I have a theory. What I think that it comes down to is the cultural belief that men are inherently less responsible in matters of reproduction than women. I sure that we could have a rousing Great Debate about this, but the prevailing notion is that men are more motivated to have many partners and more motivated to abandon a particular partner one the seed has been sown.
I will also mention that both in my real life as well as what I have read and heard in the news I do not encounter many dead beat moms.
As folks have pointed out, when the man runs off it is society that pays. Therefore, it is in societies interest to force as many men as it can to care for their own kids.
It’s not your body, so go fuck yourself. That is the only possible answer to that question.
There are other problems too, by the way. How are you going to prove you’re the father? What if she says it was the milkman? What if she says you never fucked her? What’s to stop a guy from lying and saying a kid is his when it isn’t? How would you get around any of that?
Well, see, people are animals with this weird urge to reproduce the species. On top of that, they are mammals and so are hard-wired to care for their young. Further complicating matters, some people factor emotions into their choices and aren’t capable of making every decision based of cold, perfect logic.
Yeah, lightning, he’s a scared kid, and that sucks. But there are two scared kids in this situation, and pretty soon there’s going to be three. Being a scared kid is irrelevant under the circumstances. Line forms to the left, so to speak.
Catsix, my understanding is that we used to have the system you advocate, where men could just walk away with no repercussions at all. And we, as a society, decided that we should change the system because it was unfair both to women and to children. Especially to children. If you want to try and convince people that one partner walking away consequence-free while the other bears all the burdens of something that’s only 50% their doing, knock yourself out. I doubt you’ll have much luck, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Not to mention that census figures say that single-mom households make up a disproportionate amount of families living in poverty. If there’s so many women out there ‘stealing’ (according to catsix) so much of men’s money, then how can that be? There’s also a surprising amount of custodial households in which there is no support agreement at all. So I guess we’re not really looking a bunch of thieving, greedy bitches after all.
(Bolding mine) ITA, CatLady. We seem to have pitted men against women in this thread, forgetting that a non-aborted pregnancy means that it is no longer about what is fair to the mother or father, but what is fair to the child. The child deserves the fullest protection the law can afford it.
Didn’t hauss say that she had originally agreed to put the kid up for adoption but then changed her mind?
Like I’ve said before, if one party has options which allow her to ‘opt out’ of motherhood after the pregnancy occurs and the other party doesn’t have options that allow him to ‘opt out’ of fatherhood after the pregnancy occurs, I consider this to be a sexist inequality that should not legally exist.
If a guy wanted to be a single father, as in ‘I’m going to keep this baby, mine mine mine and not let its mother have anything to do with it,’ I’d tell him the same damn thing: Pay for it yourself.
Fucking is a mutual action. A woman choosing to raise a kid as a single mother knowing full well that the biological father wants nothing to do with being a father or having a baby is not a mutual action, and you can’t pretend that it is.
If it were possible for him to take responsibility, solely and fully, from that second onward, I’d say ‘have at it.’ It’s currently not, so he doesn’t get to say ‘Well you just keep on gestating it for me.’
It seems like not only are non-custodial mothers less likely to be required to pay child support, they also have a higher percentage of default than non-custodial fathers.
Fucking is 50% his responsibility. Of course, as you’ll so often hear in the debates about abortion ‘consent to sex is not consent to’ fatherhood.
No, but she can make it damn difficult and expensive. Family Courts don’t want to bother with visitation hearings, which often just boil down to he said / she said.
Irrelevant. He assumed responsibility the moment he stuck his dick in her.
The ability to “opt out” of parenthood is freely available to all men. They are free not to stick their dicks in any vaginas. The choice to have sex is in itself a decision to take resonsibility for the consequences.
If the father didn’t want to be a father, he shouldn’t have stuck his dick in her. He CHOSE to accept responsibility when he chose to have vaginal intercourse. Sex carries a risk of pregnancy, even with contraception. All men know that, and all men know that they are taking a chance that they will become parents everytime they have vaginal intercourse. Sex is a gamble. They CHOSE to gamble. They lost. Too bad, so sad, pay the fuck up.
Of course not. It’s not his body. If he didn’t want to be in that situation, he didn’t have to fuck her. Everything stems from that choice. Men do not have some sort of guranteed right to sex without consequences. The choice to have sex is the choice to accept those consequences.
