No, it is Yank slang.
Take a deep breath, & try decaf.
Sorry if I’m mistaken but it seemed to me a deliberate choice that invokes the threat of lots of distasteful possibilities. I guess you guys just use hindquarters more often in conversation.
Yes, actually, we generally tend to be more genteel than we’re given credit for and often will say “hindquarters” or “behind” instead of “ass” (or arse) especially in mixed company or a serious conversation like this one.
Back to the helpful advice, please.
All right I confess. I’m wrong. “Sling your butt…” is common vernacular. Sorry.
There is no help for him. He either accepts his responsibilites or does a runner and keeps looking over his shoulder, until he is caught. That’s it.
He can pay and be a part of his child’s life or pay and not be a part of his child’s life. He still has the choice to do that, but he has to pay child support.
If it was me and this has been the time honoured tradition in the Holmes’ clan for several generations, in such situations. It’s time for a civil servant position…good family benefits, decent wage, chance to advance; Cop, Fireman, Postal Worker etc. Retiring at 40, with 1/2 salary isn’t too bad.
Or a pay call to Uncle Sam.
Can I email you? I have a few questions.
As for the OP, you need to get your head on straight and consider what’s important here. The baby that your girlfriend is going to have was created by the two of you, and deserves your support at the very least, and deserves your love, which it seems he or she is not going to get. Do you honestly want a child born of your genes that has to do without simply because you don’t care to contribute to his or her life?
(deep breath)
OK, at the risk of totally exposing myself I’m going to say a few things the other way.
You all have come down very hard on the guy, but i noticed there are 1200 + viewers and only 60 some-odd responses.
Does no one think child support laws are unfair?
You have sex with a woman. You are on birth control. The following things can happen:
- You both decide you want to have baby. She gets pregnant.
- She accidentally gets pregnant.
- You don’t know how you feel about a baby. She gets pregnant. You decide you want it. She excersises her right and aborts it.
- You don’t want to have a baby, you’ve told her this time and time again, you take every precaution. She wantonly skips her birth control, and your condom tears and she gets pregnant. She keeps it, and you refuse to support it - and they throw your ass in jail.
Now, I really have trouble with the idea that 3 is OK but 4 is not. Why can’t men decide they don’t want the baby? Women are running out of excuses. We don’t need men to support us in civilized countries, we no longer have the stigma of unwed motherhood.
Please. Stop yelling and explain to me why it’s OK for this double standard to exist. What about the man who sees the mother of his child sleeping around, spending the money on herself instead of the child, and he still has to continue paying? How is this remotely fair?
And by the way, I’m female. And I think divorce laws/child support laws/custody battles are decidedly in favor of the woman nowadays - yet we demand our independence from men. I don’t think it’ sfair of us to have it both ways.
Hey, I see what you mean but we have no evidence that the GF was a slut. We’re not talking about a case where any of your scenarios apply, as far as we know (and I get the feeling the OP would have told us if there was any possibility she was a tramp). We have to go only with what we’ve been told. And what we are telling this guy is that he is bringing a child into the world and this is what he has to do to deal with it.
Please don’t insult the GF; she already has the stigma of an illegitimate child to cope with and an unhelpful boyfriend.
I don’t recall insulting the girlfriend. My examples were hypothetical.
Why should I pay taxes, taking food from my kid’s mouth to support this kid? The father’s able to work, right? He choose this woman to have sex with, right? Why should the government take money from other people to support this child, when he is able to support him himself?
Boo-hoo, he were tricked into having sex with a slut? How’s that my fault or my responsibility, but not his?
We are, despite our flaws, a compassionate nation. We won’t allow this child to starve if we can help it. We won’t allow this child to be abused, if we can help it. Even though it isn’t our child. Your hypothetical father on the other hand, seems more than willing to do just that; if we let him.
We’re not going to let him.
He don’t like the way the money’s being spent? Go to the judge. He don’t like the company his ex-fuck’s is keeping…? How about this for a novel idea, raise the child himself and save him from what is clearly a destructive environment. Oh, I’m sorry; he didn’t want to be a father. Opps.
So he won’t do that, instead he’ll sit back and allow another monster to be created, to be burden on the rest of us; all the while complaining how unfair the system is. Yet he has no, problem tossing that burden on other innocent parties…or the child.
Yep, life is unfair.
Anaamika, I agree with you in theory. In practice, I agree with you 87% of the time. 87%, because that’s how effective condoms are.
If a man has used the only birth control available to him at this time (male condom), and the condom fails, tough shit. You knew that was a risk when you decided to have sex. You knew that there was a 13% chance that you’d have to pay child support, or you’re an underinformed idiot who shouldn’t be having sex.
If pregnancy wasn’t a physical, emotional and social risk to the mother, and the father wanted to keep the baby, then I’d say she should bear and deliver, sign total custody over to him and be done with it. But pregancy and delivery do come with risks, and not every woman chooses to accept them. Therefore, women should and do have the right to abort, even when the father wants to keep the child.
If the father wants to abort and the mother doesn’t, I think things are ickier. In the best of all possible worlds, maybe there should be an “opt-out” for men, but only if abortion didn’t have physical, emotional and social risks for the mother. An unwanted abortion forced on a young woman would be a horrible thing, wouldn’t it? I think we can all, pro-choice or anti-choice, agree on that.
