That’s true, but it’s only because we have not been able to detect or test DNA for very long. If they’d had DNA testing centuries ago, they would have used it the same way we do. They didn’t, so they used other means to the same end, which was establishing the biological parentage of the child.
Well this is slightly missing the point I was trying to make. If Peter and Mary are married, but Paul impregnates Mary… then there is an issue.
If Peter never finds out that the child isn’t his, he is legally the father. And it’s my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) that if Peter does find out after 10 years (for example), he can divorce his wife Mary, but he will still be required to pay child support, despite the child not being genetically his.
The above situation would never occur in your example, however.
Since starting this thread, I have found a series of 4 videos:
They’re fairly reasonable arguments, IMHO. (Though I’m not an expert, so I can’t really say.) I’ll be up front, and state that much of what follows is based on the 2nd video, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFYxlmRRnkw&feature=player_detailpage#t=206s
If a child has a *right *to the support of both biological parents:
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Then why is using a sperm bank legal/accepted? Why is the genetic donor not required to provide financial/other support? Why is the state willing to pick up the slack in this case, if necessary?
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Why is it legal to leave the name of the father off the birth certificate? Why doesn’t the state automatically investigate such circumstances to determine the father?
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Why is it acceptable for the mother to not inform the father of the existence of his child and seek financial/other support?
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Why is it acceptable to put a child up for adoption, or simply abandon the child to the care of the state?
It would seem that the state has no issue taking care of children that are unwanted by the parents (well… unwanted by the mother, to be specific). The state clearly does not actually enforce the supposed rights of a child to the support of both biological parents.
In the video, she argues that it is not the state that determines the rights of a child, but it is exclusively the mother who determine these “rights”: The mother decides if the fetus has a “right to life” to be born and become a child in the first place. The mother then decides if the child has a right to the support of only one biological parent, or if the child has the right to the support of both biological parents. The mother can also decide that the child has no right to the support of either biological parent, but instead can put that responsibility onto adoptive/foster parents, or onto the state directly - thus having the power to completely dissolve the responsibility from both biological parents. The mother can also decide that the child has a right to be supported by someone that is not even the biological father (she could lie to her husband/boyfriend, and say that the child is his, and by law he will be required to pay support - perhaps even after a divorce/break-up).
Effectively, “the child has whatever rights the mother wishes it to have” - not what the state/society wishes. If the mother has such power in determining the child’s rights, based on her own independent and personal preferences, then she argues that they’re not really “rights of the child” at all.
Following that, the state/society clearly does not actually believe that a child has the right to financial/other support from both biological parents.
Why does parent #2 only owe the child something if parent #1 chooses for it to be so? Why are these supposed “rights” of the child only enforced by the state if parent #1 desires it to be enforced?
TLDR 3-min summary of the 17-min video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFYxlmRRnkw&feature=player_detailpage#t=668s
Because from a practical standpoint, it’s too difficult/intrusive for the state to track down paternity. Lets take your example number 2?
“2) Why is it legal to leave the name of the father off the birth certificate? Why doesn’t the state automatically investigate such circumstances to determine the father?”
What, in practical terms, should the state do if the mother doesn’t provide the father’s name? Throw her in jail? Investigate her sexual partners of 9 months previous and conduct DNA tests of every man she might have slept with? As a practical matter, how does the state do it?
I see the problem here. As an analogy, a verbal contract where the defendant claims to be on the birth control pill or will take an abortion can be akin to stating that one will forego one’s statutory rights when borrowing a boat, then getting into an accident and eschewing the verbal contract in order to sue for damages for 18 years. I know, historically, women were at a disadvantage in law courts and currently they have the bear the real burdens of pregnancy and the onus of child-rearing usually falls to them.
That doesn’t mean that current circumstances aren’t somewhat unusual.
Not saying these are the best examples - they clearly have their issues. But it’s obvious that there are circumstances where parents can surrender their “parental obligations”.
If I donate my sperm through a sperm bank, and sign a contract that surrenders my paternal responsibilities, I’m no longer responsible for financial/other support for that child. If I donate sperm through any other means, and have a contract that surrenders my paternal obligations, I am still - mysteriously - responsible for financial/other support for that child. I find this extraordinarily odd.
But the better example would be the following:
A man and a woman have consensual sex, and agree to a verbal contact that they are using / will use birth control. They agree they do not want children, and that if an “accident” happens, the child will not be kept (ie morning after pill, abortion, adoption, etc).
