Female-Inclusive Legal Structure: Voluntary Relationship

What would it mean to be considered or defined in part based on your voluntary relationships? What is a voluntary relationship?

There are two aspects to this: voluntariness, and what constitutes a relationship. I’ll address the second part first.

This is based on the traditional English legal system, which is used predominantly now in the United States and Canada. I think the method of analysis, though, can be used to examine most modern legal structures.

Typically, in this legal structure, relationships focus on specific goals. Corporations are formed with an explicit purpose, as are most organizations; contracts have a specific goal or series of goals, and after they occur the contract ends; to a large extent, even families are considered to have a “purpose” of child-rearing. Arguably, many of us even think about individual persons in this way: we’re encouraged to find our “purpose” in life, or think about the way we are useful to larger goals.

If the focus of a relationship is on a goal, however, the significance of the relationship is subsumed into the importance of the goal. If the relationship is no longer useful as a means to an end, it can be discarded; one of the basic tenets of contract interpretation is that if the goal can no longer be accomplished with the relationship, then the contract – and the relationship it is meant to embody – can be ignored.

If we consider a pregnant female, however, she usually sits in a web of relationships. It’s incredibly difficult to manage a pregnancy and newborn care alone (that many women have done it throughout history speaks, I think, more to the capabilities and tenacity of those women than it does to the feasibility of doing so). The problem of goal-focused relationships in the context of pregnancy has been often addressed – if not in those precise terms – in criticisms of the anti-abortion movement: once a woman has chosen to not abort, or once the child is born, then a woman receives very little support from the organizations which were ostensibly going to help her. The organization’s goal having been accomplished, they no longer consider themselves to have a relationship with her.

A pregnant female does not need goal-specific relationships; she needs indefinite, long-term relationships which are based up on a mutually recognized bond. This has usually taken the form of female family members, female friends, and possibly her male lover. That is in part because pregnancy is an innately uncertain state; there are no assurances about the eventual outcome of the pregnancy or birth, or how the newborn will fare, or what the mother’s needs will be later down the line.

This is the same sort of bond which parents are generally expected to have with their children, or which (though this may be changing) bonded romantic partners were expected to have with each other: a concept embodied more easily by “we” than by “you” and “I”.

But this form of bond has no real place in our current legal structure. In general, even when addressing intimate family relationships, we’ve looked at them in terms of “rights” and “obligations” and goal-oriented purposes: party X must pay Y because you agreed to have the goal of raising children, party Y must pay X because you agreed to support each other financially for a college degree, etc.

We need a method for recognizing bonds which are not based upon set obligations or specific, achievable goals.

Now, this system is currently applied to relationships which are both voluntary and involuntary. I want to address unanticipated harm from an involuntary association in another later post, but I think it demonstrates by way of example the extent to which our legal structure is goal-oriented.

Tort law deals with involuntary relationships in which one party was harmed by another party. For example, if I drive my car down the street and smash into you while you were riding your bicycle, we have an involuntary relationship. I’ll be expected to pay for your medical bills – to “make whole” your losses, is how it’s euphemistically phrased – based, again, on a concept of rights and obligations. As tort law developed, it in a sense borrowed from the same ideas which formulated the basis of contract law: that two parties have obligations to each other, and when one party violates them and causes harm, that violating party must pay. In tort law, we are all tasked with an inherent obligation to every other person: to behave as a reasonable person would, or in other words to not be “negligent”. When we breach that “duty of care” and harm occurs, we’re responsible for any proximate harm which results. Importantly, if I’ve hurt your “purpose” – for example, if I’ve done something which made your business not acquire as much money as you anticipated, or if I harmed your non-profit organization’s ability to get its message out – then that is also harm.

In short, there is not much difference between relationships which are voluntary or involuntary, other than voluntary relationships usually have specified obligations and involuntary ones involve default obligations. They’re both obligation-focused, and they’re both limited to the extent of those obligations.

In order to be voluntary, there must be a way to end the relationship, and the people in the relationship must be able to choose that freely. In our current system, each individual is presumed able to make such choices, and barring evidence of coercion or force people will be held to the “choices” they make (for example, to remain married, or to remain the legal guardian of a child or give the child up for adoption).

In reality, most of us know that isn’t the way the world works. Females, in particular, are driven to make “choices” out of safety or survival. If a woman is a live-in partner with a man in part because she may become homeless if she leaves him (with the attendant dangers to females that such a “choice” would bring) then she isn’t making much of a free “choice” to stay with him. That is not a voluntary relationship. Further, if a female is pregnant but cannot procure an abortion or experiences concerted social/financial pressure to not abort, then she does not have a voluntary relationship with fetus.

For relationships to be voluntary, it requires the presence of certain other relationships, social services, and safety nets. Otherwise, people can’t be held to their choices, because our choices are not made freely.

In short: we need a legal structure which can recognize long-term, indefinite, non-goal-oriented bonds, and which provides people the opportunity to make such bonds freely and without duress.