Forced adoption is another option, but still opens the mother to the physical, emotional and social risks of pregnancy and delivery, along with the emotional risks of the adoption itself.
So there is no ideal answer, but there is the answer that our society, which I assume the OP was raised in and so therefore knows the rules, has agreed on. Have sex and get a girl pregnant? You accept her decision and support the child you have fathered. Having sex is implied consent to this social contract.
I think they are. The mom shoiuld have to document where the money is going if the dad/courts request it.
Men can decide. Abstinence and vasectomy are two popular methods.
The documentation thing would help. Also, the courts can’t get involved in every case. It would be nice if they could take each case on it’s own merit but the courts would be flooded and they just don’t have near the resources to do this.
If you give the men the knowledge that the woman can structure the child support then you will have men that take advantage of it. They will threaten and coerce the moms into writing them off, taking early payoffs, agreeing to lower monthly garnishment, etc. It wouldn’t work. It needs to be a structured across-the-board type of system in order to be the most fair.
Oh no question, from a procreational perspective women can have their cake and eat it too with respect to the right to terminate a baby for reasons of convenience, or to carry it to term and demand 18 years of child support. And yes it is distasteful to listen to some of the self satisfied chortling in this thread, at how fathers in arrears on child support will be pursued to the ends of the earth with dogs and torches.
It’s a situation where a man has relatively little power to determine the course of things, and often women are biggest deabbeats of all if the father has primary custody, and they are required to pay CS. For many women that expectation, even if financially justified, is simply not something they feel they should do even if the situations calls for it and they can afford it.
Having said this, the man’s desires are really kind of beside the point socially. The ultimate goal is to attach a source of income for the child’s upbringing. This is an over-riding social good whether mommy is manipulative tramp, or whether the pregnancy was “accidently on purpose” (and there are a substantial percentage in that category) or a true accident, it’s all irrelevant. Society is (and should be) looking out for the child. In modern society there is no village, theres only a pocketbook, and if you’re going to play Russian Roulette with sperm and ovaries you had best be prepared to lose at some point, and be ready to open that wallet for a long, long time.
Anaamika, I think your example #4 is unfair. However, I don’t see any way to change the situation that won’t end up being more unfair for the woman and (more importantly) for the child.
Especially since I think #4 is pretty rare. I think a similarly unfair situation which is less rare is:
- Young couple starts having sex. The guy assures the girl that nothing will go wrong, and if it does he’ll be there with her. She gets pregnant, he dumps her.
And by far the most common is:
- Neither the guy nor the girl want to have a baby. They use birth control, but get pregnant anyway. She realizes she can’t get rid of her own baby, he realizes he’s not ready to be a father.
Anything we do to address the injustice in the occasional #4 is going to fuck over the multitude of #5 and #6’s. It’s an inherently unfair situation, but I think the child support solution is about as fair as we can make it.
If I may be required to pay an equal share of the cost of a child, because I had an equal share in creating it, why then am I not entitled to an equal share in determining whether or not to keep it?
Why does a tied vote (1-1) go in favour of the mother?
I feel for you, I really do. And I don’t think you are being a selfish git. Just someone looking at a really expensive oops - one that you thought you’d gotten out of through adoption - and now you have no power to get out of it.
And you don’t. Might not be fair (btw, you could have done the same thing to her - refused to sign adoption papers and forced her to pay child support). But that is the reality. BTW, if say 20% of your income goes to her, that’s still a hell of a lot better than the life she is choosing as a young single mother. I can catch a glimmer of the pain a birthmother has in giving up a child for adoption - but I can also catch a glimmer of the suffering many single moms have - most don’t have ample financial resources even with child support. Most don’t have time. I don’t know how’d I’d have gotten through five years of diapers, no sleep and ear infections without my husband.
I’d do what you can to establish a relationship with this child. Likely, the child will grow on you and you may be “buying” one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. Also, you once liked this girl enough to have sex with her - if that act had any emotional meaning - you should do your best to help her through what will be a difficult few years - with your time as well as your money. (And the point made that the only way to get out of child support is if someone willingly takes over your parental rights does stand - it is possible that a future Daddy will come along and then they will be willing to say “you don’t need to pay if you are willing to give up partial custody” - of course, by that point you may not be willing to give up partial custody.)
Because her body and health are at risk. We’re not talking about selling a car.
Because it’s a child, not a sofa. There’s more to a child than the money needed to feed and clothe it. Since you aren’t currently legally required to spend 50% of the time and energy to raise it properly, you don’t actually have to pay half of the total costs associated with the child, just half of the money if that.
Simply because you (assuming you’re a man) don’t risk illness, permanent injury or death, not to mention social isolation and career suicide, depending on the choice you make. We do.
No, it’s not fair. And the second - the very second - it’s possible to transfer an embryo safely to you so that you can bear it to term under your abdominal tissue, than this line of reasoning is over. At that point, I’ll be on the picket line with all the anti-choicers, pushing to eliminate abortion in favor of paternal pregnancy.
This argument makes no sense. Aborting a pregnancy would seem to present no greater risk of infection than childbirth itself (which may or may not require cesarian section), and would seem to have less potential for longer-term health risks associated with pregnancy. Abortion aside, if the pregnancy is carried to term, regardless of whether she may choose to keep the child, or to give it up for adoption, the health risks inherent in carrying the child through to birth are identical. One could argue that post-birth, the stress and sleep deprivation are detrimental to the mother’s health.
Try again?