An accident does happens - and for the sake of the argument - a child is born. There are 4 possible outcomes now:
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The mother wants to keep the baby. The father still does not want the baby.
The mother can force paternal obligations onto the father, regardless of his will on the matter. She can also - dependant on her choice - absolve him of this responsibility as well. The mother has 100% control over the father’s obligations. -
The mother wants to keep the baby. That father also wants to keep the baby.
Baby is kept, and both parties are bound by their parental obligations. -
The mother does not want the baby. The father does not want the baby either.
Both parents can surrender their parental obligations over to the state, or another party, simply by willing it, and without much restriction. Clearly the state doesn’t really enforce paternal obligation, since they can simply surrender their obligations with relative ease. -
The mother does not want the baby. The father, however, does want the baby.
This is a puzzling case. The mother, has full control over the rights of the child, and over the paternal rights and obligations of the father. The mother can give the child up for adoption and/or abandon the child to the state. She can surrender her parental obligations and those of the father without his consent.
I suppose you can argue that the state can’t know who the father is, and thus can’t really give him any rights in the matter. But I find it perplexing that a woman can make an independent decision to have a child against the biological father’s will, but instead of having sole responsibility for the child, she has the power to burden the father with the responsibility as well - regardless of his will.
But that the same time, a man cannot make an independent decision to have her child against the biological mother’s will - even after the child has been born. She can unilaterally null-and-void his rights, based on her whim. Effectively, the father has no parental rights. According to the woman in the video (I have yet to independently verify this), a man has the right to his child in only 4 states, if the woman chooses to abandon it to the state without the father’s consent.
So to summarize, it would appear that:
- The mother has 100% control over the rights of the child.
- The mother has 100% control over her own right to decide if she wants parental responsibility or not.
- The father has 0% control over the rights of the child.
- The father has 0% control over his own right to decide if he wants parental responsibility or not.
I find the above situation to be a little bit absurd and without any sort of logical/reasonable justification. I can see why perhaps 200 years ago this might have been a good idea, as gamerunknown says, but I fail to see the reason for this being the case any longer.
The argument that the state coerces parental obligations onto biological parents, in order to protect the rights of the child, is a lie, since the mother (and the father, in agreement with the mother) can abandon their parental responsibilities to the state on a whim, without too much difficulty. So I don’t really buy that argument, even if there are laws the superficially support the idea.
No, she can’t. In the US the father also has to consent to the adoption for it to be legal. If she doesn’t tell him about the baby and he finds out later, he can contest the adoption and get the baby back. The fact that fathers can and do get their children back this way is one of the reasons some adoptive parents prefer adopting overseas.
It’s complicated, as this staff report from GFactor points out:
I’m pretty sure that Caban v Mohammed and Lehr v Robinson are still good law, and about 30 states have a putative father registry and give the father the right to contest an adoption.
Partly you have to take biology into account here, in that maternity can be determined with more certainty than paternity. And the problem with your scenario, about the couple agreeing the father shouldn’t be responsible is that the situation isn’t just a private thing between the two parents. There’s a third party with an interest in the proceeding; the child. Even though we give parents a lot of rights over their minor children, the child is still an independent individual with rights that need to be protected. So your scenario would privilege the father’s interest to avoid supporting a child that he helped create over the child’s interest to have the support that he or she needs to survive.
That seems backwards to me. If anything, it should be the child’s interest that should be paramount, because the child is in a vulnerable position; unable to care for him or herself, dependent on others for survival. So we recognize that children need special protection under the law.
I don’t see how it’s that far different from what you were saying in the OP. You said there would be a DNA test so one of the two men would be found to be the father. But you questioned why that man would be responsible for the child and the other man wouldn’t.
Interesting. But from a practical perspective, how would he find out, after the fact? Also, do the adoptive parents have no rights in the matter? Is there a statute of limitations in regards to this?
Also, what if the mother simply abandons the child to the state? The woman in the video states that only 4 states in the US allow the father to get back custody of a child that the mother has abandoned. Do you have any information on this?
I’ve watched the 4 videos I linked in my previous post again. And I suppose I can now distill my question down to this:
*Why does the biological mother of a child have an independent right to abandon her responsibilities & obligations for an unwanted child post-conception and post-birth?
Why does the biological father of a child not have this same independent right to abandon his responsibilities & obligations for an unwanted child post-conception and post-birth?*
rat avatar:
Why is only the father subject to this risk, and not the mother? The mother is not subject to the consequences of her actions, because she can abandon her parental responsibilities. The man is not allowed to similarly abandon his responsibilities (unless it is with the consent of the mother).
