In the comments to another thread, “Ed” – whose views are typical of many Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), although I don’t know if Ed himself identifies as an MRA – writes:
It’s true that some women have “tricked” men into fatherhood and child support – for example, the 1997 case of State of Louisiana v. Frisard, in which a woman gave oral sex to a man wearing a condom, and then secretly used the sperm in the condom to get pregnant. (The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling). (For more information about Frisard and some similar cases, see this article).
But even acknowledging that such cases happen, that still doesn’t support the idea that child support payments significantly motivate women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood. In the Frisard case, it appears the woman was motivated by a desire for motherhood, and so would probably have acted the same way even if no child support laws exist.
Do women seek pregnancy in order to get the financial benefits of child support, as David suggests?
And who has the most incentive to prevent pregnancy, women or men?
I’d say women do. Women, after all, face the risks and physical burdens of pregnancy, and (if they wind up collecting child support) face not only the financial expense but the enormous workload of raising a child – a workload that will make much more difficult, and possibly entirely derail, any other plans the woman had for her life. The workload, unlike the expense, is not split with another adult. On the other hand, for those women who want to be mothers, that could be an incentive in favor of getting pregnant.
Next to all that, the benefit of receiving child support is so minor that I wouldn’t expect it to have a significant effect on women’s incentives.
Many MRAs – and Ed, if I’ve understood him correctly – believe that child support laws give women a strong incentive to get pregnant and thus “trap” men into financially supporting them. Furthermore, many MRAs seem to believe that there is very little men can do to prevent pregnancy (hence the frequent claim made by MRAs supporting “choice for men” that all reproductive decisions are made by women).
This is a conflict, between what many MRAs believe and what many feminists believe. Is there any way we can settle this conflict empirically?
I believe there is.
Not all states have the same child support laws. In some states, the child support laws are relatively weak; noncustodial parents don’t pay much, and can relatively easily get away with defaulting on child support payments – or can depend on never being identified as the father at all. Other states have higher child support awards, laws that aggressively establish paternity, and collection techniques that make defaulting unlikely (such as garnishing child support from paychecks).
If the MRAs are correct, then states with strong child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, due to more women – tempted by the prospect of well-enforced child support awards – choosing to trick men into getting them pregnant.
If I’m correct, however, then states with weak child support laws will have higher rates of single motherhood, because while women’s incentives aren’t changed much by child support laws, a significant number of men are less motivated to avoid pregnancy if they think they can get off the hook.
So what do studies comparing how weak and strong child support laws effect single motherhood find? It’s men, not women, who have their incentives changed by child support laws. The stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood.
Robert Plotnick, of the University of Washington, published a study in 2005 which included a brief review of the literature.
Huang (2002) and Plotnick et al. (2004) use micro-data to examine the effect of child support enforcement on nonmarital childbearing. Both use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to analyze the likelihood that a woman’s first birth is premarital. Focusing on the teenage years, Plotnick et al. (2004) finds that young women living in states with higher rates of paternity establishment are less likely to become unwed teenage mothers. Because of the nature of the NLSY and the focus on teenage behavior, the study examines behavior during 1979-1984. Huang (2002) examines 20 years of data and different indicators of support enforcement. He reports similar relationships when women are age 20 or older but, unlike Plotnick et al., not when they are teenagers.
Plotnick’s 2005 study (available in pdf form here) replicated the earlier studies’ findings.
What does this mean?
It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.
However, it is also possible that Ed is correct, and that child support laws do strongly increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. However, this is only possible if we assume that men’s incentives to avoid pregnancy are even more strongly increased – so that even though women are trying harder to entrapt men into paying child support, men are nonetheless successful in preventing pregnancy, despite women’s increased efforts. So the MRA belief that women are motivated by child support payments into trapping men, ironically can only be rescued by giving up the MRA belief that men are not able to prevent pregnancy from happening.
The empirical evidence is clear: the net effect of child support laws isn’t that women get pregnant more often to collect on child support. Rather, the stronger child support laws are, the more men work at avoiding pregnancy.
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And for pete’s sake, it’s not as if anyone usually knows what child support is all about before they get divorced — or if they’re single.
Child support entitles a child or children to support from the non-custodial parent. That support, typically 17% of income after FICA, is meant to help keep a child’s or children’s standard of living somewhere near where it would have been had the parents stayed together.
But, it will never even get that close since you usually set up separate households which almost invariably means that you are both spending more money than you might have otherwise: two rents/mortgages, two sets of utility bills, two sets of furniture, EEE TTT CCC.
So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.
If anyone thinks that $5200/yr supports the custoidal parent’s life of leisure, then they are drinking crack-laced Welch’s grape juice and sterno.
Even if one doubles or triples those numbers it simply doesn’t support a life of leisure. It supports raising a child or children and it supports doing so in a fashion that *might* come close to the lifestyle that a child or children might have enjoyed had the parents stayed together.
P.S. Years ago, I was on a list mostly inhabited by men from the IT world. They were discussing how to handle child support. On one guy’s view, he refused to pay the money directly to the mother, preferring instead to spend it on the kid.
Somehow, in his mind, that meant the kid got the money and she didn’t. *rolls eyes*
If he paid the rent, or the utilities, or the private school tuition, or for clothes/toys/what have you, then all he’s done is make it so that less of her income was spent on those things. He’d tricked himself into imaging that, because he paid the landlord dirctly or if he paid the tuition directly, then somehow she didn’t “benefit.”
Currently, I have to fight my ex for child support. He’s refusing to pay b/c his son has reached 18 and, in spite of a divorce contract that says he pays ’til the kid is 21, in the military, or employed full-time.
What is truly astounding about this is that my ex, who remarried, has a step-daughter. His step-daughter’s father pays support.
I asked the wasband: Do YOU think that the child support that comes to the family’s coffers each month support YOUR life of leisure? Do you think you would be happy to put your daughter through college without his help? Do you think he’d be a total asshole if he bailed on his daughter.
The wasband told his kid, directly, to support himself on the $8-10 hour jobs he can find with a high school -type job.
I asked the wasband if they’d kick their step daughter out of the house and expect her to support herself and expect her to get through life without a college degree or some sort of training that would help her in the job market. Of course not.
If anyone knows a decent family-law attorney who can deal with the fact that I am utterly broke who’s in the Tampa bay area please ping me at my blog. Thanks!
Cathy Young of Reason wrote on this quite some time ago. I’m all for the noncustodial parent paying his/her share of child support, but I think the combination of TV Dramas and Court Shows has unduly influenced our opinion on what Child Support is like and how it should and shouldn’t be awarded.
Amp – great post. I appreciate your analysis. I also appreciate that you acknowledge that “entrapment” does happen. I have a particular example in my own family where a woman got repeatedly pregnant through different men and expressly said it was to get child support (and government support) so she didn’t have to work. But I acknowledge that is a freak occurance and I also agree with your conclusion:
It could mean, as I believe, that women already have such strong incentives to avoid pregnancy, that child support awards (which are, typically, not all that generous) don’t significantly alter the equation for most women.
I’m not really sure how to respond.
From a purely logical point of view child support laws *must* increase women’s incentive to get pregnant. If you compare people’s incentive to do X with people’s incentive to do X and get $1000 for it, their incentive must be higher when they’re offered the money.
I’m also not sure whether asking women or men have the most incentive to prevent pregnancy by looking at who suffers the higher burden is the right way to go. You also have to ask who get the most benefit from pregnancy, in terms of the intangable goods of wanting a child and so on.
I also think the big incentive/deterent that hasn’t been mentioned is custody law. If men got custody 50% of the time, no matter how big the support awards were, there wouldn’t be any incentive for women to get pregnant to gain child support (as the money could equally go the opposite way).
I doubt that the phenomenon of women choosing to get pregnant for the child support or to trap a man into marriage is very common, but I reckon it happens on rare occasions. It is just not a bright move for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the uncertainty involved.
I prefer to think of child support obligations not as punitive but as a societal mechanism for allocating costs. Even in cases where an unsuspecting man has been duped, it is still fairer for that man to bear the costs than to require uninvolved third parties to do so through taxation.
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This is sloppy, Amp. I know that you know that correlation doesn’t allow you to draw conclusions about causation.
Here’s an alternate theory: women who come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock for a variety of social reasons. Poor single mothers are also less likely to be politically active. In states where most of the single mothers are poor, the single mother lobby is less likely to be effective in getting politicians to pass strong child support laws. Therefore, the states with the most single mothers have less political support for strong child support laws.
My theory may be completely wrong, but the point is that it’s just as plausible an explanation of the facts as yours, and it says nothing about whether strong child support makes women have more children out of wedlock. In fact, the effect that I posit above could easily be enough to hide an uptick in out-of-wedlock births among women in strong child support states where incomes are higher if the correlation of socioeconomic status and out-of-wedlock birth were strong enough.
I agree that it’s probably not the case that lots of young women are thinking, “hmm, I think I’ll have a baby because I can get its Daddy to give me $200 a month.” But the data you cite don’t prove that strong child support laws cause lower rates of single parenthood.
