There are a handful of cases which highlight potential unfairness in the current child support system. For example, courts have held non-anonymous sperm donors liable for child support, even when the mother explicitly agreed to support the child fully herself. A court in
Sweden recently upheld a similar ruling.
The law examines child support rights from the perspective of the child, so the acts of the mother, no matter how heinous, will not supersede the right to support. The right to payment stems solely from biological parentage, and does not depend on the will or the deed of the man in question. And thus courts have upheld payments in
extreme cases, such as boys who were statutorily raped and in cases where women took the sperm from a condom and impregnated herself without the father's consent. These are just the notable cases, there are also myriad circumstances in which a woman lies about or sabotages birth control to get pregnant, and is still entitled to child support.
Although these cases seem extremely unfair, it is hard to counter the argument that the child still deserves support, and still deserves a living. A man paying $800 a month for a child conceived from sperm stolen from oral sex proposed one solution: a separate suit against the mother. An Illinois court recently reinstated his suit for emotional distress, providing some hope that this solution could stick.
I would go one step further. If the mother's actions were the sole cause of the child support obligation, why not force her to indemnify him for the payments? In the majority of the cases in which the mother has custody, this may seem impractical. The funds that she paid him would go straight back to herself, and would be taken from the same coffers that are providing current support for the child. This would effectively cancel out the child support and would not result in more overall provisions for the child's welfare. But what if such cases were instituted against non-custodial mothers, or after the child turned 18? Could the father obtain the value of his payments from the mother, now that her funds are her own and the child is independent? Such a result would seem to be a tad fairer than our current system.
And yet this is not the worst of it. A court ruled today that a man still owes back child support for a child that is not his, and whom he never claimed to parent. An
Arkansas Court found that payments due before the paternity test were not waived, since the results of those tests only apply to future payments under state law. Existing laws already oblige non-biological fathers to pay child support when they become
de facto parents by acting as such.
This departs from the justifications above; how can that basic entitlement inure to the child when there is no biological relationship?
I'm not quite sure whether this qualifies as a 'child-free' issue, and I welcome your feedback on that point. However, I have always suspected that, even as a woman, it is my childfree tendencies that have lead to my outrage on this issue. No one could trick me into having a child. Indeed, I would hold all the decision making in my hands while the man would nearly equally pay for that choice. Perhaps it is the absence of any ticking biological clock that allows me to feel that way; perhaps it would make a woman understand, even a little, why a woman would dupe a man into paternity. Or perhaps it is that in this pro-natal culture, we are very nearly the only ones left speaking on one side when someone cries "for the children!" on the other.
