Men’s Rights Myth: Women Trick Men Into Fatherhood So They Can Collect Child Support
| January 18th, 2006In the comments to another thread, “Ed” - whose views are typical of many Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA - writes:
It’s true that some women have “tricked” men into fatherhood and child support - for example, the 1997 case of State of Louisiana v. Frisard, in which a woman gave oral sex to a man wearing a condom, and then secretly used the sperm in the condom to get pregnant. (The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling). (For more information about Frisard and some similar cases, see this article).
But even acknowledging that such cases happen, that still doesn’t support the idea that child support payments significantly motivate women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood. In the Frisard case, it appears the woman was motivated by a desire for motherhood, and so would probably have acted the same way even if no child support laws exist.
Do women seek pregnancy in order to get the financial benefits of child support, as David suggests?
And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men?
I’d say women do. Women, after all, face the risks and physical burdens of pregnancy, and (if they wind up collecting child support) face not only the financial expense but the enormous workload of raising a child - a workload that will make much more difficult, and possibly entirely derail, any other plans the woman had for her life. The workload, unlike the expense, is not split with another adult. On the other hand, for those women who want to be mothers, that could be an incentive in favor of getting pregnant.
Next to all that, the benefit of receiving child support is so minor that I wouldn’t expect it to have a significant effect on women’s incentives.
Many MRAs - and Ed, if I’ve understood him correctly - believe that child support laws give women a strong incentive to get pregnant and thus “trap” men into financially supporting them. Furthermore, many MRAs seem to believe that there is very little men can do to prevent pregnancy (hence the frequent claim made by MRAs supporting “choice for men” that all reproductive decisions are made by women).
This is a conflict, between what many MRAs believe and what many feminists believe. Is there any way we can settle this conflict empirically?
I believe there is.
Not all states have the same child support laws. In some states, the child support laws are relatively weak; noncustodial parents don’t pay much, and can relatively easily get away with defaulting on child support payments - or can depend on never being identified as the father at all. Other states have higher child support awards, laws that aggressively establish paternity, and collection techniques that make defaulting unlikely (such as garnishing child support from paychecks).
If the MRAs are correct, then states with strong child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, due to more women - tempted by the prospect of well-enforced child support awards - choosing to trick men into getting them pregnant.
If I’m correct, however, then states with weak child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, because while women’s incentives aren’t changed much by child support laws, a significant number of men are less motivated to avoid pregnancy if they think they can get off the hook.
So what do studies comparing how weak and strong child support laws effect single motherhood find? It’s men, not women, who have their incentives changed by child support laws. The stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood.
Robert Plotnick, of the University of Washington, published a study in 2005 which included a brief review of the literature.
Huang (2002) and Plotnick et al. (2004) use micro-data to examine the effect of child support enforcement on nonmarital childbearing. Both use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to analyze the likelihood that a woman’s first birth is premarital. Focusing on the teenage years, Plotnick et al. (2004) finds that young women living in states with higher rates of paternity establishment are less likely to become unwed teenage mothers. Because of the nature of the NLSY and the focus on teenage behavior, the study examines behavior during 1979-1984. Huang (2002) examines 20 years of data and different indicators of support enforcement. He reports similar relationships when women are age 20 or older but, unlike Plotnick et al., not when they are teenagers.
Plotnick’s 2005 study (which is described, and available for download, here) replicated the earlier studies’ findings.
What does this mean?
It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.
However, it is also possible that Ed is correct, and that child support laws do strongly increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. However, this is only possible if we assume that men’s incentives to avoid pregnancy are even more strongly increased - so that even though women are trying harder to entrapt men into paying child support, men are nonetheless successful in preventing pregnancy, despite women’s increased efforts. So the MRA belief that women are motivated by child support payments into trapping men, ironically can only be rescued by giving up the MRA belief that men are not able to prevent pregnancy from happening.
The empirical evidence is clear: the net effect of child support laws isn’t that women get pregnant more often to collect on child support. Rather, the stronger child support laws are, the more men work at avoiding pregnancy.
January 18th, 2006 at 6:55 am
And for pete’s sake, it’s not as if anyone usually knows what child support is all about before they get divorced — or if they’re single.
Child support entitles a child or children to support from the non-custodial parent. That support, typically 17% of income after FICA, is meant to help keep a child’s or children’s standard of living somewhere near where it would have been had the parents stayed together.
But, it will never even get that close since you usually set up separate households which almost invariably means that you are both spending more money than you might have otherwise: two rents/mortgages, two sets of utility bills, two sets of furniture, EEE TTT CCC.
So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.
If anyone thinks that $5200/yr supports the custoidal parent’s life of leisure, then they are drinking crack-laced Welch’s grape juice and sterno.
Even if one doubles or triples those numbers it simply doesn’t support a life of leisure. It supports raising a child or children and it supports doing so in a fashion that *might* come close to the lifestyle that a child or children might have enjoyed had the parents stayed together.
This comment was written by Bitch | Lab.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 7:06 am
P.S. Years ago, I was on a list mostly inhabited by men from the IT world. They were discussing how to handle child support. On one guy’s view, he refused to pay the money directly to the mother, preferring instead to spend it on the kid.
Somehow, in his mind, that meant the kid got the money and she didn’t. *rolls eyes*
If he paid the rent, or the utilities, or the private school tuition, or for clothes/toys/what have you, then all he’s done is make it so that less of her income was spent on those things. He’d tricked himself into imaging that, because he paid the landlord dirctly or if he paid the tuition directly, then somehow she didn’t “benefit.”
Currently, I have to fight my ex for child support. He’s refusing to pay b/c his son has reached 18 and, in spite of a divorce contract that says he pays ’til the kid is 21, in the military, or employed full-time.
What is truly astounding about this is that my ex, who remarried, has a step-daughter. His step-daughter’s father pays support.
I asked the wasband: Do YOU think that the child support that comes to the family’s coffers each month support YOUR life of leisure? Do you think you would be happy to put your daughter through college without his help? Do you think he’d be a total asshole if he bailed on his daughter.
The wasband told his kid, directly, to support himself on the $8-10 hour jobs he can find with a high school -type job.
I asked the wasband if they’d kick their step daughter out of the house and expect her to support herself and expect her to get through life without a college degree or some sort of training that would help her in the job market. Of course not.
If anyone knows a decent family-law attorney who can deal with the fact that I am utterly broke who’s in the Tampa bay area please ping me at my blog. Thanks!
This comment was written by Bitch | Lab.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Cathy Young of Reason wrote on this quite some time ago. I’m all for the noncustodial parent paying his/her share of child support, but I think the combination of TV Dramas and Court Shows has unduly influenced our opinion on what Child Support is like and how it should and shouldn’t be awarded.
This comment was written by Josh Cohen.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Amp - great post. I appreciate your analysis. I also appreciate that you acknowledge that “entrapment” does happen. I have a particular example in my own family where a woman got repeatedly pregnant through different men and expressly said it was to get child support (and government support) so she didn’t have to work. But I acknowledge that is a freak occurance and I also agree with your conclusion:
It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.
This comment was written by gengwall.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 7:26 am
I’m not really sure how to respond.
From a purely logical point of view child support laws *must* increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. If you compare people’s incentive to do X with people’s incentive to do X and get $1000 for it, their incentive must be higher when they’re offered the money.
I’m also not sure whether asking women or men have the most incentive to prevent pregnancy by looking at who suffers the higher burden is the right way to go. You also have to ask who get the most benefit from pregnancy, in terms of the intangable goods of wanting a child and so on.
I also think the big incentive/deterent that hasn’t been mentioned is custody law. If men got custody 50% of the time, no matter how big the support awards were, there wouldn’t be any incentive for women to get pregnant to gain child support (as the money could equally go the opposite way).
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 8:19 am
I doubt that the phenomenon of women choosing to get pregnant for the child support or to trap a man into marriage is very common, but I reckon it happens on rare occasions. It is just not a bright move for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the uncertainty involved.
I prefer to think of child support obligations not as punitive but as a societal mechanism for allocating costs. Even in cases where an unsuspecting man has been duped, it is still fairer for that man to bear the costs than to require uninvolved third parties to do so through taxation.
This comment was written by Vache Folle.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 8:27 am
MRAs Planned to Kidnap Tony Blair’s Son
Men’s rights avocates in England planned to kidnap Tony Blair’s youngest child. Fathers’ rights campaigners planned to kidnap British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s youngest son for a publicity stunt, according to reports in the British media. snip Th…
This comment was written by Bloodless Coup.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 8:56 am
This is sloppy, Amp. I know that you know that correlation doesn’t allow you to draw conclusions about causation.
Here’s an alternate theory: women who come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock for a variety of social reasons. Poor single mothers are also less likely to be politically active. In states where most of the single mothers are poor, the single mother lobby is less likely to be effective in getting politicians to pass strong child support laws. Therefore, the states with the most single mothers have less political support for strong child support laws.
My theory may be completely wrong, but the point is that it’s just as plausible an explanation of the facts as yours, and it says nothing about whether strong child support makes women have more children out of wedlock. In fact, the effect that I posit above could easily be enough to hide an uptick in out-of-wedlock births among women in strong child support states where incomes are higher if the correlation of socioeconomic status and out-of-wedlock birth were strong enough.
I agree that it’s probably not the case that lots of young women are thinking, “hmm, I think I’ll have a baby because I can get its Daddy to give me $200 a month.” But the data you cite don’t prove that strong child support laws cause lower rates of single parenthood.
This comment was written by Amy Phillips.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Bitch,
I know a totally awesome family law lawyer in Pompano. I don’t know what “ping your blog” means, and I’m not sure she wants her e-mail splattered all over a blog with so many MRA-types hanging around. If she can’t help, perhaps someone she knows can. Send me an e-mail — same user name as here at gmail dot com.
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 9:41 am
Of course, given the growing MRA influence over the past few years, men can significantly reduce or eliminate the child support “threat” by asking for more visitation or demanding custody altogether. This is routinely advocated by the MRA’s and the attorneys that serve them. Some women will back down on demanding child support if you threaten them with custody. Others might just lose custody altogether, and then the man can sit back and collect it.
This comment was written by silverside.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 9:42 am
I can see where a woman might deceive a man to get pregnant, usually for reasons not totally in accord with having a strong grip on reality. But unless the man in question is wealthy (and that does happen; it’s happened in the NBA more than once), getting pregnant in order to collect child support isn’t a good way to make much of a living.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 9:58 am
getting pregnant in order to collect child support isn’t a good way to make much of a living.
Agreed. The expenses incurred by having children are hardly enough to get by, even with other social services.
In fact, I snickered when I read this post.
This comment was written by Lauren.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 9:59 am
These guys are making me puke.
Amp, the fact that you even felt the need to mention “yes, women trick men blah blah blah” in the second PARAGRAPH of your essay makes me respect you a little less. Does it happen? Odds of probability say yes. Does it happen frequently? I’d say no; in fact I’d say it happened so infrequently to be statistically insignificant. Not enough to even be considered a viable position to argue from.
Why is it automatically assumed that the women is lying when she says it was an accident? Birth control does, in fact, fail. The pill is not infalliable. Plus, if men were so concerned with pregnancy, there is a number of steps they can take that do not rely on the woman at all: condoms, vasectomies, refusing to have sex with someone who opposes abortion or expresses a wish to be a mother.
But when the mistakes DO happen, and the woman gets pregnant, they need to, more than anything, remember that pregnancy is exclusively a women’s domain. They bear the physical burden of a pregnancy, so it is there choice, and their choice alone, that is allowed to determine what is allowed with their body.
After the pregnancy, there is a child. A child that is half and half the mother’s and the father’s. They need to realize that they have a responsibility to that child, as the mom does as well. One is hurting their own child when s/he does not. Being vindictive using a child as a pawn is cruel: it’s what the villian of every Saturday morning cartoon did. Nice.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Oh, and by the way, people need to quit confating “abortion” with “child support”. The two are ENTIRELY different.
Abortion deals with bodily autonomy. If a women has sex, she has to realize that she may get pregnant. She will have to deal with the consequence with either an abortion or a pregnancy. If a guy has sex, he has to accept that he may get a women pregnant, and she will have the decision to abort or not. He DOES not get the decision over her body.
A child, the result of the pregnancy, is an autonomous being. It is the responsibility of a) the two parents specifically and b) society in general. As a society, we cannot force one to have an emotional relationship with his or her own child. (One should, unless s/he’s an abusive jackass, but we can’t force her/him). But, you have a financial obligation to the well-being of your offspring.
Suck it up, people. You don’t have the moral high ground in abandoning your child.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:20 am
This isn’t a strawman, but you are debunking a fairly weak form of this claim. The stronger form is that if a woman wants to get pregnant, child support laws do give her a strong incentive to do it the old-fashioned way rather than to use artificial insemination or adopt. Even a few hundred dollars a month is a lot better than nothing.
I’m not saying that all women, or even a significant minority of them, are unscrupulous enough to trick men into getting them pregnant for the purpose of securing child support. But for those who are, the motive and opportunity are there. Yes, men *should* use condoms, but if he doesn’t because a woman says she’s using oral contraceptives, and she’s not, who’s more at fault? Besides, as shown by the Frisard case, a condom isn’t failsafe.
And yes, obviously men can make reproductive decisions. The point is that once a woman is pregnant, she has all the power, and there’s absolutely nothing a man can do (legally) to escape child support at that point. A woman can have all the sex she wants, protected or not, with zero risk of being legally required to support a child (although there are, of course, other risks). This simply isn’t true for men.
Yes, we can take steps to mitigate our risk, and certain laws might make some men more likely to do so, but the reduction in risk isn’t free. Condoms help, but, again, they’re not failsafe, and they do make sex less enjoyable (though they have the advantage of dramatically reducing the spread of venereal disease). Under the current legal framework, the only way to eliminate any risk of exposure to child support liability is total abstention from any sort of sexual activity with women (or sterilization, which is not an option if you think you might ever want to have children later).
So as far as I can tell, those who oppose post-conception choice for men are essentially saying that men who don’t want to risk dealing with the expense of raising children shouldn’t have sex. But how many here would agree that women who don’t want to risk dealing with the expense of raising children shouldn’t have sex?
Out of curiosity, suppose a single woman gets pregnant and gives birth. If she wants to give it up for adoption, does the father have the first shot at custody? If so, and if he elects to keep it, does the mother have to pay child support?
This comment was written by Brandon Berg.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:27 am
What’s being overlooked here by those who see an incentive for women to get pregnant to get child support is that the expenses incurred by having a child far outweigh the support. So how much sense does it make to get pregnant to get $400 a month, when the child’s expenses (higher rent for a larger place, child care, food, medical expenses, clothing, utilities, etc) are more than the child support award in the first place? What’s the benefit?
This comment was written by Broce.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:36 am
What’s bizarre about this conversation is that those guys that are claiming that women entrap men (or men’s sperm) to get pregnant, are also speaking of pregnancy as a bodily process almost tangential to the topic of child support/child rearing. Yet if we were to be talking about abortion these same men would be crying about the un-born children. Go figure.
If a woman chooses pregnancy it is a process, a trap. If a woman chooses abortion, she is a murderer.
