Daddy Nobucks: When Involuntary Fathers Are Forced to Foot The Bill
…are you suggesting that once in motion, a man has absolutely no choice or mind/body control but to finished “being raped?”
No. What gave you the notion I had and to then suggest as much?
I’m going well beyond suggesting, however, that the notion of forced payments naturally and predictably perpetuate the problem of unwanted pregnancy by greatly lessening the need to act responsibly. Whatever urges men and women have, they’re beginning to be radically altered by federal child support law, and that alteration isn’t exactly gender-neutral (if that matters.)
The private sector has always had means of dealing with the economic consequences of single motherhood and disadvantaged children. Meanwhile, history shows convincingly that the collective public sector eventually destroys whatever domestic ideals it is entrusted with furthering.
Since “making” fathers pay is the majority tone of issues like this, how exactly do we intend to enforce that payment if we’re not prepared to do it by way of social pressure? Penalty of state-level law in all 50 states motivated by federal financial kickbacks is clearly not working, nor is it arguably consistent with American constitutional principle.
Precisely because people have and must exercise sound choices we must eliminate fallbacks for them to do otherwise. To your point, the child support regime, by its very nature, shifts vast responsibility to males and away from females.
To their credit, legions of males are indeed, just lately, bailing out. Admittedly, they’re bailing out because of the dire legal consequences, not because of social consequences or a simple sense of responsibility. This is the only way the child support regime, exemplified by this story in all its gory unfairness and willful single motherhood, serves to slow the tide of single parenting.
I don’t have the statistics, but I’d be willing to claim that that discouraging effect falls well short of the encouraging effect federal policy has to create single parents and their statistically far more dysfunctional children. (Remember that the majority of child support cases come from splitting families, where a mother can typically gain as much as thousands of largely uncontestable dollars a month until her children turn eighteen, and in many cases well beyond.)
Is that consistent with the gender-neutral political enlightenment we profess about ourselves these last 50 years?
