I don’t think that that would work for child support since you are technically paying the child plus it’s not considered income. So if she was broke, you’d have to pay her but she wouldn’t have to use that money to pay you back.
But money is money. Say I have an Abstract of Execution for my $250k judgment against her. I can levy all of her personal property.
Assuming that I can’t simply use the common law right of set off, as soon as she deposits my $250 check, I could serve her bank with the Writ and have the sheriff seize it. Once the money changes hands, it is legally hers. It isn’t placed in a trust account for the child.
What if another of her creditors attempted to garnish her wages? Those wages were used in the child support calculation, but nobody would seriously argue that debtors with children cannot have their wages garnished.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this, but certainly with an outstanding judgment, I can use legal process to seize her property.
It could be placed in a separate bank account to be used for the child or something. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but there might be a limit on how your judgment would work like you can’t take everything that she has especially when another court said that x amount of money has to be set aside monthly for the kid. The kid has rights too and the court will bend over backwards to protect them even if it means an incredible unfairness like portrayed in the OP.
You may be right, but it would be an interesting thing to see how courts have ruled on it. If a court wants to say that, no matter how it is titled, child support money is really paid to the child, held in trust by the custodial parent, then that would open a can of worms.
For example, the non-custodial parent would have standing to bring a suit for breach of trust on behalf of his child claiming that Mom’s cable TV purchase was mismanagement of the child’s money. It would open the door for fathers to micromanage their ex-wife/girlfriend’s finances by demanding an accounting of this trust fund.
Yes, there are some exceptions codified into the law for unusual circumstances. This should be one of them. The law ALREADY makes decisions about whether a kid is yours or not, as you said. If you put your name on a birth certificate as a parent, the law will hold you responsible as a parent regardless of biology. The situation in the OP is an exceptional circumstance the law should be able to account for. Voluntary or not doesn’t come into play in current law because in the vast, vast majority of cases it is safe to assume the biological parent played a voluntary role in some part of the process bringing the kid into the world, and thus should bear responsibility for the kid’s well being. The circumstances of the OP are truly exceptional, and the law should be able to recognize that.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. A more apt analogy would be someone gets hit by a car and can’t pay the hospital, so the courts grab some arbitrary other guy off the street and say “okay, now YOU have to pay this hospital bill.”
Have you turned into Bricker or something? I feel that old “this is what the law says, so that ends the moral argument as well” sorta thing coming at me.
I am making a moral argument, and going from there to what the law could and should say. And I don’t see what your moral counterargument is to “involuntary sperm donation not involving sex with the recipient” < “voluntary anonymous sperm donation not involving sex with the recipient” with respect to a moral obligation to support the child.
I’m certainly open to a counterargument along the lines of “regardless of the morals, it would be an unmanageable burden for the law to operate like that” but I don’t see that either.
I’m just seeing
I’m arguing that if it’s set up that way, (a) it’s wrong, and (b) it could easily be remedied.
Isn’t that what I have been arguing for the whole thread?
It’s not that rare. People get raped, people are minors at the time of conception, people get lied to about birth control, people have rock-solid reason to believe they are sterile.
And the law is able to recognize all these situations and deal with them through the civil court system. Your system demands a fiction: that either Bruce pretend he meant to father a child, if he wants to acknowledge the relationship in any way, or that everyone pretend, that the law pretend, that a child was magically generated. I don’t see how it’s ever in anyone’s best interests to legally erase truth.
You get hit by a car. You didn’t do ONE DAMN THING to deserve it, to invite it, to allow it, to encourage it. It is 100% someone else’s fault. Why on earth should you be the one who pays? Because you were the one that got hit. So sad, so bad, hope you can sue.
You get your sperm stolen in a bizarre twist of fate (or raped in an alley, if you are woman) and you become the parent of a child. You didn’t do ONE DAMN THING to deserve it, to invite it, to allow it, or to encourage it. It is 100% someone else’s fault. You pay because you were the one that was victimized. So sad, so bad, hope you can sue. Exactly the same thing. Why does the first situation seem okay to you, but the second so terribly unjust?
See my above analogy. Your way seems wrong to me because it denies the involuntary parent any right to what is, after all, their child. It suggests that somehow child-support is about punishment, not about an obligation. It treats involuntary parenthood is somehow a whole special category of Terrible Tragedy that should have a special law to deal with it, when we already have a perfectly solid system for someone who has been defrauded to recoup their losses.
What is “immoral” about this? Bruce is ordered to pay child support, Clarice is ordered to pay the same amount + court costs back to Bruce, Bruce sets up visitation schedule if and as he wants and provides additional support if and only if he feels he should? Why is that a terrible injustice? Maybe Bruce has kids already, and wants them to know their sibling. Maybe Bruce, a gay man, knows he won’t ever have any other kids and wants an opportunity to know this one. Maybe Bruce wants nothing to do with the kid. My way provides all those options because it doesn’t just pretend a terrible thing didn’t happen. That terrible thing DID and now Bruce will have to deal with the consequences. That’s just how crime works everywhere else.