To the rest of you claiming that child support laws give an “incentive” for pregnancy, you’re full of shite. More precisely, child support laws give women the social and psychological cushions they need when making difficult decisions about their pregnancies, their futures, and the futures of any potential children they might bear.
Further, if a man is mature enough to be engaging in heterosexual coitus, then he damn well better be mature enough to understand just exactly what fatherhood is. There is no trick there. Never has been. Men have spent millenia trying to figure out how to 100% tell if a woman’s child is also his offspring. It scares the bejeesus out of men to think that they can’t tell; even more scary is that it is obvious which children belong to which women. So men develop their bags of tricks to entrap women: marriage, violence (especially when the woman is pregnant), withholding of financial support, eviction, etc. But we would never say that men trick women into supporting the men’s own sense of fatherhood… no, because it is too obvious, too transparent, and too normative.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:45 am
“So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.”
I don’t know about your state but here in oregon I don’t make much more than 30 grand a year and I pay $750 a month. That works out to $9k a year. It’s a pretty hefty chunk of my salary. I have no problem paying it because I value my kids and I want them to be taken care of. But at the same time I don’t like the inferrence that child support is some pittance that men can easily pay if they want to. I lived in a single bedroom apartment for three years after my divorce because I couldn’t really afford anything else. When the kids came over on weekends I slept on the couch and they slept in the bedroom. I ate way more chicken flavored ramen than can possibly be good for me.
I agree that women getting pregnant to get support is a pretty ridiculous myth, just try not to get so zealous in debunking it that you end up (hopefully unintentionally) hurting the guys who truly want to be supportive and make sacrifices toward that end.
This comment was written by Tlaloc.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Brandon wrote:
How can this “stronger form” theory explain the fact that stronger child support laws are correlated with lower rates of unwed motherhood?
What logical reason is there to accept a “once a woman is pregnant” framing of the issue? In the real world, the timeline includes events before, during and after pregnancy. MRAs want legislation to be passed based on the idea that only the “once a woman is pregnant” portion of the timeline should be considered, as if the woman magically got pregnant without any male participation pre-pregnancy; but I’ve never once seen a logical explanation for why lawmakers should pretend that the timeline before pregnancy never existed.
“Once the house was on fire, there was nothing the arsonist could do to halt the flames. Therefore, the arsonist bears no responsibilty for the house burning down.” Yes, that’s true, but why on earth should we accept the false framing of the issue that says that “once the house was on fire” is the only part of the timeline we should consider?
What makes you think men have, or should have, the ability to eliminate 100% of risk? It’s not as if women live in a risk-free world - even for those women who’d choose an abortion if they get pregnant, they face the risk of having to deal with the expenses, discomfort and (for some women) guilt involved in having an abortion. Plus, like all medical procedures, abortion itself is not 100% risk-free (although it’s safer than childbirth).
It’s true - the choice to have sex involves some risk, which can be made tiny but not altogether eliminated. I don’t think that’s avoidable. It’s immature to imagine that decisions can be made without any risk whatsoever.
It’s interesting - and a sign of the expectations men in our culture have that women alone take on the burden of childrearing - that you describe children only as an “expense.” It reminds me of how Rebecca Blood described the dichotomy between how (many) men and (many) women view unwanted parenthood:
For you, “parenthood” means writing a check once a month. I think that very few women think of parenthood in those terms.
Anyhow, to answer your question, I wouldn’t say that about women because men and women don’t have the same reproductive systems; women get pregnant and can therefore choose to have an abortion. Men don’t and therefore don’t have that choice.
You’re like someone who says that tall people should be forbidden from reaching stuff on high shelves because short people can’t reach that high, and shouldn’t short people and tall people have equal rights? If I say that short people will have to live with the fact that tall people have a higher reach, does that mean I’m advocating prejudice against short people?
Women can get pregnant. That gives women the ability to have abortions (and it gives women many, many severe disadvantages that MRAs ignore). Both men and women have the right to control their reproductive systems to reduce the risk of parenthood, but their exact options differ because their reproductive systems differ.
To quote one judge’s ruling:
Back to your post:
Yes, he does, unless he’s abandoned the child. And yes, in many cases, she does have to pay child support if she’s a non-custodial parent (although this isn’t the case for 100% of non-custodial mothers, just as it isn’t the case for 100% of non-custodial fathers). One of the employees at my workplace has her child support payments garneshed out of her paycheck, for instance.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Given that single mothers are among the poorest socio-economic group there is, I don’t think it would take long to establish empirically that child support payments virtually never outweigh the costs of having a child to a woman. Which destroys the entire basis to the entrapment argument immediately.
This comment was written by Lorenzo.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Brandon Berg Writes:
“…The stronger form is that if a woman wants to get pregnant, child support laws do give her a strong incentive to do it the old-fashioned way rather than to use artificial insemination or adopt. …
…Under the current legal framework, the only way to eliminate any risk of exposure to child support liability is total abstention from any sort of sexual activity with women (or sterilization, which is not an option if you think you might ever want to have children later). …”
Brandon, you’ve i think, unknowingly, proposed the ideal solution for a man who doesn’t want ANY risk of impregnating a woman while he’s still “sowing his oats” yet retain the ability to impregnate a woman when he’s ready to settle down and have a child.
A man can go to a sperm bank and deposit his own sperm for his own use only. Thereafter, he can get a vasectomy. This allows him to have sex with no risk of getting a woman pregnant. As much sex as he likes with no risk. Then, once married to his Cinderella, this Prince Charming can have his wife inseminated artifically with his own sperm, thus producing little princlings and princesses certifiably of his own genetic material.
Having done so in such a deliberate manner, he then becomes liable for full child support should Cinderella discover her independence and move in with Snow White instead.
BTW, on the subject of vasectomies, what about men who tell women that they’ve had one so they don’t need to wear a condom? Or what about men who’ve actually had them yet are one of the statistically rare individuals who still produce a small amout of viable sperm, after all, it only takes one. What recourse should a woman have who thinks she’s having pregnancy-risk-free sex have then?
This comment was written by stay-at-home-dad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Antigone said:
“They bear the physical burden of a pregnancy, so it is there choice, and their choice alone, that is allowed to determine what is allowed with their body.”
Agreed.
and also:
“After the pregnancy, there is a child. A child that is half and half the mother’s and the father’s. They need to realize that they have a responsibility to that child, as the mom does as well.”
A child isn’t “half and half” of mother and father in any objective sense, except genetically. The energy and risk and money expended into growing a child is spent on the mother. I really don’t see that the father bears an equal responsibility simply by virtue of contributing a bit of semen.
And I fully support women’s bodily autonomy, including the right to contraception, abortion, etc. I just don’t see how you can give the mother the sole right to decide whether to have the child and still demand that the father be as responsible for it as the mother, without regards to the father’s prior expressed commitments.
I can understand that if the child was born with the mother expecting the father to give a lot of support voluntarily, and then the father withdrew that for whatever reason, that expecting child support from the father would be very reasonable. But in a situation where the father made it clear that he didn’t want any children and wouldn’t want anything to do with the mother if she decided to bear children, I just don’t see how the father could be expected to be financially responsible for the children.
Now, I’m open to changing my mind. There are likely considerations here that I just haven’t thought about enough.
And also, Antigone, the fact that you would respect Amp less for even mentioning an undisputed fact, as if it somehow showed that he had any less respect or allegience for feminist viewponts, makes *me* respect *you* a little less. It seems obvious to me that the only reason he mentioned it was to short circuit the silly arguments by any MRAs that might otherwise derail the thread. I think you’re being too shrill.
But otherwise, I mostly agree with you.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:14 am
That’s always been my understanding, but then again I haven’t seen a lot of proof of people giving much thought to the economic feasability of children when they get pregnant. That goes for whether the parents are married/together or not, and goes doubly when the mother is young, a high-school dropout, and can’t afford to sue for child support in any case. Welfare money, *maybe,* and welfare money sure doesn’t put anyone in the lap of luxury. For a fashion accessory, for the love the child will give, for the “grownup” status that comes with parenthood — yes, I’ve heard all of those.
The thought of getting pregnant for the money rings hollow, to me, except in the case of very rich fathers. Admittedly, the thought of getting pregnant for any reason rings hollow to me — happily child-free and intending to remain so.
This comment was written by carlaviii.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Q Grrl, I doubt that the same men who complain about being trapped into child support are opposing abortion. Sure, there are some, but most of the unwilling single dads would be quite happy if the mother had chosen to abort. In fact, they’re generally pissed that she didn’t.
I can’t back this up with a reference, but I think I read somewhere that young, single men are more likely to support the right to abortion than are women. If true, I find this not at all surprising.
This comment was written by Rex Little.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:20 am
I said:
“I can understand that if the child was born with the mother expecting the father to give a lot of support voluntarily, and then the father withdrew that for whatever reason, that expecting child support from the father would be very reasonable.”
Indeed, I think most (hopefully) fathers would also find it reasonable.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:28 am
pdf23ds wrote:
Women only have the “sole” right to decide if we pretend that nothing in the timeline before pregnancy happened. In a typical case, both the father and the mother voluntarily participated in the events leading up to the childbirth. “While it is true that after conception a woman has more control than a man over the decision whether to bear a child, and may unilaterally refuse to obtain an abortion, those facts were known to the father at the time of conception.”
Because the right to child support belongs to the child, not the mother. You’re saying that the father should have the right to contract with the mother to remove the child’s rights, but you are mistaken, because the mother doesn’t have the right to give her children’s rights to support away. Put another way, you’re proposing that Parties A and B have a right to agree that B’s obligation to C should be cancelled. But A doesn’t have any standing to void B’s obligation to C, so what A and B have agreed to isn’t relevant.
I appreciate your defense of me, and agree that Antigone’s criticism of my bringing up that case was mistaken.
However, I don’t think that posters here should be saying “by making that argument, you’ve made me respect you less,” and I definitely don’t want posters calling other posters “shrill.” (Please reread the moderation faq for an idea of how posters on “Alas” ought behave). Additionally, dismissing a woman’s argument by calling it “shrill” is an offensive sexist cliche - and is offensive even if you didn’t intend it that way - and therefore should be avoided.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:34 am
y’know…
maybe things are different now than when i was growing up.. i am rapidly approaching “old fogey” status…
but there’s all this talk of “clear expectations” and “express wishes” and “making it clear” who wants a baby and all that *before* having sex.
sounds like there’s a whole lot more talking going on before sex than i remember. in the “real world” of a guy and a gal getting together for a romp, are there really contract negotiations going on these days? or is it just “your place or mine” still?
if it’s still the way i remember it, then for both parties it’s a “you pay your money, you take your chances” game. a woman takes the risk of getting pregnant (even if she’s on birth control) and a guy takes the risk of getting her pregnant (even if he uses a condom). those are just the risks of life and you deal with the consequences in an ethically responsible way.
i think more guys need to just step up to the plate and be a mensch about it rather than whining that the couple of hundred for child support is keeping them from buying some new toy. consider it balance for the discrepancies in the wages of a single custodial mother vs. a single non-custodial father. and they need to stop worrying about screwing the woman after the sex is over with. she’s not “making out like a bandit” because of the pittance paid to her for child support. sure, she gets to eat the same dinner she cooked for the kids that the guy paid probably less than 1/10th of the cost of (not to say none of the labor involved in buying it, making it, and feeding it to the kids.)
the arguments i’ve heard from MRAs about child support (as opposed to equal treatment for custody) issues basically comes down to Libertarian-esque whining “But it’s MY money!”
why do Libertarians & MRAs sound like my 4yrold? “MINE! SHE CAN’T HAVE IT, IT’S MINE!” shreeked at the top of her voice.
it sounds like the MRAs never had the talk with their dads where they’re told “Be a man, son, don’t shirk your responsibilities. Step up.”
This comment was written by stay-at-home-dad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:53 am
And to bring up a point that is perhaps not being emphasized enough, there is no 100% method of birth control short of keeping all your clothes on. The man and the woman may both totally agree that they don’t want children, they may even have engaged in “contract negotiations” prior to actual coitus, but the bottom line is that even if the man is using two methods of birth control and the woman is also using two methods of birth control (for a grand total of 4 separate methods of contraception), pregnancy can still occur. Period. Grown-ups deal with the results of their actions, even if the result isn’t what they *wanted*. Geez.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:55 am
(The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling).
Not to out-liberal Amp or anything, but what did the Frisard child ever do to you (or to his father) that makes you think he’s less entitled to child support than his neighbor who was conceived when his father falsely told his mother that he had a vasectomy?
Child support is completely unrelated to spousal support. If the child hasn’t acted immorally, then he should be entitled to support from both of his parents.
This comment was written by Richard Bellamy.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:56 am
I think you’re conflating the rights of the mother with her wishes. Of course, in most situations with an involved and supportive father, the mother and the father will decide together whether to have the child. These are also typically situations where the father is willing to support the child, often as much as or more than the mother is. But even in these situations, the mother has the final say over whether to abort the pregnancy, and in this sense, the right is indeed a sole right. Anything less and you’re talking about men having legal standing in the question of whether the person they’ve impregnated can get an abortion.
I think I acknowledged that the actual circumstances preceeding the birth do affect how I think of the father’s obligations. If the mother had a reasonable expectation that he would provide the support, for whatever reason, or if he pressures her into having the child when she might not have otherwise, then I think the support is morally obliged from him.
I don’t see how this helps your case at all. It seems irrelevant to me.
I’ve never seen child support conceptualized as a right of the child, rather than of the caretaking parent. It does change things though. Is there somewhere I can read more about how this view is justified? It’s not at all obvious to me.
I agree that it was rude, and realized that while writing it, but said in anyway in a direct echo of what I was replying to, to make a point that Antigone was also being rude in saying so. I’m sorry to add to the friction on the blog.
I’m not sure how I should otherwise deal with a post that I consider to be out of bounds, other than by completely ignoring it. If I think another poster is using poor form, should I never call it out, and leave any such moderation completely up to you? Or is there another way I could have phrased my objection to the style without going against the posting guidlines?
Agreed about the “shrill” thing. While I maintain that the description is apt, I really wasn’t aware of the hint of sexism in the term when I chose it, and I will avoid it. On the other hand, if a post exhibits negative stereotypical qualities, it’s hard to avoid invoking the stereotypes when criticizing them.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Hee. Guess I’m an old fogey too. I always end up wondering what happened to being responsible for your screw-ups… and when it became so impossible to just not have sex if you don’t want to be a parent right now. But maybe maybe my perception’s been skewed by my years of being totally ignored by men because I’m fat and shy. Maybe the TV’s right and life is one big orgy when you’re slim and pretty.
This comment was written by carlaviii.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Tlaloc took issue with this: “So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.”
It’s a nationwide law that, The Uniform Child Support and Child Custody Law (enacted to prevent b.s. from happening: such as men moving to states with different laws so they could skate, and to deal with problems when women take children to different states to live with family, new partners, get jobs, etc.)
So, I was unclear. The min. you must pay, barring extreme circumstances, is 17% after FICA for ONE child. After that you pay more depending on how many children you have.
There was no such meaning implied. You read that into it. I’ve been on both sides of this issue: my father didn’t pay, I’ve been a step mother to three boys, etc. etc.
