And I can tell from your position — pin responsibility on somebody for the child’s sake, even if it’s just some innocent schmuck who was standing nearby — that you don’t see where I’m coming from at all.
I’ve been brought up to believe very strongly in personal responsibility: tell the truth, take accountability for your actions. If you get a woman pregnant, you have a duty.
Your entire position goes against everything I believe in. The biological father and the biological mother are responsible for that child’s welfare. You don’t just blame it on some guy who’s convenient.
I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about one’s DNA. Suppose you went to have children and somebody offered you the following proposal: You will be sterilized and you and your husband will be assigned somebody else’s (unwanted) newborn child at random to adopt and to be fully responsible for.
But there’s only one way to tell the truth. I can’t see why anybody should be allowed to use the courts as a lever to deprive somebody of property without due process; I can’t see any reason why a woman should be allowed to knowingly falsify a legal document (eg, a birth certificate) without consequence.
In the OP - how could a man be a child’s “father” for the first 6 years of their lives, and NOT “regard themselves as the social father” when they find out, a decade AFTER that, that they are not related - having believed for 16 years that they were “dad”?
Does not compute.
As for the appropriate policing of child support - that’s a different issue. Would you be all for it if the money was held in trust for (say) the kid’s education?
My next door neighbor married a woman he met on an internet message board. He’s in Ohio, she in Florida. He mover her, her child, belongings and horse to Ohio.
Within a year he adopted her 12 year old daughter. Within 6 months of that they were separated and divorced.
He is now paying child support for a child he knew for perhaps a year. Now, he did legally adopt the girl.
Well, when a fraud has been perpetrated on the category 2 dad to make him think he is a category 1 dad I’d say that changes things. He was tricked into the Cat2 dad by thinking all along he was a Cat1 dad.
That is bogus but apparently of no legal consequence.
No, but it is up to me to express an opinion as to whether those feelings should carry legal consequences or not.
In my opinion, if a man who rejects a child because of feelings of betrayal - personally I cannot approve but ultimately that’s his business; however, the courts should in no way let him off the hook financially because of his hurt feelings.
Let’s try and get beyond your obvious distaste for the child support system. Imagine an ideal world, where every cent of paid child support does, in fact, go to support the child. Food, clothes, school, soccer shoes, etc, without the mother getting a dime to spend on herself. Does that solve the problem for you? Would you agree that, in that ideal world, that child support in these cases makes sense? Or is it all about making someone pay for adultery?
I thought the courts would protect people who are victims of a fraud (or punish the people who perpetrated it if you prefer). In this case not only does the court do nothing to the person who committed the fraud they bilk the victim of the fraud out of more money.
And, for roughly the 10th time, the children did not commit the fraud. They didn’t do anything but treat the guy in the OP as their father for 6 years.
I have no problems with punishing people for fraud - the problem here is punishing people who are not guilty of anything for someone elses’ fraud, by removing from them a right - to support - they would otherwise have.
I see no justification for imputing the sins of the mom to the child.
Build something. Write a book. Produce SOMETHING that doesn’t need you to love it.
Just to make my position perfectly clear, I do NOT think that it’s very fair to ask child support of a man who without his knowledge accepted responsibility for children who are not his biological progeny.
I also think that there is something very wrong and soulless about someone who stops caring about children he has considered his own for many years, just because he finds out they’re not his biological progeny.
