To think that children should always get their mother's last name?

[CaptSkippy]

Here me out.

99% of the burden of reproduction is on women. All the pain and discomfort that come with pregnancy and childbirth are for the woman alone. No man has to suffer physically in any way for a child to be born.

All he has to do is have an orgasm.

Therefore I think that the honor of passing on a family name should belong to women alone.

What do you think?

Men massively disproportionate finance the child though. Women often give up work claim to be working as a sahm financially the burden falls on the man to provide. Due to sexism in reproductive rights and medicine men get no choices on contraceptives its condoms with their high failure rate or nothing. I don't begrudge the child taking the man's name.

I voted YABU simply because I think the decision should be made by each family what works for them.

ds has my surname and I am pleased I made that decision. But that doesn’t mean that people who make a different choice are wrong.

Yes, and if they don't have the same name they aren't allowed to get really angry at school staff when their child's jotters, certificates etc have the name which is on the register on them as they can't later change to the mothers name after a split.

That's easy for you, not so easy for future generations if everyone does the same. You can't keep adding hyphenated names so names will need to be dropped - parts of one or both parents, or even one parent entirely. Picking surnames would become as difficult as picking first names with the adding problem of potentially causing issues with grandparents.

I disagree.

One of my friends has a name that cost her a lot of embarrassment at school, she gave her son his father's surname.

There are various naming traditions around the world and some parents want to follow that here.

When I worked in hospitals it was a nightmare if we had an ECG request for a 'baby Begum', that could be any one of a number of children on a maternity ward with a large Pakistani / Bengali population. For anyone who doesn't know 'Begum' is like 'Mrs', so 'baby Begum' was 'baby of a married woman'.

Sikhs who are baptised take the names Singh or Kaur, some people are happy to pass those names on to their children but many use a family name and calling a boy 'princess' is not ideal.

Arabic tradition gives the mother her first son's name as her surname

Fathers do not give birth and don't get pregnant. This has been the case for at least several hundred thousand years. How far back do you need to go before it becomes "conventional"?

Well it's hardly a choice for them not to be the one to carry the baby is it 🤷🏻‍♀️
If you are married - then you'd all have the same surname anyway

"If you are married - then you'd all have the same surname anyway"

Er nope!
Plenty of married couples with different surnames.
I can't believe this has to be pointed out 🙄

There is no way he could supply the finances if he did not have a wife at home taking care of all his life admin stuff. And let's face it, these days many mothers work too, often fulltime. There are quite a few posters here who out-earn their male partners, yet the children still get their name.

And this does nothing to challenge my intial argument that a man has to face no physical hardship from pregnancy for 9 months and then hours, if not days, of labor to give birth.

You make a good point. Perhaps we should wipe the slate clean. Change all our last names to ones we picked so we can at least be sure they belong to women.

If it wasn't such an adminstrative hassle I would have done it already.

Did you teleport from the 1950s?

Do you really think that's true? Seriously, you've never heard of a woman keeping her name?

Exactly, it's not a choice. But naming is a choice and a privilege. I don't see why women would need to suffer so much only for that privilege to go to men.

For the longest time children legally belonged to the father and it was impossible to give the child the women's last name, as they could not even legally keep their own names when they got married.

There's no law preventing it and of course if you have your baby in hospital its name tag will be the mother's name regardless of what you later decide so you could argue that most babies certainly start life with their mother's name.

It's a cultural issue that they don't, it's not one of legality or practicality.

And judging by the comments you always get on threads like these we are a loooong way from accepting this as the cultural norm.

The number of women who get the vapours that other women might not change their name on marriage or might want their baby to have their name is staggering. And that's before you even get to the patriarchy.

We have a system now where people do have the choice. People can decide which surname to use, they can decide if they follow their cultural conventions or not.

You want to dictate what names people use so how is that any better than a system that automatically assumes the fathers name will be used?

Not as a blanket rule because that'll cause issues too. We had three kids before marriage. They were given their dad's name. I then took his name when married so we all matched. If the kids had been given my maiden name, we'd all have to change, or he'd have to take my name if we wanted to be the same, which is surely exactly the problem that so many women have, but in reverse.

I guess everyone should get married before kids to avoid that one...

What should be banned is the ridiculous double-barrelling of names.

I agree with you as well. I use "man's name" without thinking, because that is what I grew up with. When I was born it wasn't even possible for children to get their mother's name and it was not possible for married women to keep their own name. The law simply did not allow it. I was almost ten years old when the law changed to allow married women to keep their names. I was even older when children could get their mother's name.

Why would you all have to change if the kids had gotten your name? Your husband could have taken your name. Problem solved.

I agree. I prefer my married name to my maiden name so would have probably chosen my married name for ds, but I do wonder why unmarried couples routinely give their kids the father's name when the mother did all the work!

If I could travel back in time I’d keep my name and double barrel the kids.

I think it's a weird concept that mothers should give the baby their name because 'they did all the work', what, like a reward? That's weird. Have a billion other reasons why it would be sensible for the baby to have the mothers name but that's just a bit childish and petty.

I agree. It’s your name, not your father’s.

Parents can choose. It's a bit presumptuous of you to try apply this generally when there are myriad different cultures with their own way of doing things along with individual preferences.

Personally, for me, I agree. DS was always going to have my surname. If DH wanted him to have his surname then I would have it too. We got married during the pregnancy. Absolutely no way would I go through pregnancy childbirth and then end up with a beautiful child whose name had nothing to do with my own. Honestly, it would have broken my heart.

When I was born it wasn't even possible for children to get their mother's name and it was not possible for married women to keep their own name. The law simply did not allow it. I was almost ten years old when the law changed to allow married women to keep their names

which country was that? the US?

Not really. After all, one of the reasons men have always felt they need to control women so much is because they can never really be sure what kids are theirs. Women don't have that problem!

Anyway I think going through a none month pregnancy and childbirth and its aftermath DOES merit recognition. Not childish at all. It's a big deal (hence why I can never understand all the threads on here about only having one child being selfish - hardly, given what you put yourself through with every pregnancy).