Bitch,
I know a totally awesome family law lawyer in Pompano. I don’t know what “ping your blog” means, and I’m not sure she wants her e-mail splattered all over a blog with so many MRA-types hanging around. If she can’t help, perhaps someone she knows can. Send me an e-mail — same user name as here at gmail dot com.
Of course, given the growing MRA influence over the past few years, men can significantly reduce or eliminate the child support “threat” by asking for more visitation or demanding custody altogether. This is routinely advocated by the MRA’s and the attorneys that serve them. Some women will back down on demanding child support if you threaten them with custody. Others might just lose custody altogether, and then the man can sit back and collect it.
I can see where a woman might deceive a man to get pregnant, usually for reasons not totally in accord with having a strong grip on reality. But unless the man in question is wealthy (and that does happen; it’s happened in the NBA more than once), getting pregnant in order to collect child support isn’t a good way to make much of a living.
getting pregnant in order to collect child support isn’t a good way to make much of a living.
Agreed. The expenses incurred by having children are hardly enough to get by, even with other social services.
In fact, I snickered when I read this post.
These guys are making me puke.
Amp, the fact that you even felt the need to mention “yes, women trick men blah blah blah” in the second PARAGRAPH of your essay makes me respect you a little less. Does it happen? Odds of probability say yes. Does it happen frequently? I’d say no; in fact I’d say it happened so infrequently to be statistically insignificant. Not enough to even be considered a viable position to argue from.
Why is it automatically assumed that the women is lying when she says it was an accident? Birth control does, in fact, fail. The pill is not infalliable. Plus, if men were so concerned with pregnancy, there is a number of steps they can take that do not rely on the woman at all: condoms, vasectomies, refusing to have sex with someone who opposes abortion or expresses a wish to be a mother.
But when the mistakes DO happen, and the woman gets pregnant, they need to, more than anything, remember that pregnancy is exclusively a women’s domain. They bear the physical burden of a pregnancy, so it is there choice, and their choice alone, that is allowed to determine what is allowed with their body.
After the pregnancy, there is a child. A child that is half and half the mother’s and the father’s. They need to realize that they have a responsibility to that child, as the mom does as well. One is hurting their own child when s/he does not. Being vindictive using a child as a pawn is cruel: it’s what the villian of every Saturday morning cartoon did. Nice.
Oh, and by the way, people need to quit confating “abortion” with “child support”. The two are ENTIRELY different.
Abortion deals with bodily autonomy. If a women has sex, she has to realize that she may get pregnant. She will have to deal with the consequence with either an abortion or a pregnancy. If a guy has sex, he has to accept that he may get a women pregnant, and she will have the decision to abort or not. He DOES not get the decision over her body.
A child, the result of the pregnancy, is an autonomous being. It is the responsibility of a) the two parents specifically and b) society in general. As a society, we cannot force one to have an emotional relationship with his or her own child. (One should, unless s/he’s an abusive jackass, but we can’t force her/him). But, you have a financial obligation to the well-being of your offspring.
Suck it up, people. You don’t have the moral high ground in abandoning your child.
This isn’t a strawman, but you are debunking a fairly weak form of this claim. The stronger form is that if a woman wants to get pregnant, child support laws do give her a strong incentive to do it the old-fashioned way rather than to use artificial insemination or adopt. Even a few hundred dollars a month is a lot better than nothing.
I’m not saying that all women, or even a significant minority of them, are unscrupulous enough to trick men into getting them pregnant for the purpose of securing child support. But for those who are, the motive and opportunity are there. Yes, men *should* use condoms, but if he doesn’t because a woman says she’s using oral contraceptives, and she’s not, who’s more at fault? Besides, as shown by the Frisard case, a condom isn’t failsafe.
And yes, obviously men can make reproductive decisions. The point is that once a woman is pregnant, she has all the power, and there’s absolutely nothing a man can do (legally) to escape child support at that point. A woman can have all the sex she wants, protected or not, with zero risk of being legally required to support a child (although there are, of course, other risks). This simply isn’t true for men.
Yes, we can take steps to mitigate our risk, and certain laws might make some men more likely to do so, but the reduction in risk isn’t free. Condoms help, but, again, they’re not failsafe, and they do make sex less enjoyable (though they have the advantage of dramatically reducing the spread of venereal disease). Under the current legal framework, the only way to eliminate any risk of exposure to child support liability is total abstention from any sort of sexual activity with women (or sterilization, which is not an option if you think you might ever want to have children later).
So as far as I can tell, those who oppose post-conception choice for men are essentially saying that men who don’t want to risk dealing with the expense of raising children shouldn’t have sex. But how many here would agree that women who don’t want to risk dealing with the expense of raising children shouldn’t have sex?
Out of curiosity, suppose a single woman gets pregnant and gives birth. If she wants to give it up for adoption, does the father have the first shot at custody? If so, and if he elects to keep it, does the mother have to pay child support?
What’s being overlooked here by those who see an incentive for women to get pregnant to get child support is that the expenses incurred by having a child far outweigh the support. So how much sense does it make to get pregnant to get $400 a month, when the child’s expenses (higher rent for a larger place, child care, food, medical expenses, clothing, utilities, etc) are more than the child support award in the first place? What’s the benefit?
What’s bizarre about this conversation is that those guys that are claiming that women entrap men (or men’s sperm) to get pregnant, are also speaking of pregnancy as a bodily process almost tangential to the topic of child support/child rearing. Yet if we were to be talking about abortion these same men would be crying about the un-born children. Go figure.
If a woman chooses pregnancy it is a process, a trap. If a woman chooses abortion, she is a murderer.
To the rest of you claiming that child support laws give an “incentive” for pregnancy, you’re full of shite. More precisely, child support laws give women the social and psychological cushions they need when making difficult decisions about their pregnancies, their futures, and the futures of any potential children they might bear.
Further, if a man is mature enough to be engaging in heterosexual coitus, then he damn well better be mature enough to understand just exactly what fatherhood is. There is no trick there. Never has been. Men have spent millenia trying to figure out how to 100% tell if a woman’s child is also his offspring. It scares the bejeesus out of men to think that they can’t tell; even more scary is that it is obvious which children belong to which women. So men develop their bags of tricks to entrap women: marriage, violence (especially when the woman is pregnant), withholding of financial support, eviction, etc. But we would never say that men trick women into supporting the men’s own sense of fatherhood… no, because it is too obvious, too transparent, and too normative.
“So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.”
I don’t know about your state but here in oregon I don’t make much more than 30 grand a year and I pay $750 a month. That works out to $9k a year. It’s a pretty hefty chunk of my salary. I have no problem paying it because I value my kids and I want them to be taken care of. But at the same time I don’t like the inferrence that child support is some pittance that men can easily pay if they want to. I lived in a single bedroom apartment for three years after my divorce because I couldn’t really afford anything else. When the kids came over on weekends I slept on the couch and they slept in the bedroom. I ate way more chicken flavored ramen than can possibly be good for me.
I agree that women getting pregnant to get support is a pretty ridiculous myth, just try not to get so zealous in debunking it that you end up (hopefully unintentionally) hurting the guys who truly want to be supportive and make sacrifices toward that end.
Brandon wrote:
How can this “stronger form” theory explain the fact that stronger child support laws are correlated with lower rates of unwed motherhood?
What logical reason is there to accept a “once a woman is pregnant” framing of the issue? In the real world, the timeline includes events before, during and after pregnancy. MRAs want legislation to be passed based on the idea that only the “once a woman is pregnant” portion of the timeline should be considered, as if the woman magically got pregnant without any male participation pre-pregnancy; but I’ve never once seen a logical explanation for why lawmakers should pretend that the timeline before pregnancy never existed.
“Once the house was on fire, there was nothing the arsonist could do to halt the flames. Therefore, the arsonist bears no responsibilty for the house burning down.” Yes, that’s true, but why on earth should we accept the false framing of the issue that says that “once the house was on fire” is the only part of the timeline we should consider?
What makes you think men have, or should have, the ability to eliminate 100% of risk? It’s not as if women live in a risk-free world – even for those women who’d choose an abortion if they get pregnant, they face the risk of having to deal with the expenses, discomfort and (for some women) guilt involved in having an abortion. Plus, like all medical procedures, abortion itself is not 100% risk-free (although it’s safer than childbirth).
It’s true – the choice to have sex involves some risk, which can be made tiny but not altogether eliminated. I don’t think that’s avoidable. It’s immature to imagine that decisions can be made without any risk whatsoever.
It’s interesting – and a sign of the expectations men in our culture have that women alone take on the burden of childrearing – that you describe children only as an “expense.” It reminds me of how Rebecca Blood described the dichotomy between how (many) men and (many) women view unwanted parenthood:
For you, “parenthood” means writing a check once a month. I think that very few women think of parenthood in those terms.
Anyhow, to answer your question, I wouldn’t say that about women because men and women don’t have the same reproductive systems; women get pregnant and can therefore choose to have an abortion. Men don’t and therefore don’t have that choice.
You’re like someone who says that tall people should be forbidden from reaching stuff on high shelves because short people can’t reach that high, and shouldn’t short people and tall people have equal rights? If I say that short people will have to live with the fact that tall people have a higher reach, does that mean I’m advocating prejudice against short people?