I was pointing out that, whether it’s $5200 for one or $9000 for two or three, no one lives a life of leisure or ease and certainly can’t live without working a full-time job. So, how and why anyone would want to entrap someone else for that amount of money, money that wouldn’t even support 1 adult, let alone that adult and 1 or more kids — well, it’s ridiculous.
This comment was written by Bitch | Lab.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Regarding my previous comments, I think the availability of abortion to the mother probably changes things. It changes how free the choice to have a child is for the mother. If a child is seen as something “forced” upon the mother by biological inevitability, then it’s easy to see how the mother and father should both bear responsibility for the child. But if the child is seen as something that is in no way inevitable, then by choosing to having the child the mother is actual autonomously, and should therefore have full responsibility for her actions. In real life, births fall on a range from completely autonomous to more or less inevitable (for the mother) depending on the availability of abortion, on the mother’s beliefs, on the father’s role in the pregnancy, and lots of other factors. So I think, ideally, that the amount of child support payed would be relative to the autonomy involved in the mother’s choice to have the child. Whether anything like this is practical, or is already done, I am completely ignorant.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
PS TLaloc. I read that again and it sounds snippy. I don’t meant to be and I’m not angry. Just too busy for my own good. My apologies. If you got to know me, you’d know my views on all these issues are pretty complicatd and much more sympathetic to a complex reading of the issues than we are sometimes will to give one another. So, sometimes, it’s a matter of also not assuming that women who have views on this issue are able to write about everything they think in the confined and limited space of a blog comment.
Amp: another point that should be made:
We already know that women who are collecting AFDC are not motivated to collect sperm to have lots of babies so they can get bigger child support checks.
Women on welfare have, historically, had few children than married women. They apparently aren’t interested in having more children for the bigger welfare check. And that research was conducted before Clinton butchered AFDC.
I think one of the problems with the sterotypes of welfare queens is that so many people have never lived the life of the poor and working class. Consquently, they don’t know how to interpret the words and actions of the folks that get stigmatized by that myth. But no time to go into it further.
This comment was written by Bitch | Lab.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
“the mother is actual autonomously”
the mother is acting autonomously
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Cat herder — sorry about that. i just meant go to the blog, find my email adress and write me. don’t like putting it online. But I’ll use the technique that is supposed to prevent spam:
my address is info AT pulpculture DOT org (transform the AT to @ and the DOT to a period.
Thanks for any advice you can give. It is very much appreciated. After his father treated him like this, it would be nice to give the kid a sense that, in general, there are people in the world who care, even complete strangers.
This comment was written by Bitch | Lab.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
The “women entrap men into getting them pregnant so they can collect child support” argument seems so facially absurd that I have to wonder if you’re stating it accurately. A child is almost sure to be a financial loser for the woman just on the basis of direct costs, and even more so when you consider that having a kid decreases the woman’s probable future income.
Perhaps kids are cheaper to raise than I think they are, but unless the man is very wealthy (in which case the woman’s chances of winning any court battle go way down) it seems like it’s obviously going to be a financial loss.
This comment was written by Empiricist.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
I’m late to the party as always — posted this as a response to Ed on the other thread, and I’ll post it here even though others have already said it.
Child support benefits the child, not the custodial parent. Said parent can (and should) be prosecuted for using child-support money for her- or himself instead of the child(ren).
I get very tired of this notion that all a woman has to do is sucker some poor slob into getting her pregnant and then she can sit on the sofa and eat bonbons for the next 18 years while he works his guts out supporting her and the kid. We all know it doesn’t work that way (unless maybe the slob in question is Donald Trump, and that falls into the “too rare to be a legitimate argument” category).
I’m not sure your correlation equals causation either, Amp — and I’m not sure it doesn’t. It would be interesting to see the data sliced and diced by income — take two states with similar per-capita incomes, one with strong child-support enforcement and the other with weak, and compare out-of-wedlock births between them. There are still a lot of other factors in play, of course.
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
In reality, too many men who father children pay little or no child support , even with all the efforts made by women’s organizations to deal with this problem. And there’s more of a liklihood of mothers raising children by themselves of being financially strapped, than single mothers living well off of child support.
Yet once again, with the MRA’s groups, it’s
This comment was written by Radfem.“What about the men?” What about the men being victimized by all those scheming women out there looking to pick their pockets by plotting to get pregnant?
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January 18th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Said parent can (and should) be prosecuted for using child-support money for her- or himself instead of the child(ren).
How are they defining “using child-support money for herself”? As mentioned above, if a single parent spends the child support on essentials, that just frees up money to use for luxuries. Unless of course the prosecution is for failing to provide the essentials, which would probably be some kind of child endangerment offence whether support was being paid or not.
This comment was written by Nick Kiddle.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
In reality, too many men who father children pay little or no child support
Too many men who father children provide little to no support of any kind; financial, emotional, or physical, to either their child or his or her mother.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
that “using child support money for herself” argument is what most of the husbands of my aunts and my own … contributor of genetic material (can’t bring my self to call him the f word (father, not the *other* f word, i call him that a lot :) ) … used to keep my cousins and me poor growing up. heaven forbid my mom buy a new dress so she could look nice for work so she could pay the rent. that was “using child support money for herself” or if my aunt bought a new kitchen table for her & the 7 kids her husband left her with… that was “using child support money for herself”. no, far better for our moms to worry about whether they could buy bread for dinner or put gas in the car so they could go to work. and nobody better get sick, ’cause the old man ain’t footin’ the bill. and no dreams of college either. “i didn’t go ’cause your mom got pregnant, so why should you?”
these aren’t just personal stories, they happen every day because some lame-ass cheap bastard is too worried about his ex-wife “using child support money for herself.”
too many fathers pay little or no child support. i don’t have statistical data, but i think few pay after the first few payments if they can get away with it without the court or the welfare system coming after them.
and often, kids don’t realize what a jerk their father was until they grow up. after all, at dad’s house, there’s plenty of food, and a nice car, and good furniture, and money for toys on the weekend, and trips out to eat. dad’s the good guy, mom can’t afford to take us to mcdonald’s. then the kid grows up and realizes exactly why it was mom couldn’t afford the pack of gum at the grocery or that comic book you just had to have. because some jerk was worried that she was “using child support money for herself.”
for every 1 guy that’s truly been bilked or tricked or cheated, i’d lay good money (if i had it! :) ) on the odds that there are 1000 women & kids doing without because of lack of support from the father.
This comment was written by stay-at-home-dad.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Amen, stay-at-home-dad. If most of the fathers who were screaming about custody of their money were screaming just as loudly about custody of their children, I’d be a little more sympathetic to their troubles.
That said, life is complex. There are self-indulgent moms and dads, and there are responsible moms and dads. In my own circle of acquaintance, I know some of each, in various states of relationship to each other. The problem is, we live in a society where we don’t know each other well enough to use the ancient Welsh method of evaluating claims (testimony by neighbors), so how can our legal system consistently and fairly evaluate whether or not one parent is an alcoholic, a child-abuser, a gambler, hopelessly self-centered, seriously mentally ill, vengeance-obsessed, or totally incompetent with finances? (All of these last are reasons I have heard within the last year for why the person confiding in me should get things their way.) To me, with apologies to the lawyers out there, it would seem that whoever manages to hire the better lawyer ends up with the best results, which doesn’t seem like a very evenhanded way of handling things. The gold standard should be what is in the best interest of the child, who after all didn’t ask to be born.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Just because fathers know beforehand that if they get someone pregnant they could end up paying child support in the future doesn’t mean that the policy that requires those payments is fair to them, any more than a person smoking pot means that drug laws are fair.
I’m open to the idea that the individual circumstances in most situations make child support morally justified, but what is the common situation? Did most parents who receive child support expect before the birth of the child that the other parent would have provided more, only to have the other parent back out of that promise?
While I agree with stay-at-home-dad about the odds of someone really getting cheated into child-support payments, I think that a much more common situation than complete deception is where the woman is straightforward in that she wants to keep a child if the contraception fails, and the man, even though he doesn’t want any children (and was straightforward about that), decides to take that risk. (It’s a small risk, with good contraception.) In this situation I don’t think the father should be obligated to support the child. (Provided that there was no coercion involved in either the conception or the pregnancy.) And I do think it’s probably pretty common.
About the child being the one with the right to support by both parents. I think that strikes me as wrong. I don’t think either biological parent has any moral obligation to protect or raise the child after it’s born. I think if they’re not interested in doing so, the state then has an obligation to care for the child. If they do decide to care for the child, they have the obligation to do it properly and not abuse it, of course. But the decision should be voluntary, both on the part of the mother and of the father. Observe that in some primitive societies, mothers will often simply abandon an infant which they don’t have the resources to raise. Granted, the situation in the US and probably most other countries today is nothing like this. A mother doesn’t really have the choice to give the child over to the state, nor to abandon it (without risking being prosecuted for murder). Sometimes the child can be adopted if adoptive parents are found. But, if I understand correctly, a mother can’t simply voluntarily place a child into the foster care system, and even if she did have that choice, she would have to live with the awareness that by doing she’s substantially disavantaging the child. So she’s left with the choice of abortion, which is unpalatable to many, or raising an unwanted child.
OK, so I got off track a bit there. I still don’t see how an infant has a right to be alive, let alone a right to support from both parents. I only think that by deciding to raise the child, either the individual parents or society is promising them the basic rights of human society. But not before that point.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
pdf23ds,
re: your post twenty-three. If the mother is acting autonomously in giving birth to the child, how are men ever entitled to custody or visitation or a relationship with the child, even if the woman is his wife? If the entire responsibility rests on her, so does the entire right.
Ismone
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
OK, I used some loose language there. By “using child-support money for herself” I meant something like keeping the kids in rags while enhancing her Imelda-esque shoe collection, or feeding the kids crusts of bread while dining out every night. Either of those would qualify as child neglect, for which she could be prosecuted — as Nick pointed out, that would be true even if there were no child support.
My point, however, is that (again, absent Donald Trump) you don’t live very well on child support alone, and most single (and married) parents are more likely to work the other way around, skimping on themselves so that the kids can have what they need.
This comment was written by Lu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Ismone,
In the situation where the father wants an amount of custody or visitation, and the mother is completely opposed to it from the very beginning of the child’s life, the issue gets pretty thorny. I would say, as a first thought, that the mother does indeed have all the rights in the situation. At this point the father has no real investment in the child. But wait! Sometimes the father does have significant investment in the child, if he’s cared for the mother through her pregnancy. (And yet she still doesn’t want him as part of the child’s life?) But even in these situations, his role is still secondary, and I think his rights are thus smaller than the mother’s.
But in the more common situation where both commit together to raise the child and then the couple splits up personally after the child has been raised a certain amount, I think the father is entitled to visitation/custody preportionate to his prior commitment to the child. (And then you get into questions of how harmful it is for the child to be shuttled back and forth, and even more thorny issues. But still.)
I don’t see how this conflicts with what I said in 23; do you think it does?
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
I should add, I think the above situation (in what’s now comment 47) would not be changed if one or both of the parents involved were not the biological ones. I simply don’t think that makes any difference here.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
The more I think about it, the more I think custody is the big issue.
I can’t see how a man can ever get custody, unless the mother allows him to play a substantial part in the child’s upbringing or is rendered incapable of looking after the child herself. At birth the mother is going to be granted custody automatically, and thereafter she will be the primary caregiver which means she’s going to keep custody (again, unless she allows the father to play a role in the child’s upbringing which means he becomes the primary caregiver).
In this sense, I think it’s legitimate to complain about women “trapping” men into paying support (as opposed to the situation where the man has custody and the woman is “trapped” into paying support). The default is that the woman has custody and man pays support. I can’t see how the reverse situation can come about unless the woman allows this to happen, or suffers a misfortune (can’t look after the child because of illness, for example).
If you value custody over not having custody, then Ed’s right that “women have more incentives to become pregnant than a men do.”
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
>>>the woman is straightforward in that she wants to keep a child if the contraception fails, and the man, even though he doesn’t want any children (and was straightforward about that), decides to take that risk. (It’s a small risk, with good contraception.) In this situation I don’t think the father should be obligated to support the child.>>>
Why the hell not? You said it, he *knew* she would keep a child if she got pregnant and *HE* took the risk.
This comment was written by Broce.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Why the hell so? I just don’t see the case for the affirmative.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
>>Why the hell so? I just don’t see the case for the affirmative. >>
He knew the risk, as you said, and decided to take it anyway.
And what you are also losing here is that this is about the child, not the mother. A mother who refuses to feed her child is guilty of neglect and abuse. A father who doesn’t pay child support is taking food out of that child’s mouth, but he shouldn’t be guilty of anything?
He just wants free nookie, accepting that the woman might get pregnant, but hey, that’s her tough sheet? In your example she was honest and said she would have the child if she got pregnant. He decided to have sex anyway, figuring what the hell, he could just walk away?
Is there *ever* a time a man should be held responsible for his decisions? What’s wrong with saying “Hey, maybe this isnt the right woman to sleep with, since she’ll want to keep the child if she gets pregnant?” He decided to risk pregnancy, but hey, that’s ok cause it’s only a woman’s problem. Screw the kid. Screw the woman.
This comment was written by Broce.Wow. Just wow.
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January 18th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Try getting away with that on the futures market.
“Excuse me, I only invested my money to get a fat profit on soybeans. I knew the crops were grown in Tornado Alley, but I didn’t want that tornado to destroy the crop, so I want that money I invested back, please. Screw the farmers.”
Also, welching on a bet is seen as immoral and even illegal generally in male-bonding circles. Why is it suddenly OK if it’s a bet on sexual outcomes with a woman and child?
This comment was written by tigtog.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
pdf23ds,
Your posts 47 and 48 absolutely contradict your post 23. In post 23, you are creating a situation where a man can give up all responsibilities to the child unilaterally. In posts 47-8, you are creating a situation where, although secondary, a man still has rights to the child, if he wants them. So basically, under the system you advocate, a man has lesser rights to a child, but can give them up and have no responsibility. If a woman is stuck with the responsibilities of having a child due to autonomy, she should have full, not merely primary, rights to control the child and exclude the biological father. Otherwise, she has autonomy when it benefits the man (he doesn’t want to be involved, even financially) but less when it is a detriment to the man (he seeks involvement). Her “autonomy” depends on his subjective desires. Doesn’t sound like autonomy to me. One way to see the bias in this standard, is to ask whether you would rather be the man or woman in this situation. I would rather be the man.
Nik,
Of course fathers may get custody of children. It is not for the mother to “allow” the father access to his children–unless he is proven unfit (which requires clear and convincing evidence) even if he is initially the non-custodial parent he will have court-ordered visitation rights, and often joint legal (and possibly physical) custody of the child. Some states even have laws establishing joint custody as the preferred form of custody.
The question is, when it comes down to who gets custody of the children, in cases where completely shared custody is impractical, what criteria should we consider? Should the closeness of the relationship and the amount of time spent with the child be considerations? If there are problems with using that information to make decisions, what are these problems and when should those criteria not apply as a result? If these criteria mean that women more often get custody, is that because they are women qua women, or because they are primary caregivers who happen to be women? If primary caregivers should not have a presumption in favor of custody, who should? Why?
