A wife is married to man A.
Said wife cheats and has sex with man B.
She gives birth to a child sired by man B.
Man A later finds out the kid isn’t his.
This wife can, in most states (so far) compel man A to pay child support regardless of knowing she cheated.
So um, how is this not a major victory for her? She gets to cheat and get her helpless husband to pay for the consequences.
We’re starting to intermingle two different debates here. The original question was whether an unmarried biological father should be allowed to unilaterally opt out of the rights and responsibilites fatherhood altogether, since women have the option to terminate pregnancy. The topic of whether a married man who has been led to believe that children born during the marriage are his should be allowed to disclaim that relationship (and if so how long he has to do so) is a perfectly debatable topic, but unrelated the question that the OP asked.
Because, as someone so elegantly said, she is now the mother of a child with this problem:
Now let’s see, who was it that said that? Oh that’s right, it was you.
Child custody and support are not a zero sum game. Both parents are fully and jointly capable of “losing”. If she’s a “winner”, it’s a pyrrhic victory at best.
Okay, I have a hypothetical (a possible one, but not common, obviously). How about this:
Peggy and Paul are married. Peggy is involved in a horrible accident and falls into a coma. During her treatment, Paul discovers that Peggy is pregnant. The pregnancy comes to term, the baby is delivered by c-section and miraculously Peggy wakes up a little while later. She’s furious that Paul didn’t abort the baby. He’s repulsed that she thinks he should have. They divorce. Paul gets custody. Should Peggy have to pay child support?
This is about as close a scenario as I can devise to the real life scenario. For me, yes. Peggy should owe child support for the baby, even though it’s Paul’s “fault” the baby was born.
Even if you change the scenario to one where Peggy made it clear to Paul she never wanted kids and never wanted to be pregnant and he decided not to abort, she should still owe child support for the baby.
As I said before. It’s hard to judge someone for emotions associated with that kind of betrayal. You’d hope that the relationship between the two people {father and child} was grounded by love and survive such a revelation.
The money aspect would be a matter of individual circumstance. If I had the means I’d be glad to not be legally obligated to pay CS but I hope I’d continue to do things for and with the child. The great thing about that is having control over how the money is spent.
If you emotionally and financially abandoned a child who saw you as Dad , because you discovered you were betrayed by the mother, I might understand , but still would consider it a pretty selfish dick thing to do.
You’re really exaggerating what is probably statistically a rare occurrence.
That was not what I was talking about and is, in fact, something I have zero interest in discussing. The confusion was probably mine, so I’ll leave it here.
I think it would fairer before the pregnancy has occurred. Drawing the line after pregnancy but before birth makes no sense, because this is exactly the window of time at which the available choices that women and men have diverged due to biology.
Consider a scenario like this. A couple is in love and get along great. They start talking about marriage and having kids. The man tells the woman that he wants to start a family soon. They are in love. Sex is an everyday affair. They get sloppy with contraception, but no worries. The woman assumes that if she gets pregnant, all will work out because the man has expressed the desire to raise kids with her. The man isn’t worried either. He feels ready to commit this time.
Then incompatibilities surface. They start fighting. The man turns out to be an alcoholic. The woman has her own baggage too. They break up…but then wait, what’s this? The woman finds out she’s three months pregnant. It’s no secret that she’s pro-life, so abortion would be unthinkable to her. While she’s not exactly thrilled to be pregnant and is not eager to be a mother, she doesn’t want to give the child to the state either.
How should the guy should be able to get out of paying for child support in this case? What if the woman doesn’t sign his little contract, citing all the lovey dovey stuff he told her before the pregnancy took place? Doesn’t his failure to consistently strap up and the fact that he told her he wanted to start a family matter here at all?
This idea doesn’t strike me as crazy, crazily enough. It makes perfect sense to me. Most unwanted pregnancies are conceived in relationships, where presumably two adults would be able to discuss their reproductive futures and sign whatever papers necessary to make sure their intent was crystal clear in the eyes of the law. If you wait until after pregnancy takes place to get your legal ducks in a row, that’s too late. The woman can always say that you told her one thing (“let’s have a baby!”) just to get her into bed and it’s only now, when the deed is done, that you claim you didn’t want a baby after all. She can’t really say that if you have the contract signed before you even have sex.
Why do you think it matters whether the man is married or not? Certainly there are married men who don’t want to be fathers. And certainly there are unmarried men who do.
Nonsense. You are unlikely to ever find a position on any subject that doesn’t have somewhere a bad person who supports it. Beliefs should be judged according to their own merits, not who holds them. The founders of American democracy were genocidal slaveowners; that doesn’t make democracy evil.
And the fact that I don’t agree with HRoark43 on much else doesn’t mean he’s wrong when he points out the lack of sympathy men get for anything that happens to them. As I pointed out, that’s why charities use pictures of women and children in their advertisements; people feel sympathy for them, but not for men. Just as in this argument people feel sympathy for the woman having to raise a child, but none for the man who is being forced to pay for a child he may never even be allowed to see much less emotionally bond with, and who may not even be his actual child*.
