Sunday, November 29, 2009

Solving paternity fraud

The Glenn Sacks' blog NY Times Sunday Magazine article on paternity fraud that I commented on below.

As I see it, a simple change in the state law would solve nearly all the problems. When a new mother fills out a birth certification and she is asked to name the father, there should be a checkbox asking whether she is certain. Here are the possible consequences.

Are you sure? __ Yes __ No

If she checks that she is certain, then the man is presumed to be the father. But if a DNA test ever proves otherwise, then the mother is guilty of perjury, and she must accept the financial responsibilities for her lie. In particular, she can never collect child support.

If she checks that she is not certain, then no man can be required to pay child support unless a DNA test proves him to be the father.

If she refuses to name a father at all, then she should be charged with a form of child neglect. Every child has a right to a father, and she is denying her child a basic human right. If she is just trying to shut the father out of the child's life, then perhaps she ought to give up the child for adoption. At the very least, she should be barred from collecting welfare money to rear the child.

In the vast majority of cases, the mother is certain about who the father is, and my proposal would have no change on existing law. In the sort of troublesome cases mentioned in the magazine article above, it should completely eliminate the problem of some family court ordering some non-father to pay child support because of some silly argument such as a missed deadline or the Best Interest Of The Child (BIOTCh).

4 comments:

optimist said...

Even if we could put changes like that in play, women (and men) would duff moving the responsibility to to woman by claiming that she was forced or (date) raped, and does not know who the father is.

Anonymous said...

Agreed. There's an incredible amount of "wiggle room" for mothers in the family court system. There are many creative ways in which a mother can keep a father out of his child's life. Even if a father is squeaky clean, a mother can tie him up in bureaucracy for YEARS through false allegations and petty requests during the mediation process.

That's just the custody part of it.

A mother can destroy a low-income father's life through an outrageous child support judgment that leaves him unable to support himself. Consequently, he is unable to provide a home for visitations to occur (if he is awarded unsupervised visitation). His custodial rights can be stripped from him if he doesn't have adequate housing. No matter how you look at it, the lives of low-income fathers and their children are destroyed by a simple family court case.

If you are browsing this blog and think that what I'm saying is conspiracy theory, you are a useful idiot in a long-running feminist-driven campaign to destroy the American family.

Anonymous said...

While I agree that the ideology driving most of this is feminist-based, I think this is also part of a bigger picture in that we are now in thrall to a giant metastatic legal industry that wants to insinuate itself into every aspect of daily life. You'll see it in civil, business, and criminal law as well as family law. Not to trivialize the family law aspect in the least, it's likely the most damaging and dangerous of all this legalism uber alles. Also keep in mind that these trends are also in other Western countries, too, not just the US. It's a big mess, folks. So how does one stop the legal industry and govt bureaucrats from gaining yet more power? There are no checks and balances that seem effective unless you can buy politicians. More exposure in the media helps, but that's a long and steep grade to climb.

George said...

I am just trying to make a proposal to solve paternity fraud. But even if that problem were completely solved, there would many other bigger problems remaining to be solved.