit Laci Green's Youtube channel sometime: