US men fight child support laws
US men fight child support laws…
About time…
I wonder if he can prove she claimed to be impregnable?
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US men fight child support laws…
About time…
I wonder if he can prove she claimed to be impregnable?
March 10th, 2006
It doesn’t really matter if he can prove she said anything regarding fertility or the ability to conceive. The legal right to child support is the child’s, not the mother’s. Therefore, she is in no position to deny it nor is the father. Even if this woman said the man needn’t pay and was willing to put it into writing, it would not save this man if anyone found out and brought it to the attention of our legal system. She can’t negotiate away something the child is legally due.
I’ve tangled with this problem many times over the years, pondering it. It lead me to seek a vasectomy after my wife died and I began dating again. I had no desire to father children and thought it foolish to rely on my partners for birth control.
Is it unfair? Perhaps, but it is the way our reproductive destinies play out. Our legal system regarding children, and the obligations of those who bring them into the world, may not be perfect, or even any good, but the child had no say in its arrival. Surely, there should be some obligation on the part of both players for the result.
March 10th, 2006
Some highlights of my position:
If both parties have equal responsibility in conception/birth then they should (most of the time) have equal responsibility in child raising. Allowing inequity in one should allow for inequity in the other.
As to my question regarding proof:
– If the female provided guarantee that she was incapable of conceiving the male was not equally at fault for an accidental birth (if the woman was made to believe this by a medical professional, then malpractice might be involved).
– If the woman willfully made a false guarantee: the male is not equally at fault for the accidental birth.
– If the male is willfully making a false claim that the guarantee was made, then he is much more likely to be equally at fault for the accidental birth.
– As always… There are more scenarios…
I may be wrong here too, but I do not recall a specific reference to a child’s “right to financial support by multiple parents” in the constitution, so there might be room for interpretation at some levels. Unfortunately this seems to be less a child issue and more of an emotional issue argued on sentiment surrounding the “Deprivation of an innocent child”. Which is not necessarily at risk in many such cases.
March 10th, 2006
In an ideal world, I’d be agreeing with you, but our reproductive method doesn’t correspond to any ideal other than that of sharing and perpetuating DNA. It does that reasonably well. A woman can choose to carry or terminate a pregnancy. A man has no legal standing to influence or force that decision to his preference. If the woman carries it to term and births a child, then the father is legally on the hook to provide for the child, as is the mother. Each state calculates such things in its own way.
Regarding proof on the female’s part, doctor’s can make mistakes. Sometimes, they can be successfully litigated as malpractice. That still does not relieve the father of a child of his paternity. Perhaps you are thinking that the doctor might be made to provide funds for raising the child as part of his penalty for malpractice. That still doesn’t address the cases that aren’t considered malpractice.
If a woman or man makes false guarantees about their ability to conceive or successfully fertilize an egg, as the case may be, that may be cause for them to go after each other, but it still leaves the child, who has done nothing but be born into existence. They are still responsible for the consequences of their behavior.
As for the right to support, I suggest you look to your state legislature. This matter is one left to the states as it is not found in the US Constitution, save for its references that things not specifically mentioned are to be left to the states. Every state in the union provides some form of protection for children conveying their right to paternity which includes financial support from both parents, unless the child is given up for adoption, or confiscated by child service departments due to neglect or abuse.
March 11th, 2006
I do not accept “Right to choose” as a explicitly defined inalienable right. I believe “Right to choose” is a judicial interpretation (whether or not I agree) which is subject to reinterpretation.
I feel relatively sure that the the collection of current law (including accepted practices for application) are based more on social standard than the physical process of an egg being fertilized by spermatozoa (a fuzzy standard vs a physical process).
Just to clarify, my statements are not to question whether or not there are laws supporting child support, but whether the laws, their interpretation, and their application are constitutional and fair.
If the law is fair to all then why do I have the questions below?
– Is part of the validity of the law that the female usually gets custody of the child?
– Is it valid that often if the male gets custody, split custody, or custody of more than one child is split amongst the two parents, that the same laws concerning child support payment are not just as universally applied?
– Why does it seem taboo to discuss the support as a budgeted process between the parents? That decisions regarding expenditures are segregated into discretionary-agreed upon, discretionary-not agreed upon, and non-discretionary buckets. That receipts are tracked, and that reimbursement is a percentage of agreed and non-discretionary actuals?
I believe state law is questionable as well. Here is a good breakdown.
March 12th, 2006
It really doesn’t matter what you personally accept as a legal right or not, so long as the US Supreme Court has acknowledged it. “Right to choose” currently enjoys that status, though it may be changing soon, given the changes to the court and the mood of so many state legislatures to pass laws that limit access to abortion. You are free to disagree with the court, though I suspect you might find yourself on the wrong side of a jail cell door were you to try and prevent women from exercising it. That too may change. Lots of folks agree in varying degrees with the position that women should not be able to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. For what it is worth, all rights are the result of judicial interpretation and/or legislative caprice. There is a school of thought that makes frequent use of what they refer to as “natural rights” but the only enforcer to have arisen for any rights has been government.
Regarding fairness in this matter, that is always going to be subjective. 100 years ago, a wife could not legally refuse her husband sexual intercourse, usually the only legal sexual activity in which they could engage. There are cases wherein a woman sued for divorce, almost unheard of in those days, and being refused because she had refused to do her marital duty. That, by our thinking, wasn’t fair either. In fact, today things are completely reversed in most states. A husband forcing his wife to have sex with him would be considered battery, or more likely, rape.
Law and judgement have always been based on past social and legal practices, and they usually remain at least a few generations behind what are currently evolving practices. That has especially been the case the past 2-300 years, given the dramatic changes in technology and its impact on daily life. Law and judgement have also been built chiefly on compromise rather than fairness. From my reading, fairness is sought and desirable, but compromise trumps it. That may well answer your questions about fairness. In Victorian times here and in the UK, when households dissolved, husbands were always given custody of their children. Toward the end of that period, the industrial revolution required an ever growing number of bodies to man factories, mills, and the like. Subsistence farming and the agrarian cultures began their long slide to what they are today. Women either stayed home or took the least desirable mill work that could not or would not be done by men or children, and children took the other jobs that they could do. In response to this perceived damage done to families, the notion of “noble motherhood” was created. Exercise of this notion in courts and legislatures encouraged and ultimately achieved the housebound housewife so familiar to us as a stereotype. With this change came the notion that women are better caregivers for their children. Since women didn’t usually work outside the home as this change took root, and in the rare cases when marriages were allowed to dissolve, they were given custody and the fathers ordered to continue providing financial support to both the mother and their children. Judges currently sitting still would adjudicate this way if left to their own devices, and some still try despite the passage of laws beginning 20-30 years ago in many states to try and make the process more fair to all concerned. In most, if not all states today, the laws regarding child support and custody do not take into consideration any inherent superiority of father or mother as wallet or custodian. Judges, on the other hand, have considerable latitude to do so and will if they’ve a mind to do so. There is no longer any taboo regarding discussion of child support duties and splitting them. In Alabama and Georgia, the states I know a bit more of than others, child support payments are calculated based on the salaries of both the mother and father, if both have income and/or assets. I suspect that those calculations and the underlying thinking may be flawed. The links you’ve thoughtfully provided certainly strengthen my suspicions. My longer standing point remains in that law in its practice is fluid and ever changing. The system wasn’t and isn’t ever considered fair by many folks. That is one reason why it changes in an effort to accomodate real and perceived social changes.
The idea of creating a formal budget process for divorced parents likely creates to great a burden for the courts. Policing and enforcing would cost a fortune and likely provide insufficent return for the investment. I do know some divorced parents who voluntarily do this because they wish to be fair to each other. Were that more people shared that attitude. Too often, there is animosity and a mutual desire to harm the other, including using the children as weapons.
March 16th, 2006
I’m sorry for the delay. I wrote this days ago, but haven’t had time to post it.
I didn’t mean to leave you with the impression that I was unaware that judicially interpretation of law is just as legally binding as clearly defined statute. To reduce the risk of further beating of the dead horse, let me state that I fully realize that I make myself no less subject to law by questioning it.
As far as changes in an effort to accomodate real and perceived social changes goes, that is what I’m looking for. I also agree with your statement that “Judges, on the other hand, have considerable lattitude to do so”. There are still laws on the book that I believe are inequitable, laws that present too much “compromise”, and (per your point) laws that are being viewed by the judicial system with their own special tint. Of course much of this could also be related to the penchant of lawmakers to write vague law and force the courts to intrepret what the law really means, the legal industry being resistive to incurring more work by thinking outside the box, or worse yet the legal industry enjoying the status quo and presenting only traditional options to clients.
My original statement, “About time…” was originally intended to impart my belief that the existing child support/custody laws (and application thereof) are often not fair in our current environment and that re-examination is long overdue.
Here is a link> to a current news article in the AJC regarding some change in GA child support law.