My post was in response to someone else posting about how they felt no sympathy for men, after all.
I don’t think it matters, and never said that I did. The only difference is that children are presumed to be the mother’s children when born during the marriage, and have no presumed father when born outside of marriage. I think you misunderstand what I was saying: I’m saying the the issue of whether or not a father should have to pay for a child that he has been misled into believing is his is not the question that the OP posed. It’s derailing the conversation. Speaking of which:
Did you see the part where I mentioned that men fraudulently led to believe that they are the fathers of children have legal recourse to disclaim paternity, and then went on to point out that that has nothing to do with the OP?
Sure they can; it won’t work because the courts don’t care, and because of the time limit. Most men trust women who claim that a child is theirs. A mistake, but most men don’t like to acknowledge the fact that the way our system is set up puts men and women in an adversarial position to each other whether they want to be or not. Men don’t like treating every woman they have a relationship with as a threat and possible liar.
Moral precedent? Parental responsibility? I would assume that in the case of positive moral rights, it was the obligation of everyone to fulfill them (hence my statement of interested parties).
The current model is, to a greater or lesser extent, practical, as in the majority of cases, parents both can and wish to support and nurture their children. But if child support is a positive right (in the sense of having a right to do or have something and not simply a right not to have something done to you), then the fact that a couple had sex and could pay for the child but wish not to is irrelevant when it comes to determine who should actually foot the bill.
And if the issue is straight-up pragmatism, that fathers spreading their seed hither and yon will create an unsupportable number of children, then a strong incentivation of abortion also seems to be implied, which, as mentioned up-thread, seems to be a sufficiently perverse conclusion as to warrant re-examining the premises that led to it.
Aren’t you the one who brought the cuckolded husbands into the thread? Sort of off-topic, but it fits into your Men As Victims theme. There are men who revel in treating every woman as “a threat and possible liar.”
How sad.
It’s an interesting hypothetical. You can extend it ever further by saying that Peggy was at an abortion clinic about have an abortion when she went into a coma. In any case, I’d say that Peggy should be legally responsible for child support but I don’t think men should have an “opt out” option either.
Unfortunately, crazy hypotheticals like this only make for a great debate and not the foundation for public policy.
Well sure, but I was trying to get at the idea that the child existing is why both parents owe, not because men are the victims of a societal conspiracy.
In answer to above ABSOLUTELY YES same as a woman has the right to decide she doesn’t want to be a mother and have an abortion. That would promote equality in the matter of parental rights and responsibilities. She can choose not to incubate for 9 months. He can choose not to pay for 18 years. Ideally I wish individuals could relinquish parental rights and the matter be done with. Unfortunately parental rights’ relinquishment is tied to the other party’s approval (i.e. either parent can always retain custody and sue the other parnter for child support). I consider this grossly unfair.
I have no idea. It’s an obvious problem with the system and tends to get brought up in these arguments.
Just like I’m often told that men should always be treated as potential rapists and potential child molesters, and men are totally unreasonable if they find that offensive. If it’s OK to treat all men as potential predators, then it’s OK to treat all women as potential predators.
It may or may not be true that courts favor women in some circumstances, such as more frequently awarding the woman custody (and that’s probably more due to human nature than the law, as juries deciding custody do the same), but it’s just not the case that a court is going to force a man who is not the biological father who contests paternity within the statute of limitations to be a father. If a gets man gets served with a paternity suit and shows up the day of court with a DNA test that proves he’s not the father, what’s the court going to do? There’s no discretion to just force a man to be a father when he’s clearly not and proves it in a timely manner. The only time it becomes an issue is when the man lets the statute of limitations pass.
As to men trusting women that children are theirs on their say so, married men usually do and single men usually don’t, which is why the whole “paying for a kid that isn’t yours” thing, when it makes the paper, usually comes up in divorce proceedings many years later. Sucks, but pretty much every single civil action has a statute of limitations after which you can’t sue, no matter how badly you were wronged or injured. If you sit on a million dollar lawsuit until it’s too late to sue, you’re still just as wronged, but you’re unfortunately out of luck and out of a million dollars. So yes, mistake is right, and like many mistakes one that has hugely detrimental legal consequences which the law clearly warns you about ahead of time. If a man let’s the statute pass that’s regrettable, but the rationale of having the SOL isn’t that “the system wants to stick it to the man” - it’s the father by failing to contest paternity has voluntarily assumed the role of parent, that the child has relied on that, and after a certain period it’s no longer equitable to the child allow the father disclaim it. You can make a reasonable argument that the SOL should be lengthened or done away with altogether, but again, that’s an argument for another thread.
Except I haven’t seen it in this thread from the other side. And I have seen a desire to punish women in this.
So I am seeing rationality and moderation here - rationality and moderation is not running away from your responsibilities. Denying all responsibility for a 12 year old you have built a relationship with for 12 years because you find out that 12 year old’s mother wronged you 13 years ago is neither rational nor moderate. It’s despicable.