Personally, in my own life, I would like to co-parent, but I know that other concerns may prevent that approach.
This comment was written by Ismone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
I didn’t say I disliked it because he put the “women do occasionally trick men” in his essay, I said I disliked it because he put it in the second paragraph. As in, he was framing it from the get-go to have that in one’s mind. Honestly, I think it would have been more effective as a second to last or afterthought.
Hehe, I’ve been called “shrill” on the internet. Guess I can finally join the “shrill, hysterical, bitchy” feminists.
And, perhaps your right: perhaps my critism was not as well thought out as it could have been. I agree with Amp on a great many things, and respect his beliefs even when I don’t: but in this case, the theme seemed to apologetic to the MRAs.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Oooh, I get to co-opt some pro-life language: Because it’s a child, not a choice. The argument for the affirmative, pdf, is that even though the result was not desired, there’s still a kid in all of this. Who needs clothes, food, school supplies, etc. To say that fathers shouldn’t be forced to pay child support if they really don’t want to isn’t supportable.
This comment was written by evil_fizz.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I started this and have posted on 2 other threads before I even noticed it, bad me. I want to state first that I don’t think trapping a man is the norm. I think women do it, but men abandon their children too. I think ignoring one or the other is just being blind.
I want to touch on some situations that are being ignored or overlooked. We talk about the low social/economic status of single mothers. In the truly poor, how many grandparents are raising kids that mothers are collecting support for. How many mothers, 2, 3 or more kids, don’t worry about pregnancy because medicare pays the hospital and one more isnt a big deal.
I am not trying to point at anyone. I am not saying it is every woman twisting the laws and abusing the system. I am saying it happens and there should be protections. I have seen the situations above. I have seen women who were unsure of who the father was and used the “best benefits” pick to demand support.
And Nik, I think custody is the issue. While there are a lot of fathers who don’t want anything to do with their kids I think they are about as uncommon as the women trapping men into marriage or support. I think humans care about their children. It is instinct, as natural as breathing. Now, do men doubt children are theirs? Surely, but they are justified in those doubts too often to be dismissed out of hand.
I really didn’t make the statement with the thought that it was the norm. I base my arguments on rights vs. responsibilities. If you are going to keep piling on responsibilities you should be willing to share the rights equally as well.
Amp, you have said in several posts that to say a woman made a unilateral decision to have a child we have to disregard what happened up to the pregnancy. I agree to a point but as I stated in another thread if the man is held 50% responsible for the child, he should also be 50% responsible for the fetus that leads to that child. If he is not and has no vested intrest in that fetus, no rights or responsibilities in association with the pregnancy, then the act of birth is what “creates” a person.
Please do not take this to mean I am supporting forced abortion or some such nonsense. I am supporting a fathers right to know. I am supporting non-gender discriminate custody. I am supporting equal treatment under the law. I feel truly that a woman should NOT assume she has custody. I feel that attempt to keep a father out of a child’s life through deceit should be a crime with stiff penalties. I want visitation enforcement to have the same priority as child support enforcement. I don’t want another father to be laughed at by his lawyer when he suggests trying to get physical custody.
I simply want to get rid of the “have my cake and eat it too” system.
I don’t consider myself an MRA by the way. I am just a father and a man who likes to see fair play. As for why MRA’s are always harping on whats good for men…well, ahem, they are activists for MEN’s rights…right??
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
If childrearing before divorce in our current society is gender discriminate, (and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t), why should child-rearing after divorce be non-gender discriminate?
This comment was written by tigtog.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
>> I want visitation enforcement to have the same priority as child support enforcement.>>
In Massachusetts, it takes precedence, at least it did in my case. I was flat out told by both judges and family officers that if I interfered in visitation, I’d lose custody and be jailed. Meanwhile, my ex consistently refused to pay child support, up to and including quitting jobs every time the court got impatient and finally imposed a wage assignment.
The *only* time the court ever even suggested jailing him was when he lied to the judge on the phone, while I was standing in front of the judge, by telling him that I’d told my ex not to bother to come to court. The judge told him if he did not appear the next day, he’d be arrested. By the way, that necessitated my taking yet *another* unpaid day off from work to attend the then postponed contempt hearing.
Regardless of how many times he was found in contempt of court, and we’re talking in the dozens, his visitation schedule was never affected. As the court told me, visitation and child support are two entirely different issues, and while I could as the custodial parent, be expected to “make up” the missing child support out of my in those days meager income to ensure my son was taken care of, I could never take the place of my son’s father, and my son had a right to a relationship with the man.
Visitation was taken *very* seriously in Massachusetts, at least in the early-mid nineties when this all took place.
This comment was written by Broce.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Because legally it is indiscriminate before divorce. If it is one sided that is a family decision.
Because post-divorce or in unmarried couples it effects the ability of a parent to see his/her child.
Because what is best for the child is going with the better parent, not the female parent unless she is completely unable or unwilling to raise the child.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
s less ridiculous than donning superhero costumes and parading around national landmarks. (In all fairness, this is reported by a tabloid rag and the founder has condemned this action.) via Bloodless Coup A reasonably related post onthe MRA myths that women get pregnant to collect child support is discussed at Alas, A Blog.
This comment was written by Feministe's Journal.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Broce, I missed your last post before I posted. Not to sound harsh but in both of your posts your X sounds like an ass. Now, on the flip side, if he DID visit with your son every other weekend it is unfair of you to say he contributed nothing emotionally to the raising of his child. I have seen the opposite of your case as well so I have heard the “seperate issue” battlecry before. Meaning, I have seen mothers withhold visitation and the father still has to pay support and is jailable if he stops. Not an issue in PA, where my X lives by the way. There I never see the money it is pulled from my paycheck, which is not from PA I might add, as is any claimed medical costs or anything else. I am also in arrears if she submits the bill to the state regardless of if I know about it or not…do you know what child support arrears do to credit? It is ugly.
Anyway, fathers who do not at least make an attempt to meet support are wrong. Partial is better than none and the states should change laws to reflect that as well. As for how your X wasn’t garnished, well I have no response to that. I guess we can blame the system again. It sounds to me like you got the short end.
Using the child as a weapon is probably the lowest point in any relationship. Custodial parents who dangle visitation rights over a non-custodial parents head are just as terrible as parents who refuse to pay. It is said over and over, support is more than money. Denying visitation is simply denying everything about support that is not financial and equally as horrific.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
>>Not to sound harsh but in both of your posts your X sounds like an ass. Now, on the flip side, if he DID visit with your son every other weekend it is unfair of you to say he contributed nothing emotionally to the raising of his child.>>
He is an ass, and as for contributing emotionally, you could ask my son about that. He’d disagree. Any problems were *mine* to deal with, alone.
Just a cute Xmas tale…I flew my son back there to spend some holiday time with his dad this year. Now my son is 18, and the ex isnt going to pay, so I did. I also gave the kid some “emergency money” in case he ran into problems. The morning he was to leave, dad announced that unless my son gave him all of the emergency money, he wasn’t going to get him to the airport and he’d miss his flight home. So my kid forked over *my* money to dad, and arrived home at 11 pm MT, not having eaten since 7 am ET…he had no money to buy food at the airport on his layover. Yeah, my ex is an ass.
>>Using the child as a weapon is probably the lowest point in any relationship. >>
Absolutely, and I went out of my way not to do that. Alas, the same could not be said of my ex.
As for garnished wages, it’s my belief that *all* child support should be by wage assignment. It would save a ton of heartache, and frankly court time and money. And if this was the standard there’d be no “stigma” attached, which is what a lot of non custodial parents say they object to in having a wage assignment.
BTW…the moral of the story about not screwing over your kid is that it can come back to haunt you. Not only has my child decided that his dad is a lowlife..he loves him but has no respect for him…but in order to avoid paying support, he put his house *and* his business, every asset he has, into the name of his current wife when they married about ten years ago. Looks like they are headed for a divorce. And guess who’ll walk away without a dime to his name?
Yeah, I grinned just a little when I heard that.
This comment was written by Broce.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Your first post implied that I should have put in something about how rare such cases are. Probably you’re right about that; it would have been better if I had done that. My thought at the time was that the case I cited was sufficiently bizarre that I didn’t need to point out that it was rare, but perhaps that’s over-optimistic on my part.
My main target readers for posts like this one are feminists who are googling for ammunition to use in debate with anti-feminists; for them, just including the evidence and argument in enough detail to recycle is enough, since they’ll just take what they need and leave the rest. And fence-sitters, who I imagine are convinced that MRAs have some legitimate concerns, but not fully convinced of the MRA program. For those readers, I think it might be reassuring that I don’t take a “this problem never, ever happens” position, so that’s why I put it near the top.
I admit this may be a mistaken strategy on my part, but that’s how I was thinking of it.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
January 18th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
This whole thread is nauseating. Why, somebody tell me exactly WHY, anybody thinks a woman would make the god-awful choice of having a baby on the off-chance she might get some child support out of it? Apparently all the fathers on this thread are exemplary, but you are the exceptions to the rule. According to the US Dept of Health and Human Services, in 2003 child support payments were 68% in arrears! 68%! This isn’t chump change, here–this means 68% of the money that was supposed to support children just isn’t being paid. Maybe, just maybe, because this is a crazy universe after all, one woman in a million made a really dumb-ass decision to “have a baby to get some child support.” I’ll bet you just about anything that same woman is left holding the bag and getting pennies, if anything.
To me this is as damaging as the entire welfare queen stereotype–and by the way might I add that there is NO SUCH THING as AFDC anymore. The welfare deform bill that Clinton signed into law has made the entire act of trying to get some government child support (since the fathers aren’t paying)–also known as TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, an exercise in frustration, bureaucratic run-around, and nay-saying.
Oh, and as a little aside: starting January 1, the state of Wisconsin is now going to be taking the child support away from any moms who are getting any cash government assistance–TANF or C-sup (which is supplemental income for the children of disabled parents). The final amount they will be taking away by October is 58% of the total child support from the poorest of the poorest of the poor in Wisconsin. So even those few moms who get anything are going to, once more, be getting next to nothing.
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January 19th, 2006 at 3:30 am
I think my question is how does the father get custody, without the mother allowing this to happen? At birth the mother gets custody. Thereafter custody goes to the primary caregiver. But, given that the mother has custody by virtue of birth, how can the father ever become the primary caregive and get custody (without the mother allowing this to happen)?
In a situation where one of two people get custody, and both are competing for custody, isn’t it always going to go to the mother? The mother will get custody at birth, and because of this that means she gets to keep it. And given that aren’t men trapped into providing support, as they can’t get access to the caregiving role?
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
January 19th, 2006 at 4:43 am
nik: Your question is based on a false premise — that custody is always or even most often awarded to the person who has at the time of the request physical custody of the child. First, in many, many countries in the world, the mother has almost no custody rights. In the US, the laws have evolved to ensure that both men and women are assumed to have access to the child barring unfit parentage conditions, and most actual divorces are drawn up on a time sharing basis. What often happens is that one parent or the other (in my experience more often but not always the father) moves on and stops taking as much of an interest in the child. In situations where divorce is not involved, again, the mother is more often but not always the one who is either more interested in raising the child(ren) or believes it’s her responsibility.
This comment was written by odanu.Report this comment to the moderators
January 19th, 2006 at 8:17 am
what odanu said. Also, nik, in cases of mental illness, drug addiction, or other circumstances where the mother is obviously unfit, the father or the state can get sole custody without the mother allowing it.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 19th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Also, I found this interesting piece on child support law this morning, and I couldn’t remember if anyone had already posted it already.
This comment was written by Lee.Report this comment to the moderators
January 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
(MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA - writes: …Women have more incentives to become pregnant than a men do. […] There are … the financial benefits that child support laws now provide. I [...]Continue reading at Alas, a blog … posted 4:35 am at Alas, a blog
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January 20th, 2006 at 1:31 am
There’s alot of talk about people taking responsibility here. I think we should remember that the majority of the people we’re expecting responsibility from are between 18 and 22, poor, and ill educated. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the responsibility for the child rests primarily with parents. As a society, we’re ultimatelty responsible.
While I agree that custody/child support laws open males to an unreasonable vulnerability, I think the argument is redundant, when, for reasons both ethical and practical, the responsibility clearly rests with society.
With that out of the way… what the hell is an MRA?
This comment was written by CentralContentprovider.Report this comment to the moderators
January 20th, 2006 at 1:32 am
Oh - haha… Men’s Right’s Activist. I just notioced it. Never mind. :D
This comment was written by CentralContentprovider.Report this comment to the moderators
January 20th, 2006 at 6:32 am
How do fathers get custody? A few do because the mother is genuinely unfit (addicted, neglectful, etc.) and some do because the mother is uninterested. MRA’s tend to play up these cases. However, many fit, committed, and loving mothers can lose custody, too. They lose because the father finds a good Father’s Rights attorney and they wage war. They slander, lie, and attack. And they win.
I lost to a guy who has not held a steady job in 15 years now. His last employer took him to court for fraud. None of it matters, because the courts around here are so thrilled to see an “interested” father. Of course it also helps if your county family courts are father sympathetic. Here in our county, our local fathers rights honcho actually managed the campaign of our family court judge, so you know the judge is gonna deliver. Fathers rights people sit on the boards of the major non-profit counseling centers, the ones who do custody evaluations. Our evaluator, who did take my ex to task for obstructing contact and badmouthing (typical behavior of abusers, who are the most likely fathers to pursue custody as part of their power-and-control issues), spoke at a fathers rights meeting against mothers who engage in “maternal gatekeeping.” But for all his concern about mothers who obstruct visitation, there was no concern about fathers who do the same, as he gave my ex custody in spite of (because of?) his abuse. Naturally, the family court judge also has a very bad reputation among advocates for victims of domestic violence, because she has a history of granting custody or unsupervised visitation to abusers.
I suspect that because custody is a local county affair, that research would show that there are hotbeds of mothers losing custody. And it sure seems like certain counties come up again and again for absolutely agregious behavior against mothers.
This comment was written by silverside.Report this comment to the moderators
January 20th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Cathy Young of Reason wrote on this quite some time ago. I’m all for the noncustodial parent paying his/her share of child support, but I think the combination of TV Dramas and Court Shows has unduly influenced our opinion on what Child Support is like and how it should and shouldn’t be awarded.
My girlfriend and her ex were discussing this at our house last weekend (he’d come to where we live to see his daughter). They were talking about how surprised people are at how well they get along. Those TV drams paint a picture of divorce as not just adversarial (which it pretty much is by definition; if the principals weren’t adversaries to some degree, they’d stay married) but bellatorous. I don’t even think that’s a word — people think a divorcing couple exceeds the bounds of English vocabulary in their seething hatred for each other. Against that backdrop, the non-custodial parent is naturally going to fight every mill, and the custodial parent is naturally going to try and squeeze out as much as possible out of sheer spite.
