Daddy Nobucks: When Involuntary Fathers Are Forced to Foot The Bill
While I agree at the individual level with the duty to accept responsibility for your offspring, intended or otherwise, there is more to it than that. By actively rewarding women for having children out of marriage, the current system promotes single parentage, something which is clearly not in society’s interest on the whole, even if it is better after the fact for the child in question.
This is simply another facet of the welfare dilema – child support (from either the state or absent father) is better for the child than abandonment, but it also increases the number of children in single-parent households. The tragedy of the current system is not the burden it places on fathers, but the damage it does to families, whether through casual divorce, bypassing marriage entirely, or the development of a male CW based on the proposition that the system is stacked against men and women cannot be trusted.
For now, I don’t think that’s true. Most people (men and women) have enough of a moral sense not to abuse the system in that way. But just as there was a tipping point with welfare that led to the complete collapse of the family in the underclass, there is a point where the mainstream family collapses as well. That is the fire being played with here.