Women can get pregnant. That gives women the ability to have abortions (and it gives women many, many severe disadvantages that MRAs ignore). Both men and women have the right to control their reproductive systems to reduce the risk of parenthood, but their exact options differ because their reproductive systems differ.
To quote one judge’s ruling:
Back to your post:
Yes, he does, unless he’s abandoned the child. And yes, in many cases, she does have to pay child support if she’s a non-custodial parent (although this isn’t the case for 100% of non-custodial mothers, just as it isn’t the case for 100% of non-custodial fathers). One of the employees at my workplace has her child support payments garneshed out of her paycheck, for instance.
Given that single mothers are among the poorest socio-economic group there is, I don’t think it would take long to establish empirically that child support payments virtually never outweigh the costs of having a child to a woman. Which destroys the entire basis to the entrapment argument immediately.
Brandon Berg Writes:
“…The stronger form is that if a woman wants to get pregnant, child support laws do give her a strong incentive to do it the old-fashioned way rather than to use artificial insemination or adopt. …
…Under the current legal framework, the only way to eliminate any risk of exposure to child support liability is total abstention from any sort of sexual activity with women (or sterilization, which is not an option if you think you might ever want to have children later). …”
Brandon, you’ve i think, unknowingly, proposed the ideal solution for a man who doesn’t want ANY risk of impregnating a woman while he’s still “sowing his oats” yet retain the ability to impregnate a woman when he’s ready to settle down and have a child.
A man can go to a sperm bank and deposit his own sperm for his own use only. Thereafter, he can get a vasectomy. This allows him to have sex with no risk of getting a woman pregnant. As much sex as he likes with no risk. Then, once married to his Cinderella, this Prince Charming can have his wife inseminated artifically with his own sperm, thus producing little princlings and princesses certifiably of his own genetic material.
Having done so in such a deliberate manner, he then becomes liable for full child support should Cinderella discover her independence and move in with Snow White instead.
BTW, on the subject of vasectomies, what about men who tell women that they’ve had one so they don’t need to wear a condom? Or what about men who’ve actually had them yet are one of the statistically rare individuals who still produce a small amout of viable sperm, after all, it only takes one. What recourse should a woman have who thinks she’s having pregnancy-risk-free sex have then?
Antigone said:
“They bear the physical burden of a pregnancy, so it is there choice, and their choice alone, that is allowed to determine what is allowed with their body.”
Agreed.
and also:
“After the pregnancy, there is a child. A child that is half and half the mother’s and the father’s. They need to realize that they have a responsibility to that child, as the mom does as well.”
A child isn’t “half and half” of mother and father in any objective sense, except genetically. The energy and risk and money expended into growing a child is spent on the mother. I really don’t see that the father bears an equal responsibility simply by virtue of contributing a bit of semen.
And I fully support women’s bodily autonomy, including the right to contraception, abortion, etc. I just don’t see how you can give the mother the sole right to decide whether to have the child and still demand that the father be as responsible for it as the mother, without regards to the father’s prior expressed commitments.
I can understand that if the child was born with the mother expecting the father to give a lot of support voluntarily, and then the father withdrew that for whatever reason, that expecting child support from the father would be very reasonable. But in a situation where the father made it clear that he didn’t want any children and wouldn’t want anything to do with the mother if she decided to bear children, I just don’t see how the father could be expected to be financially responsible for the children.
Now, I’m open to changing my mind. There are likely considerations here that I just haven’t thought about enough.
And also, Antigone, the fact that you would respect Amp less for even mentioning an undisputed fact, as if it somehow showed that he had any less respect or allegience for feminist viewponts, makes *me* respect *you* a little less. It seems obvious to me that the only reason he mentioned it was to short circuit the silly arguments by any MRAs that might otherwise derail the thread. I think you’re being too shrill.
But otherwise, I mostly agree with you.
That’s always been my understanding, but then again I haven’t seen a lot of proof of people giving much thought to the economic feasability of children when they get pregnant. That goes for whether the parents are married/together or not, and goes doubly when the mother is young, a high-school dropout, and can’t afford to sue for child support in any case. Welfare money, *maybe,* and welfare money sure doesn’t put anyone in the lap of luxury. For a fashion accessory, for the love the child will give, for the “grownup” status that comes with parenthood — yes, I’ve heard all of those.
The thought of getting pregnant for the money rings hollow, to me, except in the case of very rich fathers. Admittedly, the thought of getting pregnant for any reason rings hollow to me — happily child-free and intending to remain so.
Q Grrl, I doubt that the same men who complain about being trapped into child support are opposing abortion. Sure, there are some, but most of the unwilling single dads would be quite happy if the mother had chosen to abort. In fact, they’re generally pissed that she didn’t.
I can’t back this up with a reference, but I think I read somewhere that young, single men are more likely to support the right to abortion than are women. If true, I find this not at all surprising.
I said:
“I can understand that if the child was born with the mother expecting the father to give a lot of support voluntarily, and then the father withdrew that for whatever reason, that expecting child support from the father would be very reasonable.”
Indeed, I think most (hopefully) fathers would also find it reasonable.
pdf23ds wrote:
Women only have the “sole” right to decide if we pretend that nothing in the timeline before pregnancy happened. In a typical case, both the father and the mother voluntarily participated in the events leading up to the childbirth. “While it is true that after conception a woman has more control than a man over the decision whether to bear a child, and may unilaterally refuse to obtain an abortion, those facts were known to the father at the time of conception.”
Because the right to child support belongs to the child, not the mother. You’re saying that the father should have the right to contract with the mother to remove the child’s rights, but you are mistaken, because the mother doesn’t have the right to give her children’s rights to support away. Put another way, you’re proposing that Parties A and B have a right to agree that B’s obligation to C should be cancelled. But A doesn’t have any standing to void B’s obligation to C, so what A and B have agreed to isn’t relevant.
I appreciate your defense of me, and agree that Antigone’s criticism of my bringing up that case was mistaken.
However, I don’t think that posters here should be saying “by making that argument, you’ve made me respect you less,” and I definitely don’t want posters calling other posters “shrill.” (Please reread the moderation faq for an idea of how posters on “Alas” ought behave). Additionally, dismissing a woman’s argument by calling it “shrill” is an offensive sexist cliche – and is offensive even if you didn’t intend it that way – and therefore should be avoided.
y’know…
maybe things are different now than when i was growing up.. i am rapidly approaching “old fogey” status…
but there’s all this talk of “clear expectations” and “express wishes” and “making it clear” who wants a baby and all that *before* having sex.
sounds like there’s a whole lot more talking going on before sex than i remember. in the “real world” of a guy and a gal getting together for a romp, are there really contract negotiations going on these days? or is it just “your place or mine” still?
if it’s still the way i remember it, then for both parties it’s a “you pay your money, you take your chances” game. a woman takes the risk of getting pregnant (even if she’s on birth control) and a guy takes the risk of getting her pregnant (even if he uses a condom). those are just the risks of life and you deal with the consequences in an ethically responsible way.
i think more guys need to just step up to the plate and be a mensch about it rather than whining that the couple of hundred for child support is keeping them from buying some new toy. consider it balance for the discrepancies in the wages of a single custodial mother vs. a single non-custodial father. and they need to stop worrying about screwing the woman after the sex is over with. she’s not “making out like a bandit” because of the pittance paid to her for child support. sure, she gets to eat the same dinner she cooked for the kids that the guy paid probably less than 1/10th of the cost of (not to say none of the labor involved in buying it, making it, and feeding it to the kids.)
the arguments i’ve heard from MRAs about child support (as opposed to equal treatment for custody) issues basically comes down to Libertarian-esque whining “But it’s MY money!”
why do Libertarians & MRAs sound like my 4yrold? “MINE! SHE CAN’T HAVE IT, IT’S MINE!” shreeked at the top of her voice.
it sounds like the MRAs never had the talk with their dads where they’re told “Be a man, son, don’t shirk your responsibilities. Step up.”
And to bring up a point that is perhaps not being emphasized enough, there is no 100% method of birth control short of keeping all your clothes on. The man and the woman may both totally agree that they don’t want children, they may even have engaged in “contract negotiations” prior to actual coitus, but the bottom line is that even if the man is using two methods of birth control and the woman is also using two methods of birth control (for a grand total of 4 separate methods of contraception), pregnancy can still occur. Period. Grown-ups deal with the results of their actions, even if the result isn’t what they *wanted*. Geez.
(The courts decided that Mr. Frisard was liable for child support, a result I find appalling).
Not to out-liberal Amp or anything, but what did the Frisard child ever do to you (or to his father) that makes you think he’s less entitled to child support than his neighbor who was conceived when his father falsely told his mother that he had a vasectomy?
Child support is completely unrelated to spousal support. If the child hasn’t acted immorally, then he should be entitled to support from both of his parents.
I think you’re conflating the rights of the mother with her wishes. Of course, in most situations with an involved and supportive father, the mother and the father will decide together whether to have the child. These are also typically situations where the father is willing to support the child, often as much as or more than the mother is. But even in these situations, the mother has the final say over whether to abort the pregnancy, and in this sense, the right is indeed a sole right. Anything less and you’re talking about men having legal standing in the question of whether the person they’ve impregnated can get an abortion.