This comment was written by Hershele Ostropoler.Report this comment to the moderators
January 21st, 2006 at 4:34 am
On the subject of MRA myths, Ampersand is confronting two of the biggies–that child support is a huge amount of money, and that when faced with this prospect of getting on the child support payroll, deviouswomen can’t help but trick men into knocking us up to get at it. Using old-fashioned, hard-nosed liberal reasoning through the lens of self-interest, Amp demonstrates that not only would it be irrational for women to use this method of self-enrichment since it doesn
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January 22nd, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Silverside, it sounds to me like you are on the flip side of the norm. Trust me I empathize. Fit parents should not be denied access to their children. I also feel that gender shouldn’t be used to determine a parents fitness. As for abusive fathers being the most likely to pursue custody, that statement is quite prejudiced. Would you say the same of mothers who pursue custody? The rest of your concerns seemed genuine, that just sounded hateful.
This comment was written by Ed.Report this comment to the moderators
January 24th, 2006 at 2:31 am
I watched a quite interesting programme on the BBC last night. That sort off touched on this issue.
I will say b4 I start that I am undecided on this subject, as I have met both Single mothers that have been poorly treated and those that seem to be working the system.
On this show about Benifit investigations, they had a number of single parents telling their stories of how they came to be on benifits and in the situration that they were in. What was interesting is that Yes, benifits do not make you rich and just keep you above the poverty line. But some young women do not Know this b4 they get pregnant, and the popular image that is being dicussed here (get pregnant and the state will keep you, so you don’t have to work) is held wrongly by many of these young women.
So essentially some, by no means all, young women belive that having a child is better than getting a job and that they will recive more benifits, they are then suprised to how little and how hard it can be.
I recently dated a single mum, who was getting support from the childs father and it was still very tuff for her. So i have a very little bit of understanding of what it takes.
So maybe the perception that you can have a child, get a house and more benifits is not just the perception of angry MRA but also some of the young women themselves. Poverty is the main factor. Young men may see an escape in crime (drug dealing etc) and some young women may see an escape (wrongly) through motherhood.
Just some Ideas.
Not being a father I have no idea about child support so I will refrain from commenting on that.
This comment was written by Wookie.Report this comment to the moderators
February 26th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
evil_fizz said:
It is definitely a child, but it was also a choice. It was the mothers choice not to abort the child. The production of the child was a voluntary and autonomous act on the part of the mother. This is why she has the responsibility, and why the father doesn’t, in my one-night stand hypothetical. And when abortion isn’t avaliable (as it really isn’t, readily) then my whole line of argument falls. Does this make it largely hypothetical? Hell, yes. Does this make it a much lower priority than other feminist issues? Hell, yes. In other words, I think my priorities are straight, but this issue still kind of bothers me, being a guy and all.
This comment was written by pdf23ds.Report this comment to the moderators
February 26th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Feminism and Child Support
So, all you feminists out there, what do you think the man’s obligation is where he meets a random girl in a bar, they hook up that night consensually, and she gets pregnant and bears the child? Do you think he should be obligated to pay child s…
This comment was written by Metablog.Report this comment to the moderators
March 2nd, 2006 at 12:32 pm
While I don’t really consider myself an MRA, I do read a lot of MRA stuff and I’m pretty knowledgable in the arena of child custody and support, at least in NY state.
I have to say that I don’t think the idea of women tricking men into fatherhood in order to get CS is so muchof a common MRA myth across the board. I will concede that it is where very wealthy men are concerned. From what I’ve seen over the last few years that’s about the extent of it.
It seems to me you may be confusing that idea with the very pervasive — and fairly accurate — idea that many decent men are victimized by laws like the Bradley Amendment and that the gov’t shouldn’t have the power to simply step in and redefine one’s parental role when no law has been broken and no significant wrongdoing can be objectively demonstrated.
On the argument that abusive men are more likely to go for custody:
That may be true, but with a caveat. The other group of men most likely to go for custody are those whose wives are abusive. The reason for these two extreme groups is that they are the ones highly motivated to go for custody despite the 10:1 odds against them. The abusive men because they’re blind to anything but they’re own narcisistic needs and the abused because they desperately want to save their kids.
The rest of the middling dads who are by and large good folks suck it up and hand over the most meaningful aspects of their lives simply because they listen to their lawyers when they tell them the fight is futile.
This comment was written by craichead.Report this comment to the moderators
November 30th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
I am sick and tired of women abusing the child support system for their own financial benefit. Not for the children and the fathers that are doing what they are suppose to do as a father are getting the raw deal.
I am a black woman and there are several women that make me embarassed to be a woman.
Men are getting the raw end of the stick. The Attorney Generals office is a joke and yes it was designed for women, not for men. (that is a damn shame!!!)
This comment was written by k. robinson.Report this comment to the moderators
November 30th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
I would love to start a women support group that are against women that abuse the child support system for financial gain. They don’t use the child support for the children.
This comment was written by k. robinson.Report this comment to the moderators
December 6th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
You all should take a look at: http://www.violentacres.com/archives/54/the-deadbeat-dad-myth
A WOMAN writes to say the entire concept of ‘deadbeat dads’ is a myth.
This comment was written by Casey.Report this comment to the moderators
January 9th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
[...] Best Series: Fattiepatties: “The Top Ten Things I Am Tired Of Discussing.” Alas/Rachel’s Tavern: “The Sky Is Falling On Black Men?” Part 1 and Part 2. Pinko Feminist Hellcat: “The OC Rape Case Series.” Alas a Blog: Refuting Men’s Right Activist Myths About Child Support: 1 and 2. [...]
This comment was written by Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » It’s Time To Nominate Blogs for The 2006 Koufax Awards!.Report this comment to the moderators
January 14th, 2007 at 5:05 am
I am a child support worker for the state of Missouri. I think there’s two problems with your argument, Amp…
1) Women who become pregnant to entrap a man often don’t do so to try to get child support. They do so to try to get him into a deeper level of commitment to her (or any level of commitment at all). “If we have a baby he’ll settle down, stop screwing around on me, stay home at night (or let me move in with him to begin with), etc, etc…”
2) Most women–and most men, for that matter–don’t have the slightest idea what child support involves. They haven’t done the research you’ve done or worked in the system the way I have. Most women believe their monthly order will be far, far larger than it actually is. They also often believe that once an order is established they’ll get the money, every month, like clockwork. They don’t seem to realize that if a guy loses his job for whatever reason the child support stops, at least until he finds work again–there’s no such thing as blood from a stone. They don’t know that some guys jump from job to job, trying to stay ahead of our garnishments, or work for cash under the table, or attempt any of a number of tricks to beat the system (they should have asked themselves if their guy was going to be like this before getting naked with him, but that’s another argument).
I’ve had a number of custodial parents call me up, incensed because they haven’t been getting their monthly support. “But I have a court order!” they shout in outrage. I then have to find a tactful way of telling them that, congratulations, they have a piece of paper. Being awarded an amount is one thing. Collecting it is a different matter entirely.
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January 21st, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I have a story regarding a resentful father, begrudgingly paying child support, who thinks I intentionally got pregnant. Except, I didn’t. Here’s my dilemna.
At age 23 I had an abortion. It was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do. It was performed at 5.5 to 6 weeks. I made the decision for many reasons and believed it to be the best decision at the time. I had no idea I would live to regret it.
At age 32, I was 5 years into another relationship and was very much in love. After 3 years of hoping to become pregnant, but not (rarely used birth control), I went in for my annual pap test and was told some alarming news. My gyno said that she couldn’t get the cells required on the swab, that my cervix was pretty much closed. It was likely due to a surgery or trauma. I told her about the abortion and asked if that could have caused this. She said the abortion had scarred my cervix, leaving it “micro” and this was likely why I hadn’t become pregnant. She said my periods would likely stop too and when that happened to have it checked by doctor, not to assume early menopause. I wanted a child one day so I was devastated. We split up the following year, but for other reasons.
At age 37 I started seeing someone I was completely enamoured with. We had known each other since high school as aquaintances. We dated for a month or so then jumped right into sex. It was amazing though and I felt like I had known him for half my life - I had. We used condoms at first, then one night he didn’t. I knew he wasn’t sleeping around. I knew I wasn’t. So I was careless but it is better.
Then an odd thing happened. He said that he wanted to “knock me up”. I almost laughed aloud because it sounded a little dorky. I thought to myself, “yea, me too, but that’s pretty much not a possibility”. I thought it was an in-the-moment thing, didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t mention my potential infertility issue - not a relationship opener I figured. So, away we went, no condom and he didn’t pull out. I decided not to go to the doc to get a morning after pill. Figured I was not in any risk due to the closed cervix, screw it. We continued the sexual relationship in pretty much the same way for the following month or so.
It was sitting with my best friend one night, talking about this guy and the great potential I thought we had when she asked me if I had my period yet. I hadn’t noticed it late. She said hers was 2 weeks ago - I was in sync with her - it was late. I felt fine but wondered if maybe the new exercise program was too much.
I was going to get a test if it didn’t show up in the next week but we had a date planned and I decided to tell him that what my friend had brought up . It was something I was so sure was not the case but I didn’t want to NOT tell him either, just in case. He said, lets get a test. It was funny that he seemed almost excited… It was positive!!!!! I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to scream with joy!
My actual reaction was surprising even to me. I cried. I cried for the choice I made last time I was pregnant. I cried because I knew I was not quite ready to have a child - I had just begun a second career and financially was about a year from being free of some debt. I cried because I knew the relationship was too new to handle this kind of seriousness. I cried for the pregnancy I didn’t have with my last partner. I cried for the choice I was facing. I cried because he wanted to talk about it and I couldn’t talk about it - it was too painful to even think about having an abortion again, at this age. I hadn’t been able to forgive myself still for the last time.
I made a decision for me. I told him I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. I wanted to keep the baby no matter what. Immediately he became nervous, then abusive. I never told him about about the scarring, the fertillity issue. I chose not to tell him about the abortion I had when he started referring to the fetus as a ball of goo and a parasite. He quickly became verbally, mentally, emotionally, financially, then physically abusive. I left and I never told him anything about my past. I didn’t trust him with my personal information at that point. I didn’t care what he thought after he physically jeopardized the pregnancy. I told him that if he didn’t want to be involved I would leave him alone and manage on my own.
I moved to another province to have the child, where I had support. I didn’t think I would ever hear from him again. He called just before her birth. He wanted involvement. I allowed him back into my/her life. Mistake. Then he decided he didn’t want to be involved again. He made a mess of the new situation I was in in the new province. He made a mess of me. I was trying to recover from birth, hormonal, thinking about saving my family and learning the ropes of being a new mother. My support withdrew. I then had to move back to my old location and set up a home again.
He didn’t see us for months. I was now angry and quickly struggling financially. I applied for child support. He threatened me with a lengthy court battle. Now he does not speak to me. He is telling his family and friends that I intentionally got pregnant and that he is just financially supporting MY decision to have a child. He has minimal supervised visits. He is trying to get more visitation in order to pay less child support. He is very angry. I’m quite angry with him for being such a weasle.
I am not sure if I made the best choice for not telling him that the pregnancy was in no way intentional. I acted recklessly by not using a barrier against std’s but not by not using birth control, since I didn’t think I could have children. He said he thought I was on the pill (but he never, ever asked if I was). And then there was the mention of knocking me up… I can’t forget that.
My girl is now 6 months old and he is using every legal delay possible to keep child support ($323. per/m) out of my hands. He is not financially very successful. He is quite a lazy character. Spoon-fed by Mummy I have since found out with a long history of bad relationships behind him. He is bitter and resentful and reclusive. His family act as if they are doing me a favour by acknowledging their own grandchild. And I have to trust her in his care after he has assaulted me and referred to her birth in the context of “me squeezing out a kitten has ruined his life”.
I feel like this situation has just spiraled so far out of control because there are many days I wake up feeling so overwhelmed by anger. We live in a smallish town and I can’t defend myself against his allegations without discussing my very personal past - an abortion, scarring, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions. Do I tell this guy my private history re: abortion or could he use that against me in court? I am not sure how to handle this any further.
This comment was written by On My Own.Report this comment to the moderators
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:00 am
Chief: Just out of curiousity: What is it that you do, as a child support worker? I mean, besides telling custodial parents to shove those decrees you-know-where?
This comment was written by Redisca.Report this comment to the moderators
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I don’t see this as a problem with my argument. It’s not me claiming that child support motivates women to try and trick men into fatherhood; it’s MRAs, such as the one I quoted in my post.
Is there a widespread problem of women conniving to get pregnant in an attempt to force their boyfriends to commit? Maybe so, but I’d like to see evidence.
As for your second point, I don’t see it as relevant to my argument at all. And clearly, to some extent, MEN are aware of how child support works in practice; that’s why they’re less likely to get women pregnant in states with stricter child support laws. If men (in general) have an awareness of how likely it is that they’ll actually be forced to pay child support, I don’t see any reason to suppose that women don’t have a similar level of awareness.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
No, it is a problem, because it opens up an alternative causal route. We just have to finesse it a little bit.
There’s the pretty crude idea that CS motivates women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood so they can get their hands on child support payments. The idea is they’re motivated by the cash and only the cash. On that view $100 from the taxpayer and $100 from the father will provide the same motivation to get pregnant. But that’s actually distinct from the idea that CS motivates women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood, it could work through other routes.
What’s to say the cash value of the CS payments is the only thing a woman gets from them? CS payments are also a legal commitment. If a women becomes pregnant, the father will be more deeply committed and less likely to leave the more his money is tied to her household through CS payments. If he leaves her, some of his money gets left behind. So it’s entirely possible CS motivates women to try and trick men into fatherhood, over and above the level of the cash, because it legally ties them to her household and increases their level of commitment.
Interestingly, that interpretation is totally compatable with the observation you cite about how the “stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood”. Stronger CS means more commitment which means lower single motherhood. You think it’s men avoiding pregnancy, but it could be that they’re more likely to commit.
This comment was written by nik.Report this comment to the moderators
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I’m puzzled by this whole discussion. Leaving out the example of the woman who saved the sperm in the condom (that woman was wrongly awarded child support, in my opinion!), mostly babies are conceived as a result of sexual intercourse.
It is very difficult to “rape” a male in this particular way, and I wouldn’t think it common. So we may assume, may we, that the men in question had intercourse with the women in question voluntarily, for the most part? (In my own experience, it isn’t at all difficult to persuade a male human being to have sexual intercourse. Voluntarily. To say the least.)
I am left thinking that these “tricked” men would benefit by a refresher course in human biology. They don’t know how babies are conceived? They think all contraception (or ANY contraception) is foolproof? Especially contraception which is not under their control? Such charming naivete, don’t you think?
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
February 24th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Original post: Comment on Men’s Rights Myth: Women Trick Men Into Fatherhood So … by at Google Blog Search: woman for men Technorati tag: Woman for men
This comment was written by Woman for men.Report this comment to the moderators
February 24th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
“It’s entirely possible” is not evidence, nik.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 26th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I’m sick and tired of the double standards and the hoops that custodial fathers have to jump through to get actions from our court systems. I’ve been a single father for 11 years now and grew tired of my ex-wife paying me “what she could”. So, I go to social services to have them handle it all for me…… “bad mistake”!!!…. I have a court order for her to pay child support administration, wich was in effect Dec. 1st……. Since then she has payed a “partial payment” of one month. At almost 5 months behind, they send her out a letter notifying her of “possible” driver liscence suspension, (wich I have to call the department and initiate any action to be taken)……. I go into the dept of social services and see a sign that is hanging up, (since Sept., that I requested them take down, because it was offensive), that Says……….. ” thank You Dad, for Your love and “child support”, Happy Fathers Day”……….What kinda crap is that???!!!………. When are these people gonna ditch this “dead beat Dad” syndrome, and realize that women are just as big if not bigger dead beats?????
