Right, but generally you can take action to prevent it. Are there any modern court cases of a man compelled to pay child support for a baby that isn’t his and that he never met?
As I mentioned, California was notorious for not doing due diligence to ensure the alleged father was notified within the two-year window. So even someone who was nowhere near the mother at the time, if she put him on the birth certificate, he has 2 years to find out and contest it once the welfare department starts proceedings to collect child support. And the welfare department was aware that a “father” who did not respond to a court case was likely to miss that 2 years and end up with an incontestable obligation. The one article I recall about this mentioned the department using incorrect addresses, or ancient addresses when the correct address was on file with the DMV all the time, etc.
I think there’s something about the husband not being liable for support or to be automatically the father if the couple were legally separated and living apart at the time? If a judge can say “I will not make the child illegitimate” then presumably judges with an intellect more firmly based in this century or the previous one will have the discretion to say “Nope; you’re not the father.”
For support, both parents owe their share of the support. For normal ranges of income, there’s a standard calculation that you can find online for the non-custodial parent. Not sure what happens with actual shared custody, where the child resides in both houses approximately the same amount.
A few years ago Quebec thoughtfully changed their laws so that the parent can include obligations to subsequent children to lower the amount owed to the first child, i.e. in a situation where the father is paying one child’s support at the “only 1 child” rate and then ends up divorced a second time with more children. Before that, “I have more children to support” was not a valid excuse to lower support payments. Note Quebec also had the law (based on medieval French civil law) that grandparents were liable to support the widow and grandchildren of their son.
There’s also the story of the lesbian couple (in Michigan?) who went the gay-friend-and-turkey-baster route. Then one got cancer, ended up on medicare, and the welfare department went after their friend for years of back child support despite their promise. Apparently sperm donors escape liability only if the donation went through an accredited clinic. The couple was given the choice - identify the father, or lose the child as bad parents unable to support her… and also get cut off Medicare.
I don’t know what happened after this news story - but this man apparently never met the child before the deputy showed up * and isn’t the biological father. In fact, it doesn’t seem that he was even married to the mother - but if Texas can require this guy to pay child support for a child that isn’t his, the same would have been true if he had been married to the mother.
* He also claims he wasn’t served back in 2002/2003. He could be lying of course, but you’d think the mother’s attorney would have mentioned that when she mentioned the garnishments.
The “you only have two years” was supposedly intended to stop a vindictive alleged parent from constantly re-litigating the issue over and over in the courts. Once it was decided and the two years were up, no chance to change things. If the court accepted back then as valid the proof of any attempt to serve back then, well, sux2BU.
Yes “sewer service” as it is referred to. Unethical attorneys and process servers will engage in this. When there is a case where it to your benefit that the opposing party doesn’t respond, such as cases where a woman does not want the guy who she had a one night stand with, and he never knows that she’s pregnant, unilaterally decides that she doesn’t want any part of him in her life. But she “pretends” to want him to be part of his life and her or her attorney hires a third party who certifies that service was made to an adult living at the address, but really just doesn’t serve it.
The mother then gets a default judgment against the putative father establishing paternity, and she is free to then have an option. She can seek child support after a few years, at her option, but then argue that he is not to have any contact with the child because he failed to act as a parent.
My state has attempted to ameliorate this with a rule that there are no default judgments at all in paternity cases, but it still doesn’t stop the State, when a woman applies for welfare services, from bringing an action against the father later, establishing support (but only from the time of decision and not years prior as in a poster’s prior example) and still arguing that visitation would not be in the child’s best interests. And it puts the burden on the woman who is seeking to establish paternity in good faith to keep trying to track down a man who does not want to be found.
Agreed. Once the law was first established thousands of years ago, the general problem was recognized that a woman is always 100% biologically certain of her parenthood whereas a man never is (at least prior to modern DNA and blood testing). The ancients attempted to solve this in their primitive way: All extra marital sex was illegal and punished. No fornication or adultery. All sex was to be marital sex and we then presumed that husband and wife followed the law.
If it was shown that the parties engaged in extra marital sex, then the father had no rights or obligations to the child and was not considered a father at all. The woman was scorned. It is pretty jarring to read reports from my county (then a part of Virginia) where there was a “bastardy commission” who would gather and criminally punish these fathers and make him pay damages to the woman’s father who was now having to support the child and woman who was considered a harlot and unmarriable.
Obviously such a regime is inconsistent with our modern sensibilities, but the law hasn’t done a whole revamp, especially to include homosexual couples fully, and keeps part of this ancient tradition and tries to "square peg-round hole’ the rest of it into portions of this past idea.
I’m still missing something about the male vs female distinctions and how one get’s labeled a legal parent… Yes I get that a woman will know whether she made a particular baby while a man may not. But the part about who’s considered a parent when a baby is born while two people are legally married as long as nobody contests it…
I marry a rich wife, who spends her time apart from me but never divorces me and just keeps me around as a status symbol (I’m super handsome/have a famous surname). I make a couple babies with different crack-mamas who disappear for various reasons leaving me the only bio-parent. I don’t even know the mom’s names but a DNA test proves the babies are mine so I can keep them. Rich wife doesn’t say anything about me bringing home the babies and raising them in our house. Wife finally divorces me, I ask for child support because those babies were made during our marriage, and she didn’t contest anything.
Why would a female not be held legally accountable for support by saying: “sure the baby was made during our marriage, I didn’t contest anything, but I didn’t physically make the baby”, but a male will be held legally accountable for support under the same circumstances?