I think I acknowledged that the actual circumstances preceeding the birth do affect how I think of the father’s obligations. If the mother had a reasonable expectation that he would provide the support, for whatever reason, or if he pressures her into having the child when she might not have otherwise, then I think the support is morally obliged from him.
I don’t see how this helps your case at all. It seems irrelevant to me.
I’ve never seen child support conceptualized as a right of the child, rather than of the caretaking parent. It does change things though. Is there somewhere I can read more about how this view is justified? It’s not at all obvious to me.
I agree that it was rude, and realized that while writing it, but said in anyway in a direct echo of what I was replying to, to make a point that Antigone was also being rude in saying so. I’m sorry to add to the friction on the blog.
I’m not sure how I should otherwise deal with a post that I consider to be out of bounds, other than by completely ignoring it. If I think another poster is using poor form, should I never call it out, and leave any such moderation completely up to you? Or is there another way I could have phrased my objection to the style without going against the posting guidlines?
Agreed about the “shrill” thing. While I maintain that the description is apt, I really wasn’t aware of the hint of sexism in the term when I chose it, and I will avoid it. On the other hand, if a post exhibits negative stereotypical qualities, it’s hard to avoid invoking the stereotypes when criticizing them.
Hee. Guess I’m an old fogey too. I always end up wondering what happened to being responsible for your screw-ups… and when it became so impossible to just not have sex if you don’t want to be a parent right now. But maybe maybe my perception’s been skewed by my years of being totally ignored by men because I’m fat and shy. Maybe the TV’s right and life is one big orgy when you’re slim and pretty.
Tlaloc took issue with this: “So, if a non-custodial parent earns $30k/yr, 17% is about $100/week.”
It’s a nationwide law that, The Uniform Child Support and Child Custody Law (enacted to prevent b.s. from happening: such as men moving to states with different laws so they could skate, and to deal with problems when women take children to different states to live with family, new partners, get jobs, etc.)
So, I was unclear. The min. you must pay, barring extreme circumstances, is 17% after FICA for ONE child. After that you pay more depending on how many children you have.
There was no such meaning implied. You read that into it. I’ve been on both sides of this issue: my father didn’t pay, I’ve been a step mother to three boys, etc. etc.
I was pointing out that, whether it’s $5200 for one or $9000 for two or three, no one lives a life of leisure or ease and certainly can’t live without working a full-time job. So, how and why anyone would want to entrap someone else for that amount of money, money that wouldn’t even support 1 adult, let alone that adult and 1 or more kids — well, it’s ridiculous.
Regarding my previous comments, I think the availability of abortion to the mother probably changes things. It changes how free the choice to have a child is for the mother. If a child is seen as something “forced” upon the mother by biological inevitability, then it’s easy to see how the mother and father should both bear responsibility for the child. But if the child is seen as something that is in no way inevitable, then by choosing to having the child the mother is actual autonomously, and should therefore have full responsibility for her actions. In real life, births fall on a range from completely autonomous to more or less inevitable (for the mother) depending on the availability of abortion, on the mother’s beliefs, on the father’s role in the pregnancy, and lots of other factors. So I think, ideally, that the amount of child support payed would be relative to the autonomy involved in the mother’s choice to have the child. Whether anything like this is practical, or is already done, I am completely ignorant.
PS TLaloc. I read that again and it sounds snippy. I don’t meant to be and I’m not angry. Just too busy for my own good. My apologies. If you got to know me, you’d know my views on all these issues are pretty complicatd and much more sympathetic to a complex reading of the issues than we are sometimes will to give one another. So, sometimes, it’s a matter of also not assuming that women who have views on this issue are able to write about everything they think in the confined and limited space of a blog comment.
Amp: another point that should be made:
We already know that women who are collecting AFDC are not motivated to collect sperm to have lots of babies so they can get bigger child support checks.
Women on welfare have, historically, had few children than married women. They apparently aren’t interested in having more children for the bigger welfare check. And that research was conducted before Clinton butchered AFDC.
I think one of the problems with the sterotypes of welfare queens is that so many people have never lived the life of the poor and working class. Consquently, they don’t know how to interpret the words and actions of the folks that get stigmatized by that myth. But no time to go into it further.
“the mother is actual autonomously”
the mother is acting autonomously
Cat herder — sorry about that. i just meant go to the blog, find my email adress and write me. don’t like putting it online. But I’ll use the technique that is supposed to prevent spam:
my address is info AT pulpculture DOT org (transform the AT to @ and the DOT to a period.
Thanks for any advice you can give. It is very much appreciated. After his father treated him like this, it would be nice to give the kid a sense that, in general, there are people in the world who care, even complete strangers.
The “women entrap men into getting them pregnant so they can collect child support” argument seems so facially absurd that I have to wonder if you’re stating it accurately. A child is almost sure to be a financial loser for the woman just on the basis of direct costs, and even more so when you consider that having a kid decreases the woman’s probable future income.
Perhaps kids are cheaper to raise than I think they are, but unless the man is very wealthy (in which case the woman’s chances of winning any court battle go way down) it seems like it’s obviously going to be a financial loss.
I’m late to the party as always — posted this as a response to Ed on the other thread, and I’ll post it here even though others have already said it.
Child support benefits the child, not the custodial parent. Said parent can (and should) be prosecuted for using child-support money for her- or himself instead of the child(ren).
I get very tired of this notion that all a woman has to do is sucker some poor slob into getting her pregnant and then she can sit on the sofa and eat bonbons for the next 18 years while he works his guts out supporting her and the kid. We all know it doesn’t work that way (unless maybe the slob in question is Donald Trump, and that falls into the “too rare to be a legitimate argument” category).
I’m not sure your correlation equals causation either, Amp — and I’m not sure it doesn’t. It would be interesting to see the data sliced and diced by income — take two states with similar per-capita incomes, one with strong child-support enforcement and the other with weak, and compare out-of-wedlock births between them. There are still a lot of other factors in play, of course.
In reality, too many men who father children pay little or no child support , even with all the efforts made by women’s organizations to deal with this problem. And there’s more of a liklihood of mothers raising children by themselves of being financially strapped, than single mothers living well off of child support.
Yet once again, with the MRA’s groups, it’s
“What about the men?” What about the men being victimized by all those scheming women out there looking to pick their pockets by plotting to get pregnant?
Said parent can (and should) be prosecuted for using child-support money for her- or himself instead of the child(ren).
How are they defining “using child-support money for herself”? As mentioned above, if a single parent spends the child support on essentials, that just frees up money to use for luxuries. Unless of course the prosecution is for failing to provide the essentials, which would probably be some kind of child endangerment offence whether support was being paid or not.
In reality, too many men who father children pay little or no child support
Too many men who father children provide little to no support of any kind; financial, emotional, or physical, to either their child or his or her mother.
that “using child support money for herself” argument is what most of the husbands of my aunts and my own … contributor of genetic material (can’t bring my self to call him the f word (father, not the *other* f word, i call him that a lot :) ) … used to keep my cousins and me poor growing up. heaven forbid my mom buy a new dress so she could look nice for work so she could pay the rent. that was “using child support money for herself” or if my aunt bought a new kitchen table for her & the 7 kids her husband left her with… that was “using child support money for herself”. no, far better for our moms to worry about whether they could buy bread for dinner or put gas in the car so they could go to work. and nobody better get sick, ’cause the old man ain’t footin’ the bill. and no dreams of college either. “i didn’t go ’cause your mom got pregnant, so why should you?”
these aren’t just personal stories, they happen every day because some lame-ass cheap bastard is too worried about his ex-wife “using child support money for herself.”
too many fathers pay little or no child support. i don’t have statistical data, but i think few pay after the first few payments if they can get away with it without the court or the welfare system coming after them.
and often, kids don’t realize what a jerk their father was until they grow up. after all, at dad’s house, there’s plenty of food, and a nice car, and good furniture, and money for toys on the weekend, and trips out to eat. dad’s the good guy, mom can’t afford to take us to mcdonald’s. then the kid grows up and realizes exactly why it was mom couldn’t afford the pack of gum at the grocery or that comic book you just had to have. because some jerk was worried that she was “using child support money for herself.”
for every 1 guy that’s truly been bilked or tricked or cheated, i’d lay good money (if i had it! :) ) on the odds that there are 1000 women & kids doing without because of lack of support from the father.
Amen, stay-at-home-dad. If most of the fathers who were screaming about custody of their money were screaming just as loudly about custody of their children, I’d be a little more sympathetic to their troubles.
That said, life is complex. There are self-indulgent moms and dads, and there are responsible moms and dads. In my own circle of acquaintance, I know some of each, in various states of relationship to each other. The problem is, we live in a society where we don’t know each other well enough to use the ancient Welsh method of evaluating claims (testimony by neighbors), so how can our legal system consistently and fairly evaluate whether or not one parent is an alcoholic, a child-abuser, a gambler, hopelessly self-centered, seriously mentally ill, vengeance-obsessed, or totally incompetent with finances? (All of these last are reasons I have heard within the last year for why the person confiding in me should get things their way.) To me, with apologies to the lawyers out there, it would seem that whoever manages to hire the better lawyer ends up with the best results, which doesn’t seem like a very evenhanded way of handling things. The gold standard should be what is in the best interest of the child, who after all didn’t ask to be born.
