I though the trial was to determine whether or not the mother had to tell the father about the child?
HIV laws are designed not only to protect the past partners of the infected person, but the future partners of the past partners (why do you keep making me write these horrible sentences?). A past partner that isn’t informed can go on to infect his/her future partners, who go on to possibly infect their future partners.
Not telling the some guy that hasn’t been involved with the woman throughout the pregnancy that he is suddenly a father is not going to cause other guys not to find out they are fathers. Your analogy is a little weak.
Mother would tell a government agency who the father was and then the government agency would inform the father without giving any information about the mother.
I realize its not exactly equivilent. But in both cases the government is forcing a partner to provide important information to the other partner. The only difference I see has to due with the importance of the information. Obviously knowing you have HIV is extremely important. I would argue that knowing you have a child is an extremely important piece of information.
treis, as people point out the flaws in your scenario, your model gets more and more convoluted and twisted. Secret meetings of a shadow court plotting Mother X against Father Doe. Talkitive witnesses and reticent mothers alike tossed in into our overcrowded prison systems. Levels of hospital bureaucracy dedicated to questioning, grilling, investigating, tracking, and DNA testing (do you know how expensive DNA tests are?) Secret meetings of hush-hush sealed-record shadow courts pitting Mother X against Father Y.
If your suggestion cannot be implemented without all the elaboration and expense, doesn’t that kind of point out how unrealistic it is? How it just couldn’t be effectively done in our society?
Everybody thinks it is downright shitty for a mother to hide paternity. Excepting cases involving domestic abuse, I reckon a good chunk of mothers who do this are not merely spiteful but seriously dysfunctional in one way or another–
mentally ill, delusional, lost in addiction. Or else they are as young and panicked as hauss, and like hauss, they make a foolish, selfish, and cruel decision. It’s totally wrong. My heart goes out to men in this situation. But you are seriously suggesting that ignorant fathers are in any way as serious a problem compared to our epidemic of runaway parents and abandoned kids.
Quote:
Originally Posted by yosemite
That’s all you want? Let’s go for it then.
Way to be compLETEly disingenuous. yosemite was talking about your suggestion to put an add in the paper in an attempt to find the father, NOT in making her go to a judge to try to convince him of a man’s abuse.
What are you, 12?
I’ve never seen anyone who was more naive or ignorant about society, human nature, human psychology, the law…JEEZ Life for that matter. Your Orwellian proposal of a law to force women, at gunpoint as it were, to divulge the name of the father AGAINST their will, would never fly.
And as many people have mentioned so far, Who would PAY for such a program of father information retrieval? You? for ONE woman it is 20 dollars to place an ad. But you are talking about any woman who won’t divulge the information.
That means:
- Workers to place ads, interview mothers, take information and enter it into a database
- Computers, offices, supplies, overhead in which these workers and files will exist
- Additional law officers for tracking, questioning and arresting “reluctant moms” (term to save time and typing ONLY)
And that’s just scratching the surface of what such a law and effort would mean moneywise, and workwise to put into effect.
Now, that’s not even to take into account how ridiculous your “it would be obvious she’s lying”. Ummmm…SO? Sorry, did I miss the part about attaching electrodes to her nipples and torturing it out of her?
Or were you thinking that once she lies, then she’ll be arrested on suspicion of lying about not knowing, and then a court case would ensue? PUH lease! You think our court systems are just sitting there with pencils all freshly sharpened twittling their thumbs with want of something to do?
And lets say that there was this new segment of the gov’t in place, so what happens when she is, by a court order determined to be lying and has to go to jail. Okay, so, you’ve now got lying "reluctant moms in jail by the hundreds of thousands (and based on you and catsix’s posts, you seem to think this is some vast evil conspiracy by ALL women, and have taken the baby away as punishment.
Where are we going to put all of those babies? (Remember, mom never talked, so she got tossed in the pokey). And who’s going to pay for THEM? That’s RIGHT, the taxpayers! In gandidgamera massive orphanages.
Hmmm, SUCH a great idea to make men in this situation accountable for nothing, yet entitled to anything he wants huh?
treis, why do you think this is an important enough issue to devote resources and money to? Do you believe there is a significant number of men out there who are interested in being good fathers to babies they didn’t know they had?
So you are going to call some guy up and say, “Sir, we believe you may be the father of an infant born on x, in y. If you are interested in learning more, please contact z.”
