Daddy Nobucks: When Involuntary Fathers Are Forced to Foot The Bill
I think the original column was carefully crafted, but would like to point out a few other points.
First, a child is an innocent member of society and the rest of society has a valid interest in assuring that the parties responsible for the child bear the financial burden instead of the rest of society. Yes, a man may have been hoodwinked by the fem, but he was an adult and caveat emptor would seem to apply. The tricked under-age male father seems a real problem, though. After all, if Vanessa Hudgens can use her age to get out of a contract, how can a 14-year old boy be held to the implicit contract of fatherhood?
Second, a vasectomy is not the answer if a man might want to have kids some other time. It would be like saying that women should have their tubes reversibly tied (with a clip or something) unless they are willing to become pregnant.
Third, the man’s child support is to the child (at least in theory). Even if the mother has no money, her commitment in time to the child has been demonstrated to be so great that (even assuming minimum wage) her expenditure is usually greater by far than court-ordered child support. (I admit some exceptions there for wealth or celebrity dads, but not the earlier mentioned $700/800 per month) So, in the case of inadvertent pregnancy from consensual sex between adults, both parties result in paying and the man probably less (but the woman has the choice so that’s not entirely unfair).
Fourth, there are notorious unfair examples that simply boggle my mind. IIRC, there is one case where a fem used the products of oral sex to essentially artificially-inseminate herself. There are other cases where a wife got pregnant and it was demonstrated that the kid was not the husband’s. In those cases, the man (in the former) and the husbands (in the latter) were held financially responsible. Any system that allows that is so patently unfair as to extinguish respect for all the rest of it.