Just because fathers know beforehand that if they get someone pregnant they could end up paying child support in the future doesn’t mean that the policy that requires those payments is fair to them, any more than a person smoking pot means that drug laws are fair.
I’m open to the idea that the individual circumstances in most situations make child support morally justified, but what is the common situation? Did most parents who receive child support expect before the birth of the child that the other parent would have provided more, only to have the other parent back out of that promise?
While I agree with stay-at-home-dad about the odds of someone really getting cheated into child-support payments, I think that a much more common situation than complete deception is where the woman is straightforward in that she wants to keep a child if the contraception fails, and the man, even though he doesn’t want any children (and was straightforward about that), decides to take that risk. (It’s a small risk, with good contraception.) In this situation I don’t think the father should be obligated to support the child. (Provided that there was no coercion involved in either the conception or the pregnancy.) And I do think it’s probably pretty common.
About the child being the one with the right to support by both parents. I think that strikes me as wrong. I don’t think either biological parent has any moral obligation to protect or raise the child after it’s born. I think if they’re not interested in doing so, the state then has an obligation to care for the child. If they do decide to care for the child, they have the obligation to do it properly and not abuse it, of course. But the decision should be voluntary, both on the part of the mother and of the father. Observe that in some primitive societies, mothers will often simply abandon an infant which they don’t have the resources to raise. Granted, the situation in the US and probably most other countries today is nothing like this. A mother doesn’t really have the choice to give the child over to the state, nor to abandon it (without risking being prosecuted for murder). Sometimes the child can be adopted if adoptive parents are found. But, if I understand correctly, a mother can’t simply voluntarily place a child into the foster care system, and even if she did have that choice, she would have to live with the awareness that by doing she’s substantially disavantaging the child. So she’s left with the choice of abortion, which is unpalatable to many, or raising an unwanted child.
OK, so I got off track a bit there. I still don’t see how an infant has a right to be alive, let alone a right to support from both parents. I only think that by deciding to raise the child, either the individual parents or society is promising them the basic rights of human society. But not before that point.
pdf23ds,
re: your post twenty-three. If the mother is acting autonomously in giving birth to the child, how are men ever entitled to custody or visitation or a relationship with the child, even if the woman is his wife? If the entire responsibility rests on her, so does the entire right.
Ismone
OK, I used some loose language there. By “using child-support money for herself” I meant something like keeping the kids in rags while enhancing her Imelda-esque shoe collection, or feeding the kids crusts of bread while dining out every night. Either of those would qualify as child neglect, for which she could be prosecuted — as Nick pointed out, that would be true even if there were no child support.
My point, however, is that (again, absent Donald Trump) you don’t live very well on child support alone, and most single (and married) parents are more likely to work the other way around, skimping on themselves so that the kids can have what they need.
Ismone,
In the situation where the father wants an amount of custody or visitation, and the mother is completely opposed to it from the very beginning of the child’s life, the issue gets pretty thorny. I would say, as a first thought, that the mother does indeed have all the rights in the situation. At this point the father has no real investment in the child. But wait! Sometimes the father does have significant investment in the child, if he’s cared for the mother through her pregnancy. (And yet she still doesn’t want him as part of the child’s life?) But even in these situations, his role is still secondary, and I think his rights are thus smaller than the mother’s.
But in the more common situation where both commit together to raise the child and then the couple splits up personally after the child has been raised a certain amount, I think the father is entitled to visitation/custody preportionate to his prior commitment to the child. (And then you get into questions of how harmful it is for the child to be shuttled back and forth, and even more thorny issues. But still.)
I don’t see how this conflicts with what I said in 23; do you think it does?
I should add, I think the above situation (in what’s now comment 47) would not be changed if one or both of the parents involved were not the biological ones. I simply don’t think that makes any difference here.
The more I think about it, the more I think custody is the big issue.
I can’t see how a man can ever get custody, unless the mother allows him to play a substantial part in the child’s upbringing or is rendered incapable of looking after the child herself. At birth the mother is going to be granted custody automatically, and thereafter she will be the primary caregiver which means she’s going to keep custody (again, unless she allows the father to play a role in the child’s upbringing which means he becomes the primary caregiver).
In this sense, I think it’s legitimate to complain about women “trapping” men into paying support (as opposed to the situation where the man has custody and the woman is “trapped” into paying support). The default is that the woman has custody and man pays support. I can’t see how the reverse situation can come about unless the woman allows this to happen, or suffers a misfortune (can’t look after the child because of illness, for example).
If you value custody over not having custody, then Ed’s right that “women have more incentives to become pregnant than a men do.”
>>>the woman is straightforward in that she wants to keep a child if the contraception fails, and the man, even though he doesn’t want any children (and was straightforward about that), decides to take that risk. (It’s a small risk, with good contraception.) In this situation I don’t think the father should be obligated to support the child.>>>
Why the hell not? You said it, he *knew* she would keep a child if she got pregnant and *HE* took the risk.
Why the hell so? I just don’t see the case for the affirmative.
>>Why the hell so? I just don’t see the case for the affirmative. >>
He knew the risk, as you said, and decided to take it anyway.
And what you are also losing here is that this is about the child, not the mother. A mother who refuses to feed her child is guilty of neglect and abuse. A father who doesn’t pay child support is taking food out of that child’s mouth, but he shouldn’t be guilty of anything?
He just wants free nookie, accepting that the woman might get pregnant, but hey, that’s her tough sheet? In your example she was honest and said she would have the child if she got pregnant. He decided to have sex anyway, figuring what the hell, he could just walk away?
Is there *ever* a time a man should be held responsible for his decisions? What’s wrong with saying “Hey, maybe this isnt the right woman to sleep with, since she’ll want to keep the child if she gets pregnant?” He decided to risk pregnancy, but hey, that’s ok cause it’s only a woman’s problem. Screw the kid. Screw the woman.
Wow. Just wow.
Try getting away with that on the futures market.
“Excuse me, I only invested my money to get a fat profit on soybeans. I knew the crops were grown in Tornado Alley, but I didn’t want that tornado to destroy the crop, so I want that money I invested back, please. Screw the farmers.”
Also, welching on a bet is seen as immoral and even illegal generally in male-bonding circles. Why is it suddenly OK if it’s a bet on sexual outcomes with a woman and child?
pdf23ds,
Your posts 47 and 48 absolutely contradict your post 23. In post 23, you are creating a situation where a man can give up all responsibilities to the child unilaterally. In posts 47-8, you are creating a situation where, although secondary, a man still has rights to the child, if he wants them. So basically, under the system you advocate, a man has lesser rights to a child, but can give them up and have no responsibility. If a woman is stuck with the responsibilities of having a child due to autonomy, she should have full, not merely primary, rights to control the child and exclude the biological father. Otherwise, she has autonomy when it benefits the man (he doesn’t want to be involved, even financially) but less when it is a detriment to the man (he seeks involvement). Her “autonomy” depends on his subjective desires. Doesn’t sound like autonomy to me. One way to see the bias in this standard, is to ask whether you would rather be the man or woman in this situation. I would rather be the man.
Nik,
Of course fathers may get custody of children. It is not for the mother to “allow” the father access to his children–unless he is proven unfit (which requires clear and convincing evidence) even if he is initially the non-custodial parent he will have court-ordered visitation rights, and often joint legal (and possibly physical) custody of the child. Some states even have laws establishing joint custody as the preferred form of custody.
The question is, when it comes down to who gets custody of the children, in cases where completely shared custody is impractical, what criteria should we consider? Should the closeness of the relationship and the amount of time spent with the child be considerations? If there are problems with using that information to make decisions, what are these problems and when should those criteria not apply as a result? If these criteria mean that women more often get custody, is that because they are women qua women, or because they are primary caregivers who happen to be women? If primary caregivers should not have a presumption in favor of custody, who should? Why?
Personally, in my own life, I would like to co-parent, but I know that other concerns may prevent that approach.
I didn’t say I disliked it because he put the “women do occasionally trick men” in his essay, I said I disliked it because he put it in the second paragraph. As in, he was framing it from the get-go to have that in one’s mind. Honestly, I think it would have been more effective as a second to last or afterthought.
Hehe, I’ve been called “shrill” on the internet. Guess I can finally join the “shrill, hysterical, bitchy” feminists.
And, perhaps your right: perhaps my critism was not as well thought out as it could have been. I agree with Amp on a great many things, and respect his beliefs even when I don’t: but in this case, the theme seemed to apologetic to the MRAs.
Oooh, I get to co-opt some pro-life language: Because it’s a child, not a choice. The argument for the affirmative, pdf, is that even though the result was not desired, there’s still a kid in all of this. Who needs clothes, food, school supplies, etc. To say that fathers shouldn’t be forced to pay child support if they really don’t want to isn’t supportable.
I started this and have posted on 2 other threads before I even noticed it, bad me. I want to state first that I don’t think trapping a man is the norm. I think women do it, but men abandon their children too. I think ignoring one or the other is just being blind.
I want to touch on some situations that are being ignored or overlooked. We talk about the low social/economic status of single mothers. In the truly poor, how many grandparents are raising kids that mothers are collecting support for. How many mothers, 2, 3 or more kids, don’t worry about pregnancy because medicare pays the hospital and one more isnt a big deal.