Cite?
Fucking is 100% his choice and so are the consequences.
It’s all about the health and welfare of the children; and in our state (CA), nothing else matters…whether or not the father wanted the kid, and who has visitation and who has the responsibility. Age of parents doesn’t matter either. Another anecdote:
A friend of mine had at that time a 15 year old stepson who had sex and impregnated his 18 year old girlfriend. Abortion was not an answer for the woman. Rather than sending her to prison for statutory rape, his parents begged the court not send the woman to jail since they were boyfriend/girlfriend over a year and they admitted to having sex when she was 17 and continued to have sexual relations after she turned 18, and that the baby would be growing up in a better environment when the mother is not in prison. The court gave her probation, and she is now raising the kid. In a separate court case, the stepson (being represented by his mom and stepdad[my friend]), also wanted the stepson have equal time with the child, but the courts said that he (they) don’t have those rights until he reaches 18 and starts paying child support, and must go through a separate hearing then.
When my friend told me this, I thought how crazy it was that you helped keep the girl out of jail, and yet she doesn’t want to share responsibilities with your stepson (under direct supervision of his parents). When she was granted full custody of the child since she was considered an “adult”, she also wanted child support, but the court said “No, not until the father turns 18.” My friend said that it really hurt being used that way since they were looking out for the child and would have used their own time and resources to help raise the kid, but the “girlfriend” didn’t really want to let anyone else help out except financially. (She was open to the idea for his parents to send money though.) My friend told me he learned what the State’s definition of “The Child’s Best Interests” really meant.
After all this, and please forgive me that I didn’t see this in any earlier posts, but I will reserve judgement on Hauss until I know his age. Since we have Dopers here who are as young as 15, I will not jump on Hauss’s back just yet.
On why parents (father/mother) can’t contract/weasel out of child support:
I believe the legal reason for not allowing men to weasel out of child support is that the right to support attaches to the child, which means that neither parent has a right to contract out of it. It’s a completely different legal line of reasoning that what is behind a woman’s right to choice and as far as I learned, is based on a public policy decision to protect the child, not the mother or father.
Of course, any of you are free to disagree with me but this is what I learned in Family Law last year out of “Family Law,” by Harry Krause, which I suppose is my citation.
Oh because I was a little brief: neither parent has a right to contract/out of or disclaim child support because the right to support belongs to the child, and not to either one of the parents to be able to give away/disclaim.
Just out of curiosity, what’s to stop a woman from deciding that she wants child support from a sperm donor since the kid is 50% his and he decided to willingly give up his sperm?
If she can’t afford the child, there are plenty of couples longing for a baby to raise. Why should a man subsidize her desire to raise a child, when she can deny him any part in the process by making up abuse charges or stalking charges, despite what many people in here claim?
Scroll up you high and mighty fuck. The cite was right below the statement, unless of course a quotation from the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Income Security Policy isn’t good enough for you.
As far as I learned from Bioethics/Health Law + Family Law last year
Couples can’t go after anonymous sperm donors for child support.
But if you willingly make a contract with a known party to use his sperm to create a child, you can’t contract out of child support. Actually, most of the cases I could cite to for the statement I made above are based on these types of situations.
The only reason I learned for that split is that the law on bioethics issues encourages “life,” so to speak, so you don’t want to punish people who could provide infertile couples from having a child by making them liable for child support. However, if the two of you know each other, the courts seem to be saying tough luck.
Egg Donors:
I don’t remember reading anything about going after an egg donor for child support-most of the time the problem there is that the egg donor wants a say in the child’s life.
It’s actually quite a fascinating subject. I have an environmental law final that I need to finish but I could hunt up my cases from last year for citations if they’re called for.
This logic does not apply to women, does it? Are they somehow unable to take the responsibility of a pregnancy when they hop onto a dick?
What’s good for the gander is good for the goose. If it is all right and proper to force a man into parenthood by virtue of a moment of indiscretion, then it’s all right and proper to force a woman into parenthood for the exact same indiscretion.
I don’t think it’s good to force this on either side, however it is impossible to give choice to the man without causing huge societal problems, so we do the best we can, women get choice, men don’t. I’ll agree that there is currently no better solution, but don’t piss in my face and say it’s a summer shower.