Then the guy calls up and says…what? “Oh, goody, I’ve been waiting lo so many years to have a child of my own, sign me up! I don’t care who the mom is, I’ll be there tomorrow to let you Buckel swab me and run the paternity test.” I just can’t imagine a scenario where the guy doesn’t ask who the mom is. You really think he’s just going to show up and give his DNA? If he doesn’t, do you then figure the woman is lying? How is this going to work, treis?
on preview:
But unlikely to cause harm to untold numbers of other, uninformed people. And though finding out your a parent is important information, it’s not important enough to compel every woman to reveal the name of the father of her child just in case she might be trying to screw some unsuspecting guy over. HIV can kill people–lacking knowledge of your biological children has less chance of doing that. (So help me, if you break out organ donation or bone marrow here, I’m my head’s gonna explode like so many before me.)
Yes…but it doesn’t seem to mean anything! Facts are shown, inconsistencies are pointed out, logic is applied, the truth is illuminated…and all we get is another repetition of “women have after-the-fact options and men don’t.”
It’s like discussing table manners with the cat.
In that specific case yes thats all I want.
19
Aww you’re flattering me.
Like I said if it proves to be too expensive for the benefit scrap the program. I don’t have the means to do an indepth financial analysis of the program. If you do have specific numbers by all means share them.
Do I have to spell this out again? If we think she is lying we inform her of the penalities of perjury. If we find out later that she lied we toss her ass in jail for perjury.
Unless we have evidence we don’t arrest her I have been over this.
Oh please I don’t think hundreds of thousands of moms will go to jail. Whos being disingenous now?
Did you miss the part about making him pay for child support if he doesn’t want custody?
I think its a very important issue. How much would you pay to be able to raise your child? I don’t know how much it will cost and for what benefit but like I have said repeaditly if it turns out to be too costly for the benefit it provides then we scrap the program.
Yes call the guy tell him he might be a father and arrange the paternity test.
He can ask all he wants we aren’t going to tell him.
Yes I think he will show up and give his DNA. If he doesn’t then he forfeits his right to custody and we go after him for child support.
Scroll up and look at my previous post numbnuts.
You’re going to demand a DNA test from a guy without telling him why, and if he refuses to consent what is essentially a search, you’re going to terminate his parental rights and yet still make him pay for child support — on the word of a woman who might not even know WHO the baby’s father is? Yeah, that’ll happen.
In almost all cases, if you pay child support, you get some form of custody. The only way you can be forever released is if your parental rights are terminated: no more child support, but if Mom dies the father can’t come out of the woodwork and get custody of the kid.
It already happens in Washington:
I’ll see if I can dig up a cite or maybe stretch could help.
Do you have any idea how idiotic this kind of reasoning is? Sigh…do you REALLY think that a piece of paper will prevent a batterer from gaining access to his target and harming or killing her, or them? There have been countless cases of men hunting down and finding their ex-spouses who dared to leave them and either killing them, or attempting to kill them even years after the woman left or divorced them and moved hundreds of miles away.
Not to mention how long it takes things to go through the courts, so, a woman who has been threatened petitions the court. Do you think that she gets in to see a judge that day, that hour? That she gets police protection until the case is decided? What planet are you from anyway? Because you are NOT living on real world planet earth, that’s for sure.
In a perfect world, the mere filing of a protective order would do the trick. A determined batterer or stalker isn’t stopped by a piece of paper, and that goes for female stalkers or batterers too (there are about 3 times the number of male batterers as there are female batterers according to the US Justice Website. I posted this on a previous catsix fiasco of a thread several months ago, but will look it up again if you’d like).
At any rate, as it stands now, “convincing” a judge is no real protection for the woman. It is merely a start, in many places the man still has to actively “do something” to violate the order before any action will be taken, and as I said above, frequently that “something” is to attempt or accomplish murder.
Ummm, WHAT? holmes said "real world events. You are aware of what that term means right? As in, those events that happen all around you, on the news, written up in books, sensationalized (the name Laci Peterson ring a bell?).
It’s exceedingly illogical to propose a law which is designed to stop an action which is the rare exception rather than the rule, as almost everyone else in this thread has pointed out. And that is what you’re proposing.
If you want “real world” statistics, look around you, 90% of the people in just this thread alone are telling you that you’re nuts, that’s a similar percentage (adjusting for the less informed outside the dope :D), to what you’d see in a real world vote should your silly law ever make it to be voted upon (though likely it’d cause a few coronaries of older politicians as they laughed themselves to death, before it ever even made it to the floor to be voted down), is a resounding “NO! Not just no, but HELL no!”