I am not trying to point at anyone. I am not saying it is every woman twisting the laws and abusing the system. I am saying it happens and there should be protections. I have seen the situations above. I have seen women who were unsure of who the father was and used the “best benefits” pick to demand support.
And Nik, I think custody is the issue. While there are a lot of fathers who don’t want anything to do with their kids I think they are about as uncommon as the women trapping men into marriage or support. I think humans care about their children. It is instinct, as natural as breathing. Now, do men doubt children are theirs? Surely, but they are justified in those doubts too often to be dismissed out of hand.
I really didn’t make the statement with the thought that it was the norm. I base my arguments on rights vs. responsibilities. If you are going to keep piling on responsibilities you should be willing to share the rights equally as well.
Amp, you have said in several posts that to say a woman made a unilateral decision to have a child we have to disregard what happened up to the pregnancy. I agree to a point but as I stated in another thread if the man is held 50% responsible for the child, he should also be 50% responsible for the fetus that leads to that child. If he is not and has no vested intrest in that fetus, no rights or responsibilities in association with the pregnancy, then the act of birth is what “creates” a person.
Please do not take this to mean I am supporting forced abortion or some such nonsense. I am supporting a fathers right to know. I am supporting non-gender discriminate custody. I am supporting equal treatment under the law. I feel truly that a woman should NOT assume she has custody. I feel that attempt to keep a father out of a child’s life through deceit should be a crime with stiff penalties. I want visitation enforcement to have the same priority as child support enforcement. I don’t want another father to be laughed at by his lawyer when he suggests trying to get physical custody.
I simply want to get rid of the “have my cake and eat it too” system.
I don’t consider myself an MRA by the way. I am just a father and a man who likes to see fair play. As for why MRA’s are always harping on whats good for men…well, ahem, they are activists for MEN’s rights…right??
If childrearing before divorce in our current society is gender discriminate, (and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t), why should child-rearing after divorce be non-gender discriminate?
>> I want visitation enforcement to have the same priority as child support enforcement.>>
In Massachusetts, it takes precedence, at least it did in my case. I was flat out told by both judges and family officers that if I interfered in visitation, I’d lose custody and be jailed. Meanwhile, my ex consistently refused to pay child support, up to and including quitting jobs every time the court got impatient and finally imposed a wage assignment.
The *only* time the court ever even suggested jailing him was when he lied to the judge on the phone, while I was standing in front of the judge, by telling him that I’d told my ex not to bother to come to court. The judge told him if he did not appear the next day, he’d be arrested. By the way, that necessitated my taking yet *another* unpaid day off from work to attend the then postponed contempt hearing.
Regardless of how many times he was found in contempt of court, and we’re talking in the dozens, his visitation schedule was never affected. As the court told me, visitation and child support are two entirely different issues, and while I could as the custodial parent, be expected to “make up” the missing child support out of my in those days meager income to ensure my son was taken care of, I could never take the place of my son’s father, and my son had a right to a relationship with the man.
Visitation was taken *very* seriously in Massachusetts, at least in the early-mid nineties when this all took place.
Because legally it is indiscriminate before divorce. If it is one sided that is a family decision.
Because post-divorce or in unmarried couples it effects the ability of a parent to see his/her child.
Because what is best for the child is going with the better parent, not the female parent unless she is completely unable or unwilling to raise the child.
Broce, I missed your last post before I posted. Not to sound harsh but in both of your posts your X sounds like an ass. Now, on the flip side, if he DID visit with your son every other weekend it is unfair of you to say he contributed nothing emotionally to the raising of his child. I have seen the opposite of your case as well so I have heard the “seperate issue” battlecry before. Meaning, I have seen mothers withhold visitation and the father still has to pay support and is jailable if he stops. Not an issue in PA, where my X lives by the way. There I never see the money it is pulled from my paycheck, which is not from PA I might add, as is any claimed medical costs or anything else. I am also in arrears if she submits the bill to the state regardless of if I know about it or not…do you know what child support arrears do to credit? It is ugly.
Anyway, fathers who do not at least make an attempt to meet support are wrong. Partial is better than none and the states should change laws to reflect that as well. As for how your X wasn’t garnished, well I have no response to that. I guess we can blame the system again. It sounds to me like you got the short end.
Using the child as a weapon is probably the lowest point in any relationship. Custodial parents who dangle visitation rights over a non-custodial parents head are just as terrible as parents who refuse to pay. It is said over and over, support is more than money. Denying visitation is simply denying everything about support that is not financial and equally as horrific.
>>Not to sound harsh but in both of your posts your X sounds like an ass. Now, on the flip side, if he DID visit with your son every other weekend it is unfair of you to say he contributed nothing emotionally to the raising of his child.>>
He is an ass, and as for contributing emotionally, you could ask my son about that. He’d disagree. Any problems were *mine* to deal with, alone.
Just a cute Xmas tale…I flew my son back there to spend some holiday time with his dad this year. Now my son is 18, and the ex isnt going to pay, so I did. I also gave the kid some “emergency money” in case he ran into problems. The morning he was to leave, dad announced that unless my son gave him all of the emergency money, he wasn’t going to get him to the airport and he’d miss his flight home. So my kid forked over *my* money to dad, and arrived home at 11 pm MT, not having eaten since 7 am ET…he had no money to buy food at the airport on his layover. Yeah, my ex is an ass.
>>Using the child as a weapon is probably the lowest point in any relationship. >>
Absolutely, and I went out of my way not to do that. Alas, the same could not be said of my ex.
As for garnished wages, it’s my belief that *all* child support should be by wage assignment. It would save a ton of heartache, and frankly court time and money. And if this was the standard there’d be no “stigma” attached, which is what a lot of non custodial parents say they object to in having a wage assignment.
BTW…the moral of the story about not screwing over your kid is that it can come back to haunt you. Not only has my child decided that his dad is a lowlife..he loves him but has no respect for him…but in order to avoid paying support, he put his house *and* his business, every asset he has, into the name of his current wife when they married about ten years ago. Looks like they are headed for a divorce. And guess who’ll walk away without a dime to his name?
Yeah, I grinned just a little when I heard that.
Your first post implied that I should have put in something about how rare such cases are. Probably you’re right about that; it would have been better if I had done that. My thought at the time was that the case I cited was sufficiently bizarre that I didn’t need to point out that it was rare, but perhaps that’s over-optimistic on my part.
My main target readers for posts like this one are feminists who are googling for ammunition to use in debate with anti-feminists; for them, just including the evidence and argument in enough detail to recycle is enough, since they’ll just take what they need and leave the rest. And fence-sitters, who I imagine are convinced that MRAs have some legitimate concerns, but not fully convinced of the MRA program. For those readers, I think it might be reassuring that I don’t take a “this problem never, ever happens” position, so that’s why I put it near the top.
I admit this may be a mistaken strategy on my part, but that’s how I was thinking of it.
This whole thread is nauseating. Why, somebody tell me exactly WHY, anybody thinks a woman would make the god-awful choice of having a baby on the off-chance she might get some child support out of it? Apparently all the fathers on this thread are exemplary, but you are the exceptions to the rule. According to the US Dept of Health and Human Services, in 2003 child support payments were 68% in arrears! 68%! This isn’t chump change, here–this means 68% of the money that was supposed to support children just isn’t being paid. Maybe, just maybe, because this is a crazy universe after all, one woman in a million made a really dumb-ass decision to “have a baby to get some child support.” I’ll bet you just about anything that same woman is left holding the bag and getting pennies, if anything.
To me this is as damaging as the entire welfare queen stereotype–and by the way might I add that there is NO SUCH THING as AFDC anymore. The welfare deform bill that Clinton signed into law has made the entire act of trying to get some government child support (since the fathers aren’t paying)–also known as TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, an exercise in frustration, bureaucratic run-around, and nay-saying.
Oh, and as a little aside: starting January 1, the state of Wisconsin is now going to be taking the child support away from any moms who are getting any cash government assistance–TANF or C-sup (which is supplemental income for the children of disabled parents). The final amount they will be taking away by October is 58% of the total child support from the poorest of the poorest of the poor in Wisconsin. So even those few moms who get anything are going to, once more, be getting next to nothing.
I think my question is how does the father get custody, without the mother allowing this to happen? At birth the mother gets custody. Thereafter custody goes to the primary caregiver. But, given that the mother has custody by virtue of birth, how can the father ever become the primary caregive and get custody (without the mother allowing this to happen)?
In a situation where one of two people get custody, and both are competing for custody, isn’t it always going to go to the mother? The mother will get custody at birth, and because of this that means she gets to keep it. And given that aren’t men trapped into providing support, as they can’t get access to the caregiving role?
nik: Your question is based on a false premise — that custody is always or even most often awarded to the person who has at the time of the request physical custody of the child. First, in many, many countries in the world, the mother has almost no custody rights. In the US, the laws have evolved to ensure that both men and women are assumed to have access to the child barring unfit parentage conditions, and most actual divorces are drawn up on a time sharing basis. What often happens is that one parent or the other (in my experience more often but not always the father) moves on and stops taking as much of an interest in the child. In situations where divorce is not involved, again, the mother is more often but not always the one who is either more interested in raising the child(ren) or believes it’s her responsibility.
what odanu said. Also, nik, in cases of mental illness, drug addiction, or other circumstances where the mother is obviously unfit, the father or the state can get sole custody without the mother allowing it.