This comment was written by tim.Report this comment to the moderators
March 26th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re not going through anything mothers dont go through as well. Out of 13 years, I’ve gotten 2 months of child support. He’s never gone to jail, never had his license taken (not even a letter) and to get any court date set, *I* have to call and stay on their asses. And all they do is tell him to pay. So I guess they’ll ditch the deadbeat dad thing when there’s not any.
This comment was written by pheeno.Report this comment to the moderators
March 26th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
OK, so why do I have so many clients whose (admittedly screwed up) sons, being way far behind in child support, cannot drive, cannot get a license to do anything, and if they get a job their wages are immediately garnished so they don’t have enough to live on? (Good enough for them, by the way, in my opinion.)
Being a dead-beat Dad (or Mom) destroys your life as an economic person. If you drive you do so without a license. If you work, you work under the table. You cannot discharge this debt in bankruptcy, or by any other means. I know one guy who gave up and is living under an overpass in San Francisco because he’ll never catch up.
My sympathy for this creep is everything it should be, by the way, but if these orders are so hard to enforce, why is my guy living under that overpass?
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:13 am
I know one guy who gave up and is living under an overpass in San Francisco because he’ll never catch up.
Wonder how his kids are doing.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 3:57 am
Probably better with him out of the picture. But, the plural of anecdote isn’t data.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 7:57 am
True enough, Joe, but all the horror stories by custodial parents, immediately above, are not data either.
The kids are grown. These are back debts. They don’t go away when the children grow up. The kids were, of course, better off without this creep, although to my knowledge no rape was involved in their production, so the mothers who chose to sleep with this guy were probably not prizes either.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 7:58 am
(Six children by six different mothers. OK the first two, but you’d think prospective mothers five and six would have caught on.)
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 8:06 am
This is something I wish more people would realize, on both sides of not just this issue, but every single issue.
The hilarious thing is that we’ll often see someone adopt a strict ‘anecdotal evidence doesn’t count’ rule when dealing with an opposing point of view, only to launch almost immediately into their own anecdote, explaining with great relish how this personal experience explains it all.
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Well, from my perspective they are prizes since they raised their children without his emotional, psychological and financial support. I personally have little sympathy for men who pathologically refuse to use condoms (as this man obviously did) and then find they can’t support the upkeep of their laziness and selfishness.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 8:40 am
“OK, so why do I have so many clients whose (admittedly screwed up) sons, being way far behind in child support, cannot drive, cannot get a license to do anything, and if they get a job their wages are immediately garnished so they don’t have enough to live on? (Good enough for them, by the way, in my opinion.)”
Sounds like they kept fucking with their dicks unwrapped and had more kids than they could afford. I mean, if you’re going to say the motherS should have clued in, whats the fathers excuse? He’s the one with 6 kids.
This comment was written by pheeno.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 9:01 am
My point was not that this guy is some kind of OK guy. Yikes.
I’m also not trying to allocate responsibility among all these parents, none of whom I have ever met. The easy answer is, of course, they’re ALL responsible. No one was coerced, so far as I know, and everyone knew the probable results of unprotected sex. Did I mention that everyone involved was on drugs?
My point was, if child support is impossible to enforce, how did they catch up with this guy? (Not that it did anyone any good.) There must be some enforcement mechanism out there - it caught up with this creep at least. The previous anecdotes suggested that it’s fairly easy to just walk away from child support obligations, no penalty. I’m suggesting that in come cases at least there IS a penalty.
As well there should be.
I told my younger son, “This is how it works. The instant some girl gets pregnant by you, control passes from your hands to her hands. She can abort the baby, and you can’t stop her. She can NOT abort the baby, and you can’t force her to abort it. She can give the child away, and the only way you can stop her is to take custody yourself. She can NOT give the child away, in which case you are paying child support for 18 years. And if you don’t pay, your economic life above the water ends, the only way you can live is poorly, under the table. So, ponder these issues, BEFORE you have unprotected sex. Because afterwards it’s too late.”
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Q Grrl:
Unless he raped those women, they bear every bit as much responsibility for failing to insist that he use a condom as he does for failing to use one.
Also, the decision to have unprotected sex isn’t always driven by the man (though I suppose it probably is in most cases). Every woman I’ve ever been with (granted, the N is low) has tried to talk me into skipping the condom at one point or another, and none were using any other form of birth control.
This comment was written by Brandon.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Which they did. And then they took on the part where his lazy fuckin’ ass failed to come through.
Get it?
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I’d give up, Q: obviously, a woman taking on the feeding, clothing and nurturing of a (n initially, anyway) unwanted child singlehandedly is simply what’s expected….in fact, it probably isn’t punishment enough for her irresponsible, slutty ways.
Whereas a MAN’s doing the same thing–hell, not even the same thing: just chipping in a bit of money now and again–is a freaking paragon of fatherhood.
This comment was written by crys t.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Susan, as the original post pointed out, the strength of enforcement of child support laws vary from state to state. (And, I suspect, vary along other lines as well.)
So it’s likely that all the anecdotes are true. There are some cases in which child support ends up being enforced very stringently; and also some cases in which it’s basically not enforced at all.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Well shit Crys. At least this man didn’t rape those baby mamma bithes.
Who are we to complain?
Personally, I think I’m going to try a new social experiment, maybe on the bus ride home: every time a man gets near me, I’m going to slam my thighs together, with umph and flair, and loudly declare “Eradicating deadbeat dads starts here!”
Whatcha think?
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
That’s a good point. I think that sometimes poeple just want to ’share’ and other times they want to personalize a point they feel they’ve made with data. But mostly I think it’s just poor reasoning.
I do think that there should be some mechanism to discharge child support debts in bankruptcy. I think there should be some way to do that with any and all debt. After some point it makes sense to me to allow people a ‘do over’. Obviously it should be set up to minimize moral hazards. e.g. I’d dislike a system that cleared the debt when the kid turned 18 since that would make it too easy to quit early. The devil as always is in the details.
In terms of priority I don’t think fixing this is a pressing issue. If the legislatures were going to spend time on something like this I’d prefer to see them address incidents where the courts have erroneously determined who the father is. But budgets are usually a higher priority. (rightfully so)
This comment was written by joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
“My point was, if child support is impossible to enforce, how did they catch up with this guy? (Not that it did anyone any good.) There must be some enforcement mechanism out there - it caught up with this creep at least. The previous anecdotes suggested that it’s fairly easy to just walk away from child support obligations, no penalty. I’m suggesting that in come cases at least there IS a penalty.”
There should be a penalty is all cases, across the board. I found that the more I called, the less they did. The state took his income tax to pay back fees he owed *them*. I got jack. After that, he started working under the table. He makes 2 grand a month. I had to take 2 jobs just to make ends meet. Now that Im making good money, he’s resurfaced and wants to lower what he’s supposed to be paying. He’s ordered to pay 220 a month. He pays zero, so I dont understand how he can pay any less, unless I start giving HIM money.
This comment was written by pheeno.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Whatcha think?
I think you need a T-shirt.
Joe, so the child is just another creditor?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
No. Or at least not exactly. I haven’t really thought about this enough to have a bullet proof rule. But I’ll take a swing.
If the ‘child’ is 36 and if there aren’t any other kids under 36 by the man I would say treat the child’s mother as a creditor. IANAL but I know there are different classes of creditor. I’d put the mother ahead of say, sears or VISA.
At that point the child has been an adult for just as long as it was a minor. If the father hasn’t paid by now they likely never will, and are probably in their late 50’s. So, if we don’t allow bankruptcy the mother get’s nothing and the father is still economically dead. If we DO allow bankruptcy than the mother still gets nothing but the father has some chance to be productive and have a job on the books. (and a drivers license.)
I’m not really looking for a system that’s lenient. I just don’t think there’s any benefit to never allowing the debt to be discharged.
I should mention that I have a number of objections to the way that bankruptcy is currently handled in the US.
This comment was written by joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Child support is not like any other debt. I don’t see the value in allowing somebody to get out of paying, or paying full value, if they stall long enough.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Interesting concept.
For me, in theory it seems that there’s SOME point where collecting child support from a noncustodial parent ceases to be really about the child, and starts being, hmmm, more like punishment of the parent. I don’t know where that point is though. But at some age (18? 21? 25? 30? 35? 50?) there’s some point where it seems wrong to do so. Wish i could put my finger on it better.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Sailorman, the most likely reason that men don’t pay child support is indeed punishment against the mother. Are you ok with the one and not ok with the other?
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
How about if you’re not ok with either? Is there a way to express that?
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
No. they should pay (in general, i’m of the “people should do what they are supposed to do” bent; that certainly includes fathers and mothers.)
I’m not anti-child support. But undischargeable debts bother me.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
mythago writes:
How so?
Seriously.
How is child support not like any other debt? In a lot of ways that are “good” for deadbeat parents, child support really isn’t like any other debt — the kids grow up, move out, life goes on. I don’t expect my child to pay me back for the money I’ve spent on him, all $200,000 or so thus far in his life.
We don’t have debtors prisons for a reason in this country, and we do have bankruptcy laws. That tells me that refusing to discharge child support debts is more political than anything. Maybe its “good-political” and not “bad-political”, but there’s nothing carved in stone that says a bankrupt deadbeat parent somehow has to pay what they can never pay, ever.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
mythago, I agree that it’s not like any other debt. I also agree that there’s no value in the act of discharging the debt. The value is in allowing the father back into the economic mainstream. At some point the child doesn’t need the money anymore and it’s obvious that the mother is never going to get the money she’s owed. Draw that line wherever you want. Once drawn we have two choices. We, as a society, can let the father back into mainstream economic life or we can keep them out. There are costs and benifits to either choice. If we keep them out we loose whatever value they might be able to offer. If we let them in we encourage people to stall.
Sailorman, I don’t think it would ever be wrong to collect owed child support. If the child is 60 and their 80 year old father wins the lottery i think the mother should be paid. She’s owed that money, by rights it’s hers.
I just think that at some point there’s no way it’s going to be paid and the ‘best’ course of action is to allow the father to discharge the debt. Obviously that point needs to be selected to minimize the desire to stall. Also remember that bankruptcy isn’t easy, and it isn’t a total relief. If the judge determines that the father can pay some or all of what’s owed the mother they will have to do so.
It does serve the purpose of saying that we, as a society will NEVER let you out of your obligations to your children. But I agree with your point in general and I just don’t know if that message is worth the cost.
This comment was written by joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
A number of decent-seeming studies have shown that a reliable predictor of a non-resident father not paying child support is poverty. This suggests that for many fathers, lack of money, not an attempt to punish the mother, is the primary reason for not paying child support.
Of course, I’m not denying that bitter guys who hate their ex-wives use child support noncompliance as a way of punishing their exes. Of course they do. But when we talk about “deadbeat dads” (or moms), we should acknowledge that in some cases class issues are involved, too.
My ideal solution would be socialism; lacking that, however, it seems to me that strictly-enforced child support — as flawed as that is — is better than the other options.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
The value is in allowing the father back into the economic mainstream.
How about giving the father primary custody and letting him figure out how to deal with raising a child plus providing whatever needs aren’t covered by mom’s share of the support check?
A better alternative to erasing the debt would be allowing a father who has genuinely lost the economic ability to support his child back into the economic mainstream, if he did so in good faith, similar to the way we allow people with student loans to handle their debt.
Julie, it’s not like any other debt because parents have legal obligations towards their children because they are parents. Those obligations do not go away unless somebody else assumes them and you lose them–e.g. your child is adopted.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
A number of decent-seeming studies have shown that a reliable predictor of a non-resident father not paying child support is poverty. This suggests that for many fathers, lack of money, not an attempt to punish the mother, is the primary reason for not paying child support.
That’s my understanding.
Mostly deadbeat dads and moms are poor. For several reasons. First, of course, poor people are less likely to be able to pay. Then too, a rich non-custodial parent has a lot to lose. Liens can be filed against properties; his or her ability to drive can be taken away (if you can’t afford a car anyway who cares), and perhaps his or her license to practice a profession can be revoked. All these are powerful motivators, even for the unscrupulous person who doesn’t give a damn about the child.
The man I mentioned, besides giving up economically, went back on drugs. He will probably become a public charge sooner or later. It’s hard for me to see how anyone’s going to win this one, including the taxpayers. But I’m not clear on what exactly we should do about all this.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
That’s possible under the current system. But it would require that the mother not have primary custody. I suppose you could make the argument that mother could put the child up for adoption. But
1. There’s a lot biology ‘bonding’ the mother with her child.
2. There’s a lot of societal disapproval for women who give up their babies for adoption.
I think 2 is a good thing. You can find examples in eastern Europe of how the loss of that stigma affects society. BUT I think we need to be MORE disapproving as a society of fathers that don’t support their children.
I have no idea what you’re talking about with student loans. They also don’t go away with bankruptcy. A system that kept the debt on the books but at some point removed the wage garnishment and loss of driving privileges would accomplish much of the same thing. Is that what you mean? The debt stays but isn’t collects as vigorously after some point? I’d prefer bankruptcy to that. It’s harder on the debtor. Like I said above. I’m not interested in leniency.
Doesn’t the obligation end at some point as the child grows up? I think that it should. Now, the debt to the mother for the money you didn’t pay towards support of the child should last a lot longer.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
I understand that drugs addiction is a disease and I think people should be able to hurt themselves however they like. But this guy sounds like a determined loser. I don’t know what society can do about that. I guess we’ll just have to foot his bill for lack a system that can differentiate between determined loser and unlucky.
I agree that class plays a part. But class plays a role in many ways. I don’t have any data (what did I say about anecdotes earlier? Does anyone have data?) but I can’t think that I’ve ever met anyone in the middle class that has 5 kids by 5 different women. I’m sure they exist but my guess is they’re rare.
I think that the type of decision making that would lead to that will also lead to a lack of earning potential. I do know that the age where people have children is going up in the middle class in part because people want to focus on careers when they’re younger.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Part of the problem with a class analysis is that class is so damn malleable in the US.
Take my foster son. He’s black (mostly - some Native American). His father is an alcoholic, his mother was barely functional. Most of his family, including his sister, is in prison for dealing drugs. The sister has two kids by two different men. Lower class, right?
However. This very same guy is also an orthpaedic surgeon who makes north of $6oo,ooo a year. Still lower class?
So also my Example Man. Except in the other direction. Yes, being a drug addict and having 5 kids with 5 different women and having NO money is lower class behavior if ever I saw it. However, his parents are solidly upper-middle class, comfortable, have an estate of $3million or so. So….what class is he in? Is Example Man a screw-up because he’s poor, or is he poor because he’s a screw-up?
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Joe:
Really? Where’s it coming from? I’ve heard a lot of conservatives endorse adoption as an alternative to abortion, but I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about adoption (either giving or taking).