If you can’t see the logic, just from the reacfions and attempts of the good people here on the board (by the way, some who’ve expressed your nuttiness are ones that I don’t generally agree with, so it’s not like we’re all in cahoots or something), that your ideas wouldn’t hold water in the outside world, well, you’re either VERY young and naive, or nuttier than a fruitcake.
I hope it’s the former, so you have a chance.
Diogenes and I rarely see eye to eye, but I think he was right to wonder if you’re a crack baby. What in the hell planet do you live on where people other than women are likely to give birth? I like the X-Files more than most people, but you scare me.
And if the Dad is so goddamned concerned about his babies being born without his knowledge, why place the women who moved out of state under the burden of informing him? Make it a law that men must stay in contact with the women they fuck for six months after they cease sexual relations. If they choose not to stick around long enough to figure out if the woman is pregnant or not, they’d be forfitting their right to know that they’re going to be a daddy. Coughing up planefare to check in on women they screwed is no more unreasonable than jailing a woman for not wanting to admit who the daddy is. If they’re legally required to keep in contact with the women for six months after the relationship ends, maybe he’ll be a little more selective about who he sleeps with, and will sleep with fewer women who are going to move across the country to avoid him…
Don’t you call me names now. I’ve been nothing but civil to you. Scroll up and look at my previous post. Does it say treis there?
Didn’t you originally post in this thread in support of hauss? As in, he shouldn’t have to pay support?
It’s not even a remotely important issue. Your plan is intrusive and expensive, and doesn’t provide any benefit that I can see. As has been pointed out about a hundred times in the last ten pages.
And lose the “how much would you pay to raise your child?” crap. In the rare cases women get pregnant without telling the father or later asking for child support (at which point he could sue for partial custody), if you think more than 0.001% of the men would do anything except breathe a huge sigh of relief at not having to pay child support, you’re nuts.
So it’s already happening.
Guess what else is already happening? Men being forced to pay child support for kids who aren’t theirs.
Just because it’s “already happening” doesn’t mean it should be done.
What would this accomplish? Besides depriving a 3 year old, at the one of the MOST critical stage of a child’s life, of the mother he has known?
What is your reasoning here? Just to punish her because she did something assholish? We can NOT leglislate morality, kindness or decency. What we can do, as holmes has EVER so patiently tried to point out, is to get the best information we can.
Otherwise, again what would be the purpose in jailing the mothers of young children? And again, who would pay for the upkeep of all these suddenly orphaned children.
Or, in your little padded cell do you imagine that the fathers will magically all become superdads and take the kids to their homes and hearts while the evil mothers rot in jail?
Again, if you are imagining this, you know NOTHING of human development, psychology or human nature. Kids have a hard enough time adjusting at that age to a divorce where they’ve KNOWN both parents all of their lives. Have you any idea what it would do to a toddler to be taken from the only mother he’s known and be given to a stranger?
Or worse, if the dad only wants “visitation” rights, to become a ward of the state? And once again, WHO IS GOING TO PAY for all of these changes and new programs and agencies?
The father gains no information about the location of mother or child. Even if finding out he has a child sends the father into a flying rage he doesn’t know who the mother is.
What are you talking about? The father doesn’t know shit about the kid until after the trial.
I don’t know how many times I gotta say this but the father doesn’t gain any information about the mother and child until he is granted custody.
Do we have to go over what statistics are?
You are assuming that it is an rare exception when we don’t know if it is or not.
The plural of anecdote is not statistic. Like I have said (are we up to countless yet?) before if we get data that shows that this law isn’t worth the expense or does more harm then good then we scrap it.
sugaree- Oops my fault. I apologize
Abbie Carmichael- Fine thats a legitimate objection. I feel that the right of a child to get child support overrides the mans right to refuse a DNA test.
Knowing you have a child isn’t a remotely important issue to you? Its certainly an important issue to me. I have also pointed out a 100 times that my plan ensures that fathers will be informed of their child thats a benefit to me.
Hey 79% of statistics are made up. Show me some hard numbers and I will scrap the plan.
Sigh that was a response to if the law was profiling which its not.
She isn’t under the burden of informing him. The state will do that for her all she has to do is give some information.
Oh please this argument again? Do we require the man to go and pat the stomach of each of his sexual partners 8 months after they had sex?
It doesn’t matter if they keep contact the woman doesn’t have to tell him anything. If the father asks are you pregnant there is nothing illegal about her lying.