So, Bruce discovers what has happened at 3 months into the pregnancy and demands the fetus be aborted…
So essentially Clarice is free and clear? She has forced a child on Bruce, much as a male rapist forces a child on a woman.
Are you talking to me? I’m suggesting she be 1) arrested for fraud and theft 2) faces whatever criminal penalties are appropriate 3) be sued in civil court and found liable for any child support Bruce might be ordered to pay, plus whatever others costs would normally be assigned in a civil case, such as court costs 4) If she and Bruce both want custody of the child, he has a claim and family court will, obviously, be looking at a woman with a criminal record and facing a huge financial liability and likely find in Bruce’s favor.
In what way is that “free and clear”? What other remedies would you suggest?
In the case where the car crashes into you, or you get raped in an alley, you become a victim at that very moment.
In the case of someone swiping your sperm, you don’t become a victim in any meaningful way until a court decides that you are by determining that you share the responsibility for paying to raise the child.
You can’t reason with a car driving into your lap, or a rapist with a gun in an alley, but in a democracy, one should be able to keep the law from unreasonably victimizing people. The law, as an actor, should be a fundamentally reasonable actor. One doesn’t have that expectation of a rapist or drunk driver.
I don’t see where that’s the implication of my words.
Where child support is imposed in situations where it has no business being an obligation, I’d say that turns it into a punishment.
Yes, but normally the legal system isn’t creating the loss. The loss doesn’t exist prior to a ruling by a court creating the loss. This is what distinguishes this situation from all those other situations. The law shouldn’t create the loss to begin with, just as the rapist and the drunk driver shouldn’t create those losses. But the rapist and the drunk driver are not rational actors. The law should have no such excuse.
By that logic, the hospital is victimizing you when they send you the $250K bill from when you were admitted and the court reinforces that decision when they allow the hospital to pursue all legal means to collect that debt just the same as if you’d “voluntarily” made yourself open to being hit by a drunk.
And you keep ignoring that some people would very much feel as if they had a meaningful connection to a child made from their genetic material–however illicitly obtained. You seem to be arguing that the law should unilaterally deny such a claim. How is that just?
Child support is NOT punishment imposed by the government on men who screw around. An order to pay child support doesn’t make you a victim: it makes you a debtor. It’s something that is owed to the child, who also was involuntarily involved. The courts recognize and enforce that debt, but the debt was created as soon as the child was born.
Not in particular. I was commenting on the general consensus that a criminal act has not been committed.
If you are the parent of a child, you have a responsibility to support that child. The only way to say “you don’t have an obligation to that child” is to say “you are not in a parental relationship with that child”. Because there’s no such thing as a parent with right who doesn’t have responsibilities: they come from the same well-spring.
The legal system isn’t creating this loss, either. It’s money owed to the child. I think this is where we will never see eye to eye: you seem to see child support as an entirely artificial, court-imposed institution, and I see it as a moral liability that the courts are codifying and enforcing.
Yes. And from the arguments in other threads, we agree on the arguments in this thread, but disagree generally on child support obligations.
So, for the purposes of this thread, I think that it is legally certain that this isn’t rape, and that there is child support owed.
But my hypothesis is that the civil judgment for (insert tort here) can offset the child support obligation. Others say that the obligation is owed to the child and cannot be taken from the mother. I am interested in case law that might shed some light, because I can’t see a rationale to allow the money to be said to legally belong to the child without the payor having standing to micromanage the payee’s finances.
I’m sure some skeevy lawyer can thread this needle, and has, but I’m honestly interested in the legal theory on how it was done.
I’m deeply troubled by the idea that being the victim of a crime can create a moral obligation for the victim. Isn’t that basically the logic used by people who argue against abortion for rape and incest?
But it happens all the time. See my hit-by-a-drunk, go-to-the-hospital example. Or if you fall for the “deposit this money order and send the money on” scam. Or if you get raped and get pregnant. Or if someone steals your car and you still owe money on it. They system is riddled with examples of victims of crime having to pay in some way. We have a remedy for that: sue the person that caused the damages. I just don’t see what makes this different. Tragic, yes. Fucking evil and horrific, yes. But a lot of crime is like that.
ETA: For whatever it’s worth, I also don’t think abortion laws should distinguish between different circumstances of conception. I am solidly pro-choice, but if we are going to decide there is a point where the fetus’s rights supplant the mother’s, those are absolute. They aren’t determined by whether or not mom was a big old slut who needs to live with the consequences of her slutty ways.
Where is the *moral *obligation in those crimes?
That’s… pretty fucking horrible, when you get right down to it. You’re basically saying that philosophical consistency is more important than people’s actual lives. I’m genuinely surprised to hear that from you, of all people.
You have an obligation to pay what you owe . . .I mean, if someone abandons me in a bar and a stranger pays my cab fare so that I can get home, am I less obligated to him because it wasn’t my fault I was stranded there in the first place?
I think it’s more horrible to say THIS woman can be forced to carry a baby and has to cede autonomy over her body because she chose to have sex but this other identical woman is allowed to keep that autonomy because she was a victim. It suggests that the issue is really about punishment, not conflicting rights. I am, again, solidly pro-choice. I don’t see how I am putting philosophical consistency above any actual people.