That’s the weird thing - according to the all the articles I read, the issue is not that the time period to contest paternity was over , and none of them said that he was liable for child support after the DNA test proved he wasn’t the father. I could understand if the time period to contest paternity was over, and he just had to live with it , although I still think that there should be some provision for lack of service.* But that doesn’t seem to be what happened. The articles all said it was due to some provision of Texas law that said he owes the child support for the time period between the child support order in 2003 and the DNA test in 2017- and that makes no sense to me.
I’m not sure of TX law, but this is WV law: WV Code 48-24-104
(c) Reimbursement support ordered pursuant to this section shall be limited to a period not to exceed thirty-six months prior to the service of notice of the commencement of paternity or support establishment, unless the court finds, by clear and convincing evidence:
(1) That the respondent had actual knowledge that he was believed to be the father of the child;
(2) That the respondent deliberately concealed his whereabouts or deliberately evaded attempts to serve process upon himself or herself; or
(3) That the respondent deliberately misrepresented relevant information which would have enabled the petitioner to proceed with the cause of action.
If the court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the circumstances in subsection (1), (2) or (3) exist, then the court shall order reimbursement support to the date of birth of the child, subject to the equitable defense of laches.
So I was incorrect in the time period above. A man can still be on the hook for 36 months of support even without knowledge. But without knowing the facts of the TX case, it seems that the man (at least presumably) was served with process in 2003.
The law is that the married man is presumed to be the father of any children his wife bears because of ye olde ancient law that is supposed to not open the marriage to questions of adultery when unchallenged by any party. A married woman is not presumed to be the mother of any children sired by her husband because no presumption is needed—we know who the mother is (better stated:; who the mother is NOT) without the resort to legal fictions–many scores of people could testify in your circumstance that she did not give birth at those times.
Thanks, i think this is key. Family matters are generally based on state law, and state laws vary.
Um, there’s even a case cited in the Bible from about 3000 years ago where maternity is disputed. 
The whole history of the law goes back to the “Good Old Days” when males where the general breadwinners, and could abandon a female with a certain degree of alacrity. The problem was that the woman was then left with a child to feed and no visible means of support.
The history of laws on marriage and paternity and child support has to be viewed through the lens of a history where there were no welfare departments and so it fell to someone - alleged father, father of the non-bride, or church charity - to make things right and feed them so there were not desperate women roaming the streets.
My reading of the modern, gender neutral laws would be - if she’s been living with you while the babies were being raised, then it’s on her to prove she was not acting like a parent and filling a parental role - otherwise she’s on the hook for support.
But the gender gap still applies. A child born to the crack-mama is not her problem; it was not born in the marriage, because it was not born to the member of the marriage capable of giving birth. The simple answer is when a married couple produce a child together, the male partner is assumed to have fathered the child with the female partner, simply because there should be a name on the birth certificate for paternity. The law might look different on situations where there is a lesbian marriage and one of the couple gets knocked up. Upon such interesting cases rest the opportunity to pay for many country club memberships for lawyers, until the law is updated.
But if I had to hazard a guess, when the laws are rewritten to correct for injustices, odds are the default paternity will no longer be the male spouse, but whoever the mother names - subject to a DNA test.
If we are discussing pie-in-the-sky oughta-be’s I would suggest the rule would be that the DNA-positive father should be subject to support obligations starting from the date the mother chose to pursue him, whether he was found or not. Retroactive support should depend on proof the father actively avoided service. But, I don’t get to write the laws, and this issue is moot for me.
As I understand, it takes one hearing to establish paternity, then a second to ask for support, then a third to garnishee. If the father successfully avoids all 3 services to the satisfaction of 3 different judges, maybe that’s because he doesn’t want to be found. If the mother gets a judgement but makes no effort to collect, then the presumption should be she did not want to collect and retroactivity should not apply. A judge should be able to determine how difficult it was to find and serve the garnish order on the employer.
But for now, oddly enough, we have a hodge-podge of jurisdictions with a hodge-podge of variously antiquated (or not) laws.
I didn’t say that it could not be “disputed” but that a woman herself is always 100% certain of the two. One of the women in the Solomon case knew she was lying and the other knew she was telling the truth. This is no different that an argument over who owns a gun or a dog or most other property (not saying a child is property, but the truth seeking function is the same).
In those days nobody, not Solomon, possibly not the woman, not the men involved, or anyone else could know for certainty who the father was. Therefore it was something that the law did not have an adequate procedure to solve.
Agreed. And as I stated above, the basis of it are still largely based on that idea except that we have carved off things here, made exceptions there, and so forth instead of largely rewriting the laws to comport with modern society.
Hence the smiley face. It was sort of a joke.
Often in the case of paternity, the woman also knows the truth - she just ain’t sayin’.
But the point is, not what someone knows or not. The question is what the law says. Otherwise, there would never be a presumption of paternity. Fortunately we are at the stage where science can definitely answer the question. (provided you are not an identical twin 
) The point being, many laws were made well before this was possible and have yet to be updated.
(Fun story - Wilfred Laurier was the prime minister of Canada over a century ago and a prominent and well-respected man. He was also very friendly with his former law partner and his partner’s wife. When the partner’s son was a young man and came to Ottawa, the resemblance to the great man was striking.
One very religious society lady remarking on this exclaimed “It must be the Finger of God!”
Her more worldly companion said, “I’ve heard it called many things, but never that.” )