Actually, no. As was pointed out to you above, a father does have the right to contest an adoption and gain custody of the child himself. And custodial fathers can and do pursue child support from the child’s noncustodial mother.
Why are you continuing to argue otherwise?
That’s a fascinating article.
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But what if the child is anonymously abandoned by the mother at a “safehouse” or “safe haven”? It would seem that the father only has a right to get the child back in 4 states, in such a case (I’m still looking for a reference, however, outside of it being mentioned in the video that I linked previously).
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The mother can unilaterally give away her rights and obligations - yet the father cannot. If we (as a society) truly believe that parents should be bound to these obligations, why is the mother allowed to give these obligations away to the state? If we (as a society) are okay with the mother abandoning these obligations, why are we not okay with the father abandoning these same obligations?
[QUOTE=Borzo]
Why does the biological mother of a child have an independent right to abandon her responsibilities & obligations for an unwanted child post-conception and post-birth?
[/QUOTE]
She doesn’t. She can surrender them, or have them taken away (along with her parental rights), but abandoning them is a crime. The state provides a mechanism for surrendering these responsibilities because a parent who won’t take care of a child will kill or injure the child – in such a situation, should the state allow the child to die, just to be “fair” to an absent father? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
He does, and he has. He’s not caring for the child, he’s not doing a damn thing but paying the bills (if that). And the adoption process applies to him, as well – fathers don’t pay child support to adoptive parents.
Why is only the father subject to this risk, and not the mother? The mother is not subject to the consequences of her actions, because she can abandon her parental responsibilities. The man is not allowed to similarly abandon his responsibilities (unless it is with the consent of the mother).
[/QUOTE]
“The mother is not subject to the consequences of her actions”? Seriously? Nine months of pregnancy and hours in labor aren’t “consequences?” And again, she CAN’T “abandon” her responsibilities, she can surrender them to someone willing to take them on.
What you really want to know is “why is the mother in a different position with respect to children?” BECAUSE SHE’S THE ONE WITH THE BABY! Remember the baby? The helpless living creature who’s going to die if someone doesn’t take care of it? She has possession. She has an indisputable, undeniable, physically inevitable, and immediately, blindingly obvious connection to it. She has certain rights that come with that. But once it’s separated from her body, it has all the rights that any non-adult citizen has, and the state will protect those rights, regardless of any twisted, idiotic notions of “fairness” that social commentators and disgruntled fathers can come up with.
There’s no question that the state does not discharge this obligation well. There are centuries of religious, superstitious, pseudoscientific, and emotional twaddle that went into creating the foundation of family law, and much of it is still held to be true. But the fact remains that mothers and fathers are in inherently different positions in reality, not just before the law.
Hence why the solution would be to allow the father a way to surrender his parental rights, or to go after the mother for child support payments while the state takes care of the kid.
And paying the bills is something the mother can opt out of in certain circumstances. That’s what the OP is complaining about.
She chose to endure those nine months by not aborting the baby. As has been established in many other threads, this is something she alone can do. You don’t get to blame someone else for a choice you made when they did not have the same choice.
Again, only after she chose to have it. Of course a baby deserves a lot. But why use a system that either goes after the father for support or removes it from both parents? Why isn’t the mother who drops her child off in one of those safe haven places on the hook for child support? Heck, why aren’t we all on the hook for child support if making sure the child is taken care of is something we as a society have decided is necessary?
No, it’s clear that child support is not just about providing for the child. It is also a punishment for the parent’s abandoning the child. There are other ways to make sure the child is taken care of. Trying to make it about the child is a distraction.
In what circumstances can she opt out of paying the bills when he can’t? There are three possible outcomes:
a. She has an abortion. There’s no baby to pay for, so the father doesn’t have to pay any bills.
b. The baby is given up for adoption. In most cases she has to get his consent to give the baby up, and when she manages not to the father is rarely known because she doesn’t disclose who he is, which in any case prevents him from being burdened by his financial obligation. When the baby is given up for adoption, neither parent pays for the baby because the adoptive parents assume the costs of the child’s care.
c. She keeps the baby. The father pays towards the child’s care, so does she. Babies are expensive and not fully supported by child support collected from the father, so the mother has to pay for the child’s upkeep too. According to the census bureau the median child support payment is $280/month and the average across all income levels is $350/month. Any man who thinks that this amount covers the full monthly cost of raising a child needs to better educate himself on what child-rearing actually costs given that this figure won’t even cover the cost of daycare in most locations. Most figures assume that it’ll cost $10-11,000 a year to raise a child, and the average child support amount for the year at $4200 falls short of half of that so the mother typically spends more on the child than the oh so burdened father does.
