h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On this morning's news they said a prison inmate, imprisoned for beating an old man to death, is fighting for the right to have his wife artificially inseminated because they want children. His wife met him in prison while he was serving his sentence. His lawyers say that he is being denied his basic human right to father children.

Should a murderer have the right to use the health service, paid for by tax payers (including the poor old war veteran he murdered presumably) for this purpose. Who will have the obligation to pay for the health and well being of the children born in this way if the father is in prison?

What do you think?

I think he should spend more time in solitary.

It is not a human right to have children and it shouldn't be.

That said, I think that the mother to be will be in charge of the health and wellbeing of the child if any is conceived, not the state - we do allow single parents to look after their children and it is perhaps a little bit mysoginistic to assume that the child will be any more of a burden on the state for not having a live-in father.

Particularly in the case of extreme violence, where it would seem there may be some degree of inheritance, I suspect we'd all be better off if he didn't breed even after his eventual release.

How long is he in prison for? Men never stop being able to have children, so surely he could wait. I don't think I would want to sentence my children to a life of only seeing their father behind bars.

I can't imagine it'd be very easy for the child either :
'And what does *your* father do'
'Err - kill people?'

If it *was* decided to be a human right for a man, would women prisoners be allowed to get pregnant and bear one or more children while imprisoned, however long their sentence? If not, it's hardly fair to allow men to breed.

Men never stop being able to have children, but they can get too old to be generally attractive to women young enough to be fertile, especially if they don't have any money or prospects.

Please don't think I'm a misogynist. I promise I'm not. But it occurs to me that even little birds take more trouble in choosing a suitable mate than some human females.

The American Constitution contains nothing mentioning the "right to breed." I'm not overly familiar with the Declaration of Human Rights, but I suspect there is nothing in there as well. Not that it matters terribly, since it is my understanding that one loses many of their constitutional rights when they are convicted of a crime and forced to serve time in jail.

Now you come to mention it, what about the right to send out for a pizza?

LOL! I think that one is in there... right next to the Right to Watch Soap Operas and after the Right to Use Exercise Equipment In Order to Become a Stronger Villain.

Yes, I thought I'd seen it there. Further down the list there was something about the inalienable right of old geezers to be bludgeoned to death by maniacs.

Surely, if we combined the right to pizza with the right to unlimited TV, couches and huge bags of high-fat snacks, we could negate the effect of the gym equipment?

Stealthy execution by coronary heart disease. Brilliant idea!

Apparently, the prisoner lost his appeal this afternoon.

I think he lost his *appeal* to everyone except his wife right after the conviction was handed down.

I am firmly of the opinion that while serving a prison sentence, prisoners should be denied the opportunity to breed. This has three useful effects that I can see immediately:

1) It reinforces the unpleasantness of prison (or as it should be) and prison as a place of punishment - no sex, not even in a lab
2) It reduces the burden on the health service, prison service and so forth
3) It has a small but marginal effect on the population

Mina has a point about male fertility and age.

The only time I can really see it being okay to allow prisoners to donate sperm is if they've been arrested but still need to be there to provide sperm to match their partner's IVF treatment (or similar fertility treatment). There is of course a problem with women being arrested while in the process of undergoing IVF - but that's really a different discussion, and to be perfectly honest they'd be far more sensible just not to get themselves arrested at all. I mean, if you don't break the law you're very unlikely to be arrested - and if you are, one would hope you're going to get released pretty quickly in the vast majority of cases.

Apparently, his lawyer's argument was that his wife (who left her job working at the prison where he was being held in order to marry him) might be too old to have children by the time he gets out. Given he was already banged up, you'd rather think that point would have been worth considering *before* they got married.

Duncan, the difference between the woman wishing to make babies with the imprisoned, convicted murderer and women who are simply deserted by their partners, is that she will be knowingly starting from a point where she alone has to support the child with her income alone and if she is unable to work for any reason the Child Support Agency will be unable to chase her husband for child maintenance payments. It's not an ideal start for a child in a society where you have to be fairly well off to have the luxury of allowing one parent to stay home to take care of the children. Believing that the woman should have a sense of responsibility doesn't make me a misogynist. Can a woman be a misogynist, by the way?

The female equivalent of a misogynist is a misandryst, but I suppose it's *technically* possible for a woman to hate women in general.

Hmmm. Well, I don't. I just think that people - male and female - have more than just rights. They also have responsibilities and one of those responsibilities is not to deliberately put themselves in a position where their fellow citizens/subjects are likely to be burdened with paying for their follies.

As Shorn said a bit earlier, even birds - probably most of the higher animals, in fact - are quite fussy about who they mate with. If a weaver bird can show so much discrimination in choosing its breeding partner, why can't humans be a bit more discerning.

Because (and don't laugh I'm serious) we've lost our sense of smell.