This comment was written by Brandon.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
mythago writes:
(And I’m responding to her because her reply was shorter than Joe’s, which also covered some of the same points I’m making …)
Sounds like a plan to me, except there is such a bias against giving father’s custody that it would never fly. And who is going to pay for the lawsuit to make this happen anyway? I went shopping for a lawyer to do a simple revision on a support and custody order and the opening bid was a $10K retainer. I couldn’t find any who’d touch the case for less than a $7,500 retainer, and the last family lawyers I spoke with billed around $375 per hour. How is a parent who cannot afford to make support payments supposed to get a lawyer to do all this work?
The longer they go unable to hire a lawyer the larger the pile of debt grows, and as we all should know, judges don’t go back and retroactively reduce arearages just because one parent had the misfortune of being out of work.
A better alternative would be finding a way to make it so that child support modifications, when there are legitimate reasons, don’t cost an arm and a leg. If Parent #1 loses their job, Parents #1 and #2 and Children #1, #2 and #2.3 all suffer, except when Parent #1 is a non-custodial parent. Or at least, that’s the theory.
In practice, the non-custodial parent winds up with an obligation they cannot reduce or dismiss and the custodial parent winds up owed money they are likely to never see. The family court system is then engaged in a losing battle, at taxpayer costs, to recover money that will never be recovered.
The federal government passed a law a while back that mandates that states set speed limits at levels that produce compliance for roads that are built with federal funds. States should look at ways to work towards increasing compliance in the same manner — parents who can pay something should be ordered to do so, not what a one-size-fits-none set of guidelines dictate, and at the same time, states should work on helping both parties, obligor and obligee, with financial planning so that what little money there is goes further.
That’s true until the age of majority, after that, parents no longer have a legal obligation to their children in most jurisdictions and under the vast majority of circumstances.
Personally, I think 7, 10 or 14 years — take your pick (I pick 14, FWIW) — after legal majority should be the “statute of limitations” for child support. A delinquent parent with no (legally attachable …) means of supporting themself is going to become a burden on society as a whole, and while I have a soft spot in my heart for socialists, I’m much more interested in people paying their own way in life, whenever possible.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 12:52 am
class, maybe, but not in the real world. So if science is war, you go to war with the data you have, not the data you wish you had. ;) … ■Comment on Men’s Rights Myth: Women Trick Men Into Fatherhood So …（Google Blog Search: a-blog） http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/01/18/mens-rights-myth-women-trick-men-into-fatherhood-so-they-can-collect-child-support/#comment-268593 Sailorman, the most likely reason that men don’t pay child support is indeed punishment against the mother. Are you ok with the one and not ok with the other? How about if you’re not ok with either? Is there a way to express that?
This comment was written by a-blog馬鹿.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Q: I think I’ll join you in your Deadbeat Dads experiment! I’ll try it this afternoon when I go for a coffee.
Brandon: Yes, conservatives always do point out that adoption is an option for unwanted children……BEFORE the woman gives birth. After women give birth, it’s a whole different story. Of course, any woman who actually carries to term and delivers just “naturally” has to be a mother, and to give up the baby only indicates what a selfish, monstrous slut she is. But of course, if she keeps the child and she’s single, then she’s the dreaded Single Mother (synonymous with Welfare Queen and other popular cultural demons).
So, how does that work? Get pregnant and abort=Murdering Monster. Get pregnant, carry to term, then give away for adoption=Heartless Monster. Keep child and raise till adulthood=Irresponsible, Greedy, Unfit Parent Monster.
And that doesn’t even get into the fact that if a woman IS properly married and has a child, she’s Brood Cow Monster, and if she then decides to go back to work before her child is middle-aged, she’s Selfish, Uncaring Bitch Monster, but if she stays at home full-time she’s Lazy Parasite Monster.
Don’t try to make any sense out of anything surrounding conservative attitudes towards women and childbearing. There is no sense to be found.
This comment was written by Crys T.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Crys T, I’m with Brandon, I’ve never heard any disapproval from anyone about giving a child up for adoption. It’s widely viewed as an heroic, self-sacrificing choice.
As for the rest of what you view as “conservative attitudes,” as of course you recognize, other peoples’ opinions are only important if you think they are.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Crys T:
I know that at least two of those attitudes (disapproval of abortion and single motherhood) are part of mainstream conservatism, but I’m not even sure that it would be accurate to call someone a conservative if he had all of the opinions which you attribute to conservatives. Respect for married and stay-at-home mothers is pretty much a definitional characteristic of conservatism.
While many conservatives believe that it’s best for mothers to stay at home with children until they start school, most have no problem at all with mothers who work once their children have started school, and even before that, it’s really only the people on the far fringes who actually attack mothers for working outside the home.
In short, I think you’re either imagining the attitudes you attribute to conservatives, or attributing to all conservatives the attitudes of a few people on the far fringes of conservatism.
This comment was written by Brandon.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Crys,
I’ve never heard, or seen any evidence of, this “conservatives say once the kid is born you keep it” attitude.
Up until a few years ago (because I’m now an old fart and don’t want to start ALL.OVER.AGAIN.) it was widely known in some pretty conservative circles (Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians) that I was open to adoption and actively working on it. There was never a single hint that mothers who couldn’t raise their kids shouldn’t ever give them up. As I was not looking for a newborn (for a variety of reasons …) I was obviously not looking for a situation where Poor Mom had to give up her unborn bundle of joy.
(I’d still be willing to do a private party adoption, but don’t have the inclination to go through all the cr@p I would have had to go through years ago as a single, queer parent — score one for the bigots …)
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:23 am
My grandmother gave up a child for adoption. This is still brought up within the family as a way to disparage her and mark her as an unfit and irresponsible woman.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Sounds like a plan to me, except there is such a bias against giving father’s custody that it would never fly.
Not to mention that I suspect many non-custodial fathers would be against such a plan.
If Parent #1 loses their job, Parents #1 and #2 and Children #1, #2 and #2.3 all suffer, except when Parent #1 is a non-custodial parent.
In which case Parent #1 should get a special exemption and Parent #2 should pick up the slack?
That’s the element I see missing from all the discussion about the plight of the deadbeat parent: somebody has to meet the children’s living expenses, and if the non-custodial parent isn’t doing so, that means their burden is shifted to the custodial parent–whose income-making ability is limited by the necessity of being a caretaker of minor children.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Brandon and Julie: then where do all these messages I’m constantly seeing expressed by American media, Americans who post on various Internet fora, Americans I knew in my daily life while I was living there, etc. coming from?
I don’t doubt that actual practice may not reflect what’s said (just like there are many, many who are vocally anti-abortion but don’t hesitate to terminate pregnancies when it’s them/their daughters/their sisters/etc.), but there is a very negative social stereotype of women who “give up” their babies. Don’t tell me there isn’t, because every time you turn around, there’s some unspeakably awful television film about it–that has to come from somewhere.
This comment was written by crys t.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Oh, and Brandon, your comment about how “other people’s opinions are only important if you think they are” is (yet again) one of those statements that could only come from someone so privileged that he is completely blind to how most of the world actually lives.
This comment was written by crys t.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I said that, Brandon didn’t.
Please to demonstrate that your statement isn’t just another attack which has no foundation. Very easy to make such claims.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Here’s the deal.
If you believe what the abusers say, and internalize it, then you’re giving them the power. Then, the only way out is to convince them to stop being abusers, which isn’t going to happen.
The way out is to not believe them. Call these fictions for what they are. Live in your own good regard and ignore what they say or think.
My advice? Don’t do this. It doesn’t harm the abusers one whit. The only person it harms is you.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Opinions matter. I, personally, have done many things in my life for reasons that essentially boil down to “…because others will like what I’m doing, and not dislike what I’m doing.”
Susan, I suspect that point you are trying to make is a bit more precise. Are you saying that others’ opinions are relevant, sure, but they’re not a limit on one’s actions to the same extent as laws, finances, health, etc?
That’s surely true: the limits on adoption because conservatives may or may not LIKE it are in an entirely different category than limits which are more concrete. but practically speaking they are important to many fokls anyway.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Susan wrote: “…other peoples’ opinions are only important if you think they are.”
Susan, I disagree with you about that, for reasons I discussed in this post.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
mythago writes:
Right on cue we have a classic example of said bias. The presumptive assertion that fathers have no interest in raising their children.
I’ll be sending your check.
(Note: There will be no real check. Please don’t stand by the mailbox waiting for it.)
Yes? How is that not the right answer?
Parent #1 and Parent #2 engage in ugly bumping, and produce Child #1. Parent #1 and Parent #2 proceed to raise said Child #1. Parent #1 through no fault of their own find themself unemployed.
Who in this scenario picks up the slack? Is the answer “Parent #2″ only if Parent #1 and Parent #2 are still married? Or is Parent #1 expected to sell a kidney or knock over a liquor store in order to continue preventing slack?
I don’t think parents, or anyone for that matter, believes that unemployment means they will continue to have money to pay the bills, and given that, I have to believe that the other parent is aware that unemployment can result in some financial hardship. Not to say that financial stability is a bad thing or anything, but divorce and a child support award shouldn’t be some kind of state-enforced guarantee of what doesn’t exist in real life.
There is a solution, and I think it’s probably one the various and sundry socialists here might even like (see, I do have a tender spot in my heart for socialists) — people who have custody orders against them should have to pay a form of unemployment tax, just like those of us who work all do anyway, that would cover a part of their child support in the event of unemployment (Hey, I like this idea so much I might just send it to my US Senator. Hmmmmm.) But I think it is wrong to increase the risk exposure non-custodial parents have to unemployment (Oh, and for what it’s worth, I think custodial parents should have to pay into the same system — sauce, goose, gander — against their own unemployment and the child’s needs. I’ll lose all my Conservative cred if I keep proposing taxes, even if they are For The Children.)
Right, because unemployment magically happens to “deadbeats” and never, ever happens to non-custodial parents who want to take care of their children.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
As a good libertarian, I can’t support Susan’s state solution, but there is an admirable private-initiative version: in the contractual settlement surrounding the divorce, both custodial and non-custodial parents can set up a support “insurance” fund, with each of the contributing in some agreed proportion, for use if one party or the other is unable to meet their expected contribution to the children’s welfare.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Oh, sorry, that’s JULIE’S solution. My bad.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
The presumptive assertion that fathers have no interest in raising their children.
Where did I say this, please? Oh, that’s right–I didn’t.
Are you really claiming that 50% of divorced fathers would love to be primary or joint physical caretakers of their children if only the courts would allow them to be? That the majority of non-custodial dads are only noncustodial because of a biased court system? Heck, I’m all for a fair system that gives fathers primary custody at least half the time. The US workplace is never going to think of parenting responsibilities as anything but “you had it, you deal with it” until significant numbers of men are also trying to juggle sick kids and client meetings.
In a marriage, if a breadwinner loses her job, there are still bills to pay and the kids cost money. Nobody proposes that our taxes go to fund a special “Broke Breadwinner Fund” to help them with those expenses. There’s also a distinct lack of symmetry in your plan: a custodial parent who is unemployed doesn’t get to ask the non-custodial parent for more money, and doesn’t get the benefit of an ‘unemployment tax’ to cover expenses until he or she finds another job.
Right, because unemployment magically happens to “deadbeats” and never, ever happens to non-custodial parents who want to take care of their children.
Non sequitur. Just like your imaginary check.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
I think that if the non-custodial parent looses their job. They should make that money up. I also think they should (and are) able to get the payment adjusted as their circumstances change. My cousins and her ex-husband did this regularly as his overtime at the plant fluctuated. (She’d ask it be moved up, he down) The idea of an insurance fund is interesting but I think pointless. People that are most likely to need it are least like to want to do it or be able to afford it. The premium is likely to be a killer for someone without a secure source of income. Also, this is just a special type of rainy day fund. Everyone should have one of those. Before they buy new shoes or a nice dinner out they should have 500$ in the bank. Before they buy a TV they should have 1000$ in the bank. Before they buy cable TV, a computer, and an internet connection they should have 6 months expenses. Also no one should carry a credit card balance unless there’s an emergency. And I had to walk through snow up hill…sorry I seem to be channeling my grandmother. She lived through the great depression and has firm ideas on saving.
Anyway, I think the best solution is more societal pressure on people (in this case men) to take better care of their children. I don’t care what economic system you prefer (fascist/communist/anarcho-capitalist/socialist/capitalist/whatever) it’s a pretty common agreement that children need to be cared for and that ideally the biological parents should be the ones to do that. (boctaoe)
I also still think that at some point we as a society should let up, and allow the deadbeat back into the tent. (I’m thinking bankruptcy when the last kid turns 36 is a good spot. Twice the age of the child has a nice symmetry to it.) But again, low priority on that.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Doesn’t everyone that paid in and than looses their job get to collect unemployment insurance already?
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
mythago writes:
So … why do you say it below?
The US workplace already has to deal with fathers who want to be fathers and not just walking wallets.
Surprise! The day you’ve been waiting for has arrived! You can work on some other problem!!!
Standard custody orders, at least for states like Texas, have non-custodial parents with about 60% possession and non-custodial parents with about 40%. I can post the rules, but the basics are alternating numbered weekends starting Friday afternoon and ending Monday morning, basically a 3 days weekend (NCP gets 28, CP gets 24), midweek (52 of them), split of 4 week long holidays (spring break, t-day, x-mas, new years), and a month in the summer for the NCP. That’s what a Texas standard order works out to, with some extra days thrown in — Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc., I have extra days for some extra curricular activities and certain religious holidays, so I have more than Standard. A “Non-Custodial” parent doesn’t have “no” time, they actually have … a lot of time.
“Non-Custodial” doesn’t mean “Never”. And it doesn’t mean “Never takes the child to the doctor like I had to do earlier in the month and do now for all kinds of appointments and extracurricular activities, plus picking up from school and dropping off and teachers conferences”. Non custodial parents — men and women — have been doing this in Texas for at least the 11 years I’ve been a “Non Custodial” parent.
Keep in mind — Standard Custody Order. Heck O’ Lota Time.
And before you tell us about the miserable excuse for a human you divorced, just remember — the plural of “anecdote” is not “fact”.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
So … why do you say it below?
Julie, pretending your opponent took an extreme rather than a moderate position is a fairly transparent old trick. Please move on.
Surprise! The day you’ve been waiting for has arrived!
Really? The US has mandatory family-leave policies and leave is used just as much by fathers as by mothers? Childcare and flextime arrangements are common in the workplace, and are not seen as “women’s issues”? Oh, wait, you’re a “Conservative”, you’re opposed to all that.
And before you tell us about the miserable excuse for a human you divorced
Project much?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
“Standard custody orders, at least for states like Texas, have non-custodial parents with about 60% possession and non-custodial parents with about 40%. I can post the rules, but the basics are alternating numbered weekends starting Friday afternoon and ending Monday morning, basically a 3 days weekend (NCP gets 28, CP gets 24), midweek (52 of them), split of 4 week long holidays (spring break, t-day, x-mas, new years), and a month in the summer for the NCP”
Mine says 6 pm friday to 6 pm sunday, every other weekend and 3 hours on wednesdays.