Also, I found this interesting piece on child support law this morning, and I couldn’t remember if anyone had already posted it already.
There’s alot of talk about people taking responsibility here. I think we should remember that the majority of the people we’re expecting responsibility from are between 18 and 22, poor, and ill educated. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the responsibility for the child rests primarily with parents. As a society, we’re ultimatelty responsible.
While I agree that custody/child support laws open males to an unreasonable vulnerability, I think the argument is redundant, when, for reasons both ethical and practical, the responsibility clearly rests with society.
With that out of the way… what the hell is an MRA?
Oh – haha… Men’s Right’s Activist. I just notioced it. Never mind. :D
How do fathers get custody? A few do because the mother is genuinely unfit (addicted, neglectful, etc.) and some do because the mother is uninterested. MRA’s tend to play up these cases. However, many fit, committed, and loving mothers can lose custody, too. They lose because the father finds a good Father’s Rights attorney and they wage war. They slander, lie, and attack. And they win.
I lost to a guy who has not held a steady job in 15 years now. His last employer took him to court for fraud. None of it matters, because the courts around here are so thrilled to see an “interested” father. Of course it also helps if your county family courts are father sympathetic. Here in our county, our local fathers rights honcho actually managed the campaign of our family court judge, so you know the judge is gonna deliver. Fathers rights people sit on the boards of the major non-profit counseling centers, the ones who do custody evaluations. Our evaluator, who did take my ex to task for obstructing contact and badmouthing (typical behavior of abusers, who are the most likely fathers to pursue custody as part of their power-and-control issues), spoke at a fathers rights meeting against mothers who engage in “maternal gatekeeping.” But for all his concern about mothers who obstruct visitation, there was no concern about fathers who do the same, as he gave my ex custody in spite of (because of?) his abuse. Naturally, the family court judge also has a very bad reputation among advocates for victims of domestic violence, because she has a history of granting custody or unsupervised visitation to abusers.
I suspect that because custody is a local county affair, that research would show that there are hotbeds of mothers losing custody. And it sure seems like certain counties come up again and again for absolutely agregious behavior against mothers.
Cathy Young of Reason wrote on this quite some time ago. I’m all for the noncustodial parent paying his/her share of child support, but I think the combination of TV Dramas and Court Shows has unduly influenced our opinion on what Child Support is like and how it should and shouldn’t be awarded.
My girlfriend and her ex were discussing this at our house last weekend (he’d come to where we live to see his daughter). They were talking about how surprised people are at how well they get along. Those TV drams paint a picture of divorce as not just adversarial (which it pretty much is by definition; if the principals weren’t adversaries to some degree, they’d stay married) but bellatorous. I don’t even think that’s a word — people think a divorcing couple exceeds the bounds of English vocabulary in their seething hatred for each other. Against that backdrop, the non-custodial parent is naturally going to fight every mill, and the custodial parent is naturally going to try and squeeze out as much as possible out of sheer spite.
Silverside, it sounds to me like you are on the flip side of the norm. Trust me I empathize. Fit parents should not be denied access to their children. I also feel that gender shouldn’t be used to determine a parents fitness. As for abusive fathers being the most likely to pursue custody, that statement is quite prejudiced. Would you say the same of mothers who pursue custody? The rest of your concerns seemed genuine, that just sounded hateful.
I watched a quite interesting programme on the BBC last night. That sort off touched on this issue.
I will say b4 I start that I am undecided on this subject, as I have met both Single mothers that have been poorly treated and those that seem to be working the system.
On this show about Benifit investigations, they had a number of single parents telling their stories of how they came to be on benifits and in the situration that they were in. What was interesting is that Yes, benifits do not make you rich and just keep you above the poverty line. But some young women do not Know this b4 they get pregnant, and the popular image that is being dicussed here (get pregnant and the state will keep you, so you don’t have to work) is held wrongly by many of these young women.
So essentially some, by no means all, young women belive that having a child is better than getting a job and that they will recive more benifits, they are then suprised to how little and how hard it can be.
I recently dated a single mum, who was getting support from the childs father and it was still very tuff for her. So i have a very little bit of understanding of what it takes.
So maybe the perception that you can have a child, get a house and more benifits is not just the perception of angry MRA but also some of the young women themselves. Poverty is the main factor. Young men may see an escape in crime (drug dealing etc) and some young women may see an escape (wrongly) through motherhood.
Just some Ideas.
Not being a father I have no idea about child support so I will refrain from commenting on that.
evil_fizz said:
It is definitely a child, but it was also a choice. It was the mothers choice not to abort the child. The production of the child was a voluntary and autonomous act on the part of the mother. This is why she has the responsibility, and why the father doesn’t, in my one-night stand hypothetical. And when abortion isn’t avaliable (as it really isn’t, readily) then my whole line of argument falls. Does this make it largely hypothetical? Hell, yes. Does this make it a much lower priority than other feminist issues? Hell, yes. In other words, I think my priorities are straight, but this issue still kind of bothers me, being a guy and all.
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While I don’t really consider myself an MRA, I do read a lot of MRA stuff and I’m pretty knowledgable in the arena of child custody and support, at least in NY state.
I have to say that I don’t think the idea of women tricking men into fatherhood in order to get CS is so muchof a common MRA myth across the board. I will concede that it is where very wealthy men are concerned. From what I’ve seen over the last few years that’s about the extent of it.
It seems to me you may be confusing that idea with the very pervasive — and fairly accurate — idea that many decent men are victimized by laws like the Bradley Amendment and that the gov’t shouldn’t have the power to simply step in and redefine one’s parental role when no law has been broken and no significant wrongdoing can be objectively demonstrated.
On the argument that abusive men are more likely to go for custody:
That may be true, but with a caveat. The other group of men most likely to go for custody are those whose wives are abusive. The reason for these two extreme groups is that they are the ones highly motivated to go for custody despite the 10:1 odds against them. The abusive men because they’re blind to anything but they’re own narcisistic needs and the abused because they desperately want to save their kids.
The rest of the middling dads who are by and large good folks suck it up and hand over the most meaningful aspects of their lives simply because they listen to their lawyers when they tell them the fight is futile.
I am sick and tired of women abusing the child support system for their own financial benefit. Not for the children and the fathers that are doing what they are suppose to do as a father are getting the raw deal.
I am a black woman and there are several women that make me embarassed to be a woman.
Men are getting the raw end of the stick. The Attorney Generals office is a joke and yes it was designed for women, not for men. (that is a damn shame!!!)
I would love to start a women support group that are against women that abuse the child support system for financial gain. They don’t use the child support for the children.
You all should take a look at: http://www.violentacres.com/archives/54/the-deadbeat-dad-myth
A WOMAN writes to say the entire concept of ‘deadbeat dads’ is a myth.
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I am a child support worker for the state of Missouri. I think there’s two problems with your argument, Amp…
1) Women who become pregnant to entrap a man often don’t do so to try to get child support. They do so to try to get him into a deeper level of commitment to her (or any level of commitment at all). “If we have a baby he’ll settle down, stop screwing around on me, stay home at night (or let me move in with him to begin with), etc, etc…”
2) Most women–and most men, for that matter–don’t have the slightest idea what child support involves. They haven’t done the research you’ve done or worked in the system the way I have. Most women believe their monthly order will be far, far larger than it actually is. They also often believe that once an order is established they’ll get the money, every month, like clockwork. They don’t seem to realize that if a guy loses his job for whatever reason the child support stops, at least until he finds work again–there’s no such thing as blood from a stone. They don’t know that some guys jump from job to job, trying to stay ahead of our garnishments, or work for cash under the table, or attempt any of a number of tricks to beat the system (they should have asked themselves if their guy was going to be like this before getting naked with him, but that’s another argument).
I’ve had a number of custodial parents call me up, incensed because they haven’t been getting their monthly support. “But I have a court order!” they shout in outrage. I then have to find a tactful way of telling them that, congratulations, they have a piece of paper. Being awarded an amount is one thing. Collecting it is a different matter entirely.
I have a story regarding a resentful father, begrudgingly paying child support, who thinks I intentionally got pregnant. Except, I didn’t. Here’s my dilemna.
At age 23 I had an abortion. It was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do. It was performed at 5.5 to 6 weeks. I made the decision for many reasons and believed it to be the best decision at the time. I had no idea I would live to regret it.
At age 32, I was 5 years into another relationship and was very much in love. After 3 years of hoping to become pregnant, but not (rarely used birth control), I went in for my annual pap test and was told some alarming news. My gyno said that she couldn’t get the cells required on the swab, that my cervix was pretty much closed. It was likely due to a surgery or trauma. I told her about the abortion and asked if that could have caused this. She said the abortion had scarred my cervix, leaving it “micro” and this was likely why I hadn’t become pregnant. She said my periods would likely stop too and when that happened to have it checked by doctor, not to assume early menopause. I wanted a child one day so I was devastated. We split up the following year, but for other reasons.
