Daddy Nobucks: When Involuntary Fathers Are Forced to Foot The Bill
The point being left out of this discussion is that child support is not for either parent — it is for the child. There are three people involved in this situation, not just two, and the child is the only one of those three people who made absolutely none of the choices that brought the situation about. I absolutely agree that there are inequities in the present situation and that the result is that women have more ways out of unwelcome parental responsibilities than men do. But the law has to choose, here, which of three people to be unfair to: unwilling mothers; unwilling fathers; or their unwanted kids. If you think about it, there isn’t any solution that is going to be perfectly fair to all three parties. The claim that women who “hoodwink” men into pregnancies should not be able to look to those same men for financial support seems perfectly fair as far as the father and mother are concerned — but the child ends up short-changed, and what’s fair about that, when the child is the one person who did absolutely nothing to create the situation?
Unfortunately, the law cannot create a perfect world in which there is no unfairness at all and nobody ever has to suffer as the result of a bad choice. Confronted with that impossibility, the law must, instead, choose who should suffer least from the inevitable unfairness of the circumstance of an unwanted pregnancy — and the law has picked the child. Really, can anybody here create a defensible ethical argument that society should have selected fathers to protect from these injustices, rather than children? Even fully acknowledging the truth of the various injustices that commenters here have pointed out, I can’t come up with a better answer that doesn’t foist the injustices improperly onto the kids.
And yes, before somebody else points it out, I realize that the legality of abortion is hardly consistent with the theory that in child support, the law is putting children first.