So what circumstances aren’t covered by one of the three scenarios above? When is mom getting out of paying when dad isn’t?
[quote=“Borzo, post:50, topic:616708”]
*Why does the biological mother of a child have an independent right to abandon her responsibilities & obligations for an unwanted child post-conception and post-birth?
Why does the biological father of a child not have this same independent right to abandon his responsibilities & obligations for an unwanted child post-conception and post-birth?*
[QUOTE]
The shortest answer to those questions is to paraphrase Charles Dickens: the law is ass. There are many people like myself who think these inequalities in the law that should be corrected.
If the mother does not want to parent (chooses adoption) and the birthfather steps in, he can, and will, get child support from the biological mother.
There are statutes of limitations, in some states they are years, in others basically you have until the baby is born. Some states assume that if you didn’t know the mother well enough to have enough contact with her in the nine months preceding birth, you weren’t really interested in being a parent. Note that being a parent is different than having financial responsibility for a child.
You seem to be advocating one of two positions:
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Legally forcing responsibility for the upbringing of a child on men who had nothing to do with that child’s conception; or:
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Abandoning newborn babies and having nobody legally repsonsible for their upbringing.
Given that both of those two situations UTTERLY SUCK BIG TIME, we’re left with the parents of the child being responsible for it.
What on earth other workable system are you feverishly imagining? You clearly have an idea of a society in your head where babies aren’t abandoned to die (I hope) yet nobody has responsiblity forced on them by society? Could you describe this system to us? I can’t imagine what it would look like.
It’s in the interests of society that babies are nurtured to adulthood. It’s also in the interests of society that random parties not connected to a baby aren’t forced to pay for it.
That leaves the parents. Who the hell else?
All of this, of course, is fairly simple to avoid. Wrap it up, and try to use some mild discretion when choosing sex partners. For example, you may want to choose sex partners who you can trust are using birth control correctly. Believe it or not, but the number of women who are psycho bitches out to ensnare men with their magic vaginas are relatively few. The vast majority of men get through life without managing to knock up a psycho scammer, and when it does happen, it’s not because she was insanely poking holes in the condoms.
Child support is not a gendered thing. Men are capable of having partial or full custody of their children. Some men even like to be a part of their children’s lives beyond writing a check, and actively work to make that a reality rather than sitting around bitching about how unfair it is that they have to make a small contribution to the kid they made. Women can, do, and are sometimes ordered by the courts to pay child support.
Adoption is also not a gendered thing. Fathers can give their children up for adoption. If a mother chooses to put her child up for adoption, the father is perfectly capable of saying “Hey, I’d like to take full custody.” In that case he’d even get child support. A father can drop a baby off at an anonymous baby drop. And if a mother leaves a baby at an anonymous baby drop and the father says “Hey, WTF, where did my baby go?” there is no question that the authorities would scour the local hospitals and orphanages and find the kid s that he could take custody. Nobody is going to tell the grieving father “Hey, it’s the mother’s choice alone.”
Of course, if you are unaware of the child and the mother gives it up for adoption, what do you even care? You didn’t bother to find out if you made a baby with your most likely unprotected sex, so you kind of lose the moral high ground with what happens to said baby.
Seriously, wrap it up, don’t stick your dick in the crazy, maybe consider keeping in contact with girls you’ve had underprotected sex with and try to keep that chip off your shoulder. This isn’t a problem that happens to smart, careful guys.
There was a case on Judge Judy (believe it or not) years ago in which (since I don’t remember the names, I’ll use the ones the OP used) Peter and Mary were married, but immediately after the wedding, Mary began an affair with Paul. Mary got pregnant, and knew that Paul was the father. She told Peter, and they divorced. As a condition of the divorce, Peter agreed to have the baby on his health insurance for one year. The baby was born with an expensive health condition, and Peter’s health insurance was insufficient for the baby’s needs. Mary was suing Peter for more money.
As is often the case on this show, people were very upset and loud…except for Peter. He just stood there calmly. After Judge Judy listened to Mary’s case, she asked Peter if he had anything to say. He agreed that the facts were as stated. That was it.
Judge Judy ruled in Peter’s favor. She said that Paul (and/or Mary) should get another job to provide for his/their baby.