At age 37 I started seeing someone I was completely enamoured with. We had known each other since high school as aquaintances. We dated for a month or so then jumped right into sex. It was amazing though and I felt like I had known him for half my life – I had. We used condoms at first, then one night he didn’t. I knew he wasn’t sleeping around. I knew I wasn’t. So I was careless but it is better.
Then an odd thing happened. He said that he wanted to “knock me up”. I almost laughed aloud because it sounded a little dorky. I thought to myself, “yea, me too, but that’s pretty much not a possibility”. I thought it was an in-the-moment thing, didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t mention my potential infertility issue – not a relationship opener I figured. So, away we went, no condom and he didn’t pull out. I decided not to go to the doc to get a morning after pill. Figured I was not in any risk due to the closed cervix, screw it. We continued the sexual relationship in pretty much the same way for the following month or so.
It was sitting with my best friend one night, talking about this guy and the great potential I thought we had when she asked me if I had my period yet. I hadn’t noticed it late. She said hers was 2 weeks ago – I was in sync with her – it was late. I felt fine but wondered if maybe the new exercise program was too much.
I was going to get a test if it didn’t show up in the next week but we had a date planned and I decided to tell him that what my friend had brought up . It was something I was so sure was not the case but I didn’t want to NOT tell him either, just in case. He said, lets get a test. It was funny that he seemed almost excited… It was positive!!!!! I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to scream with joy!
My actual reaction was surprising even to me. I cried. I cried for the choice I made last time I was pregnant. I cried because I knew I was not quite ready to have a child – I had just begun a second career and financially was about a year from being free of some debt. I cried because I knew the relationship was too new to handle this kind of seriousness. I cried for the pregnancy I didn’t have with my last partner. I cried for the choice I was facing. I cried because he wanted to talk about it and I couldn’t talk about it – it was too painful to even think about having an abortion again, at this age. I hadn’t been able to forgive myself still for the last time.
I made a decision for me. I told him I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. I wanted to keep the baby no matter what. Immediately he became nervous, then abusive. I never told him about about the scarring, the fertillity issue. I chose not to tell him about the abortion I had when he started referring to the fetus as a ball of goo and a parasite. He quickly became verbally, mentally, emotionally, financially, then physically abusive. I left and I never told him anything about my past. I didn’t trust him with my personal information at that point. I didn’t care what he thought after he physically jeopardized the pregnancy. I told him that if he didn’t want to be involved I would leave him alone and manage on my own.
I moved to another province to have the child, where I had support. I didn’t think I would ever hear from him again. He called just before her birth. He wanted involvement. I allowed him back into my/her life. Mistake. Then he decided he didn’t want to be involved again. He made a mess of the new situation I was in in the new province. He made a mess of me. I was trying to recover from birth, hormonal, thinking about saving my family and learning the ropes of being a new mother. My support withdrew. I then had to move back to my old location and set up a home again.
He didn’t see us for months. I was now angry and quickly struggling financially. I applied for child support. He threatened me with a lengthy court battle. Now he does not speak to me. He is telling his family and friends that I intentionally got pregnant and that he is just financially supporting MY decision to have a child. He has minimal supervised visits. He is trying to get more visitation in order to pay less child support. He is very angry. I’m quite angry with him for being such a weasle.
I am not sure if I made the best choice for not telling him that the pregnancy was in no way intentional. I acted recklessly by not using a barrier against std’s but not by not using birth control, since I didn’t think I could have children. He said he thought I was on the pill (but he never, ever asked if I was). And then there was the mention of knocking me up… I can’t forget that.
My girl is now 6 months old and he is using every legal delay possible to keep child support ($323. per/m) out of my hands. He is not financially very successful. He is quite a lazy character. Spoon-fed by Mummy I have since found out with a long history of bad relationships behind him. He is bitter and resentful and reclusive. His family act as if they are doing me a favour by acknowledging their own grandchild. And I have to trust her in his care after he has assaulted me and referred to her birth in the context of “me squeezing out a kitten has ruined his life”.
I feel like this situation has just spiraled so far out of control because there are many days I wake up feeling so overwhelmed by anger. We live in a smallish town and I can’t defend myself against his allegations without discussing my very personal past – an abortion, scarring, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions. Do I tell this guy my private history re: abortion or could he use that against me in court? I am not sure how to handle this any further.
Chief: Just out of curiousity: What is it that you do, as a child support worker? I mean, besides telling custodial parents to shove those decrees you-know-where?
I don’t see this as a problem with my argument. It’s not me claiming that child support motivates women to try and trick men into fatherhood; it’s MRAs, such as the one I quoted in my post.
Is there a widespread problem of women conniving to get pregnant in an attempt to force their boyfriends to commit? Maybe so, but I’d like to see evidence.
As for your second point, I don’t see it as relevant to my argument at all. And clearly, to some extent, MEN are aware of how child support works in practice; that’s why they’re less likely to get women pregnant in states with stricter child support laws. If men (in general) have an awareness of how likely it is that they’ll actually be forced to pay child support, I don’t see any reason to suppose that women don’t have a similar level of awareness.
No, it is a problem, because it opens up an alternative causal route. We just have to finesse it a little bit.
There’s the pretty crude idea that CS motivates women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood so they can get their hands on child support payments. The idea is they’re motivated by the cash and only the cash. On that view $100 from the taxpayer and $100 from the father will provide the same motivation to get pregnant. But that’s actually distinct from the idea that CS motivates women to “trick” men into involuntary fatherhood, it could work through other routes.
What’s to say the cash value of the CS payments is the only thing a woman gets from them? CS payments are also a legal commitment. If a women becomes pregnant, the father will be more deeply committed and less likely to leave the more his money is tied to her household through CS payments. If he leaves her, some of his money gets left behind. So it’s entirely possible CS motivates women to try and trick men into fatherhood, over and above the level of the cash, because it legally ties them to her household and increases their level of commitment.
Interestingly, that interpretation is totally compatable with the observation you cite about how the “stronger child support laws are, the lower the rate of single motherhood”. Stronger CS means more commitment which means lower single motherhood. You think it’s men avoiding pregnancy, but it could be that they’re more likely to commit.
I’m puzzled by this whole discussion. Leaving out the example of the woman who saved the sperm in the condom (that woman was wrongly awarded child support, in my opinion!), mostly babies are conceived as a result of sexual intercourse.
It is very difficult to “rape” a male in this particular way, and I wouldn’t think it common. So we may assume, may we, that the men in question had intercourse with the women in question voluntarily, for the most part? (In my own experience, it isn’t at all difficult to persuade a male human being to have sexual intercourse. Voluntarily. To say the least.)
I am left thinking that these “tricked” men would benefit by a refresher course in human biology. They don’t know how babies are conceived? They think all contraception (or ANY contraception) is foolproof? Especially contraception which is not under their control? Such charming naivete, don’t you think?
“It’s entirely possible” is not evidence, nik.
I’m sick and tired of the double standards and the hoops that custodial fathers have to jump through to get actions from our court systems. I’ve been a single father for 11 years now and grew tired of my ex-wife paying me “what she could”. So, I go to social services to have them handle it all for me…… “bad mistake”!!!…. I have a court order for her to pay child support administration, wich was in effect Dec. 1st……. Since then she has payed a “partial payment” of one month. At almost 5 months behind, they send her out a letter notifying her of “possible” driver liscence suspension, (wich I have to call the department and initiate any action to be taken)……. I go into the dept of social services and see a sign that is hanging up, (since Sept., that I requested them take down, because it was offensive), that Says……….. ” thank You Dad, for Your love and “child support”, Happy Fathers Day”……….What kinda crap is that???!!!………. When are these people gonna ditch this “dead beat Dad” syndrome, and realize that women are just as big if not bigger dead beats?????
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re not going through anything mothers dont go through as well. Out of 13 years, I’ve gotten 2 months of child support. He’s never gone to jail, never had his license taken (not even a letter) and to get any court date set, *I* have to call and stay on their asses. And all they do is tell him to pay. So I guess they’ll ditch the deadbeat dad thing when there’s not any.
OK, so why do I have so many clients whose (admittedly screwed up) sons, being way far behind in child support, cannot drive, cannot get a license to do anything, and if they get a job their wages are immediately garnished so they don’t have enough to live on? (Good enough for them, by the way, in my opinion.)
Being a dead-beat Dad (or Mom) destroys your life as an economic person. If you drive you do so without a license. If you work, you work under the table. You cannot discharge this debt in bankruptcy, or by any other means. I know one guy who gave up and is living under an overpass in San Francisco because he’ll never catch up.
My sympathy for this creep is everything it should be, by the way, but if these orders are so hard to enforce, why is my guy living under that overpass?
I know one guy who gave up and is living under an overpass in San Francisco because he’ll never catch up.
Wonder how his kids are doing.
Probably better with him out of the picture. But, the plural of anecdote isn’t data.
True enough, Joe, but all the horror stories by custodial parents, immediately above, are not data either.
The kids are grown. These are back debts. They don’t go away when the children grow up. The kids were, of course, better off without this creep, although to my knowledge no rape was involved in their production, so the mothers who chose to sleep with this guy were probably not prizes either.