This comment was written by pheeno.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 3:35 am
pheeno writes:
And mine says I get 47.5% (and I’m working on the other 2.5% — I might even get it before tiny munchkin turns 18!) of the time, pay $1,300 a month for one child, prepay college, and a few other things. I guess that’s what every non-custodial parent has on their orders. Ho-hum.
All together now –
“The plural of anecdote is not ‘fact’”.
A STANDARD Texas Custody Order, by law (”fact”) is from the time the child is dismissed from school, or 6pm Friday, until 6pm Sunday or the time the child is returned to school Monday (unless Monday is not a school day, in which case it’s more complicated …) or 8am unless the possessory conservator wishes otherwise (. Section 153.312, Texas Family Code). The mid-week period is from the time the child is dismissed from school, or 6pm, Wednesday (or Thursday these days or …) until 8pm or the time the child returns the following morning (or extending through the weekend).
PLUS an entire month in the Summer.
PLUS two entire weeks at two of Spring Break, Thanksgiving, X-Mas and New Years.
PLUS more fun stuff — Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, stuff I probably forgot.
Those are the facts, pheeno, anyone who wishes to look up Texas Civil Law is free to do so (I’ve provided the URL …) and confirm them for themselves, without having to be told that your miserable excuse for a human ex husband didn’t want what was his by law, or that you didn’t want him to have what was his by law.
I am not a “Conservative”. It’s easy to confuse me for a “Conservative” if you don’t pay attention.
To answer your question, no, people who don’t give birth to children tend not to stay home afterwards because Americans are, in general, pretty bad at saving enough money to take extended leaves from work. And while I have a soft spot in my heart for Socialists, I tend to think people should pay their own way in life. That’s probably what makes you think I’m a “Conservative” — expecting people to save their money and pay their own way.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 4:03 am
The much quoted phrase is ” The plural of anecdote isn’t data.” The idea is that while your anecdote may be true and a fact it’s not necessarily typical. Therefore it isn’t as persuasive as say, a statistically significant controlled study that’s be published in a peer reviewed journal with published data for independent analysis.
I’m pretty sure that’s what you meant.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 4:35 am
Sorry Brandon for attributing Susan’s comment about opinons to you. And sorry to Susan for attributig your quote to Brandon.
Also Susan, I’m sure that every single one of the people posting here could come up with myriad examples about how “other people’s opinions” have devastated their lives. And that’s only on the individual level. Groups are also affected by opinions.
I stand by my appraisal.
This comment was written by Crys T.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Joe,
Thanks for the clarification. I’d never heard that quote before in any of its incarnations.
I’m particularly touchy on the subject of “Non-Custodial Parents” (whoda thunk it) because there is often this bizarre assertion in discussions about children, child custody and child support, that “Non-Custodial Parents” somehow don’t actually have custody or expenses. The focus is almost entirely on the Custodial Parent who may have overall expenses substantially lower (or higher) and lengths of possessions which are scarcely longer than the “Non-Custodial Parent”.
Terms like “Custodial” and “Non-Custodial” are themselves part of the problem, because they linguistically seem to imply that one has “all” and the other has “none”. Kind of like “Non-Dairy Creamer” has no dairy, “Non-Fat Milk” has no fat, and other things where the prefix “Non” indicates a lack of. I prefer to describe custody either with terms like “Sole” or “Joint” and include possession as a ration. It makes for a much more accurate discussion.
In the case of “Non-Custodial Parents”, we don’t have … none … we have … less. In my case, I have 174 (more or less — at this point, it’s so close to 50/50 that I could wind up with more if my ex would ever actually go on a week long vacation …) days out of 365 annual days of custody, and spend a total of some $28,900 (more or less) on my (one) child each year. If I use the “Per Capita” method used by the folks who set child support guidelines, instead of the “Marginal Cost” method I used for the amount given earlier, that increases to $37,600.
(BTW — my custody agreement, and Texas Family Law, don’t use “Non-Custodial Parent” to describe me. I’m a “Joint Managing Conservator”. Notice the word “Joint”. It’s only in discussions where people want to argue about who has it worse, and when the IRS wants to pretend that my ex spends more than me, that “Custodial” and “Non-Custodial” come into play.)
This comment was written by FurryCatHerder.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Parenting Posts from Elsewhere: » Of videotaping school plays and burning DVDs » Our Trip to Arizona (told mostly via pictures) » A Blog about Secular Parenting » Parenting Plans Under HB 369 » Comment on Men’s Rights Myth: Women Trick Men Into Fatherhood So … » Sarbanes-Oxley Treats Businessmen as Guilty Until Proven Innocent » Defrazzle Your Parenting - Day 20 » Seize the Moment » Fourteen Year Old Election Revived in House Bill 369 » Over-Educated, Under-Appreciated, Divorced Mom…
This comment was written by raising4boys.com » parenting tips, tricks and commentary.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 8:58 am
I am not a “Conservative”.
You said “I’ll lose all my Conservative cred if I keep proposing taxes”, above.
To answer your question, no, people who don’t give birth to children tend not to stay home afterwards because Americans are, in general, pretty bad at saving enough money to take extended leaves from work.
That tends to suggests that they can’t afford for people who do give birth to children to take extended leaves from work, no? But if you think people should ‘pay their own way,’ I’m not sure why you’re insisting that therefore we do (in the US) have a workplace where the needs of parents are recognized. (If you’re a parent, surely you’re aware that “extended leaves from work” does not cover until the kid is 18.)
Terms like “Custodial” and “Non-Custodial” are themselves part of the problem, because they linguistically seem to imply that one has “all” and the other has “none”.
Very true. “Joint”, unfortunately, suggests 50/50 in all respects, when it probably ranges from your might-as-well-be-the-same custody to “on weekends”.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 9:51 am
pheeno writes:
Such is the life of those of us who live in the middle. If we suggest people pay their own way, we lose our Liberal cred, and if we propose taxes, we lose our Conservative cred. There’s more to life than polar opposites. Some of us prefer life closer to the tropics …
I don’t think the workplace is obligated to hand out free money. It’s that Capitalist in me (tho I think workers should own the means of production — feel free to read Marx on the subject …) that thinks money doesn’t somehow grow on trees.
I believe in FMLA, and I wish more fathers took more time off, but most of the people I speak to when asked “Why aren’t you still at home?” tell me they need the money, so they work. The workplace should =enable= parents to care for children, not pay for it. It’s not some either/or decision — either the workplace hands a parent a giant pot full of money and 18 years off, or workers are tossed on the street as soon as they become parents.
Well, when I find some “Non-Fat Milk” that has more than 0% milkfat (or more than “as close to 0% as practical”), I’ll consider your complaint to be a valid one. “Non”, as a prefix, means “None”. Not “Some”, not even “once in a blue moon”. None. Zero, zilch, zip, nada. Here, have a definition:
(non-: Definition)
“joint”, however, does not mean “exactly equal” –
(joint: Definition)
As I said, I prefer that custody be described as “Sole” or “Joint” with the ratio of custody being given. In my case, I have joint custody with about 47.5% time of possession. Not sure what you’ve got, but that’s what I’ve got.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Well, when I find some “Non-Fat Milk” that has more than 0% milkfat (or more than “as close to 0% as practical”), I’ll consider your complaint to be a valid one
“Complaint”? Are you actually reading anything posted here, or are you just closing your eyes, pointing to random sentences on the screen, and then arguing? FurryCatHerder correctly pointed out that “non-custodial” is not an accurate term, and I agree.
I believe in FMLA
Whoops, there goes your Conservative cred.
As I said way back when, the issue isn’t really whether you get a few days off after childbirth; it’s that childrearing is seen as a private issue, and “my kid is sick” is not any more important than “there’s a baseball game I’d love to catch”. That attitude is not going to change until both women and men start to insist that it change.
Not sure what you’ve got
Why do you assume I am a divorced parent?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Mythago,
Sorry, I thought you were pheeno. And “Furry” and I are the same.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 10:44 am
mythago write:
(Have I said lately how much I hate the Word Press software?)
Oh, I lost almost all of it years ago. It’s just that people keep giving it back to me every time I say something like “People should be responsible for their own needs in life.” Then I have to say “I believe in FMLA” or quote Marx.
My experience is that most employers, in the 21st century, recognize that “My kid is sick” is way more important than “I need to slack off”. Even between the sexes I’ve seen, in my adult lifetime, huge changes in social attitudes. Thirteen years ago I saw almost no fathers picking up or dropping off kids at school, or at any event that wasn’t sports or Boy Scouts. Today I run into fathers all over the place with kids. Not 50/50 yet, but definitely better than when I first got into the parent biz 22 years ago.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 11:06 am
My experience
What’s that thing about the plural of anecdote again?
Of course things are better than 20+ years ago. (20+ years ago, it was perfectly legal for my mother to be told openly by a boss “No broad is going to make partner as long as I’m at this firm”.) That doesn’t mean they’re good, or anything close to 50/50.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
mythago writes:
That’s only true for very large values of 20. Title VII was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That’s a pretty big value of 20 :)
In particular, single father households have grown dramatically since Title VII (though I doubt we can credit Title VII for that …). Using smaller values of 20, the shift in paternal involvement began in the 1970’s precisely because of the changes in men’s attitudes towards shared parenting, as well as changing social roles, as has been shown in some research for years where 20 has a value closer to 10 + 10.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Susan writes,
“I told my younger son, “This is how it works. The instant some girl gets pregnant by you, control passes from your hands to her hands. She can abort the baby, and you can’t stop her. She can NOT abort the baby, and you can’t force her to abort it. She can give the child away, and the only way you can stop her is to take custody yourself. She can NOT give the child away, in which case you are paying child support for 18 years. And if you don’t pay, your economic life above the water ends, the only way you can live is poorly, under the table. So, ponder these issues, BEFORE you have unprotected sex. Because afterwards it’s too late.”
How about teaching him to be a kind and caring human being so if he does end up in this situation, WHETHER INTENTIONAL OR NOT, he’ll chose to become an actual father instead of a resentful, irresponsible, schmuck living in fear of ending up under a bridge. If you grew up with a good father, I’m sure you are greatful that he decided not to run for the hills (or the troll-bridge).
This comment was written by Pat A Cake.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
That’s only true for very large values of 20.
The Civil Rights Act was not, at that time, thought to apply to businesses that were partnerships, like law firms. And enforcement of what laws existed was not exactly as vigorous as today.
Isn’t it easier just to teach kids “Stick to homosex, you’ll never have to worry about a little surprise”? :P
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 30th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Pat, you can’t know this, but the son in question is seriously mentally ill. Of course if possible it’s always better to raise both our sons and our daughters to be loving and responsible people. In this case it wasn’t possible to have much impact on his behavior, much of which is dictated by illness.
I only meant the tale as an example of the power shift in this kind of relationship. If the male in question is not anxious to be caught in this particular dilemma, whatever the rest of his character may be like, he would be well advised not to engage in unprotected sexual intercourse.
Some of these men have the nerve to act surprised when intercourse results in pregnancy. (No!) Thus the “entrapped” in the title of this thread. Like she raped him or something. Even if - or especially if - the male in question is mentally ill or just a schmuck, he needs to exercise some rudimentary alertness, or at least not claim later that, well, it was all a trap of some kind.
This comment was written by Susan.Report this comment to the moderators
March 30th, 2007 at 8:03 am
mythago writes:
Exceptions don’t prove rules. I know English speakers have a hard time translating “prufung” to mean anything other than “prove” (it means “test” …), but the existence of someone, somewhere, who wasn’t protected, somehow, by Title VII doesn’t invalidate the overall factoid that Title VII made sex discrimination in employment illegal in 1964 (and wage discrimination became illegal in 1963, which is an even larger value of 20 …)
And I’ll note that you ignored the links showing changes in men’s attitudes about fatherhood that I provided in #157 upthread. :p
Hey, I want grandchildren. I expect tiny munchkin to be out producing grandchildren at every possible turn, all of which will then be spoiled as rotten as I can possibly manage.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
March 30th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Exceptions don’t prove rules.
This isn’t a “rule”, it’s a law. Laws are pretty specific about what they apply to; if a law says “employees of a business with more than 50 people have rights A, B, and C,” then the law doesn’t apply to you if you work for a tiny cafe that employs 10 people. Your employer, if it is a partnership, may argue that they do not meet the definition of “employer” under the law.
The point you’d rather avoid is that it’s not the case that all gender discrimination in all employment everywhere vanished in 1964.
And I’ll note that you ignored the links showing changes in men’s attitudes about fatherhood that I provided in #157 upthread. :p
I’m sorry to disappoint you by refusing to disagree with you on everything.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
March 30th, 2007 at 11:37 am
mythago writes:
Uh, no, that’s not at all a point I’m trying to avoid. I just don’t expect the world to improve overnight, and I don’t consider a failure of things to change instantly to be proof of an overall failure. A substantial amount of discrimination was made illegal in 1964, and over the years the loopholes have been closed, with fewer remaining open year over year. We should, of course, continue to solve problems as they are identified.
I herd cats for a living, I’ve learned to be patient. Otherwise I’d go crazy …
Oh, damn. Now you’re being all reasonable and stuff.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 27th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Susan wrote:
“I only meant the tale as an example of the power shift in this kind of relationship. If the male in question is not anxious to be caught in this particular dilemma, whatever the rest of his character may be like, he would be well advised not to engage in unprotected sexual intercourse. ”
The “power-shift” only exists when he decides not to be a father and live up to his responsibilities”. GET IT?
This comment was written by Pat A Cake.Report this comment to the moderators
June 9th, 2007 at 3:00 am
“And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men? I’d say women do. ”
You couldn’t be any more wrong.
-Dick
This comment was written by Dick Masterson.Report this comment to the moderators
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:37 am
With respect to the issue on women tricking men into pregnancy, i’ve noticed one thing missing from all the boards, maybe someone can help me out. Do men ever HELP a woman on taking her birth control? I mean like he also reminds her everyday, so they are sharing the responsibility to have safe sex together, not just her having that responsibility alone. Avoiding pregnancy is a responsibility right?
Call me crazy, but i think there is a big distinction between an ineffective birth control pill and a girl forgetting to take them. I don’t think forgetting should happen, and IF it does, then there’s no way the guy can complain, he was supposed to be on top of it too.
That was what I did and i never worried once about getting a girl pregnant. Of course, birth control between a man and woman is very intimate situation, and i’d be interested to hear how guys and girls handle this, and any comments on my suggestion
This comment was written by Jonny Doe.Report this comment to the moderators
April 9th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
This is the most rediculous thing I’ve ever heard of. No amout of child support can fully cover the expense of raising a child. The mother’s in question are saddled with the burden of raising these children for the next 18 years with limited funding and limited time/resources to improve their own condition to actually be able to provide a better life for their children, on their own, without the support of the fathers. And, I won’t even go into the emotional toll of worrying and self sacrifice of time and resources.
If a man doesn’t want to “get trapped” into paying child support, he should keep his dick in his pants or put a rubber on it — Actually, make that two rubbers. Better yet, get a vasectomy.
This blog is a classic example of boys who refuse to grow up, aka Narcissim.
This comment was written by Thomas Stone.Report this comment to the moderators