All fathers should pay child support

I fear Feather Sky refers to all fathers as sperm donors, but I hope I'm wrong.

Added:  Otherwise, she's accusing sperm donors of being weasels.

Also added:  If sperm donors were liable to pay child support, I believe the number of men willing to be sperm donors would almost disappear.

Donations made to a sperm bank are made on the understanding that the donor is abandoning any parental rights or responsibilities. That's something both donors and recipients want. Who would donate if they might later be responsible for child support for some unknown and possibly large number of children? Who would receive knowing that they might later be legally challenged for custody or visitation by a stranger?

feather sky - I would agree that children whose fathers were sperm donors deserve to know their identity (for medical record reasons, etc.) and there is a [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jan/03/familyandrelationship... movement [/url]

in existence for children to have the right to know who their biological father is.

However, in regards to child support, this right is signed away by the mother. In all other cases, I agree that maintenance enforcement programs need greater resources.

I have a friend right now trying to get child support and it is extremely difficult. Especially if the father makes copious amount of money in a an illegal way that cannoe be "garnished" or

legally proven.

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Regardless, that man is the father and any father who does not willfully attempt to support his children is a criminal and should be sent to jail after all his assets are seized.

Can I assume you feel the same way of a woman who puts a child up for adoption? She's a biological parent too, and has a responsibility too, yes? So you can't just let her walk away from it. Publish the names of those "criminals" too, eh?

Wow - including sperm donors in that statement suddenly make the whole argumentation less credible, doesn't it?  There is a difference between a father and a sperm donor.  There also is a huge difference between a one-night stand and a sperm donor.  Women who choose to go to a sperm bank know, or should know, the implications of it.  There will be no "biological father" and there shouldn't.  That's the whole point of sperm banks.   A man who donates sperm has not "accepted the responsibility of being a father" but merely the fact that his sperm will be used in the reproduction process at one point or another.  But he has no moral, or legal obligation to do anything.  Changing that would modify the system in a way that would essentially render the process useless.  

Maysie makes an excellent point - what about adoptive parents? Could you imagine if a child or his/her adoptive parents could claim child support from the biological parent? It makes absolutely no sense.  Zero.  

Wilf is right - except that it should be specified that even if the custody arrangement is 50/50, there can still be child support.  In a joint custody situation, if a parent makes substantially more than the other parent, he or she might still have to pay child support.  In a situation where the non-custodial parent has 40% or less access rights with his/her child, he/she will have to pay child support in most cases.   

I agree that all parents should contribute to the needs of their children.  The reality is that every case if unique and there are number of factors that come into play when making that determination.  As for cases where the parent who has to pay child support hides revenue or doesn't declare it, there are mechanisms that courts can use to establish a salary for the non custodial parent.  Granted, it is complicated and not easy to do, but it does help a little.  It won't change the fact that some people will leave their jobs, disappear, hide revenue, or ask for joint custody in order to avoid having to paid child support.  But if I may, these are far from being common cases, they are just the ones we hear about most and the ones that fuel people's imagination in thinking the whole system is flawed.  

The problem I essentially have with the way this discussion was started is that it tries to portray women who get pregnant through sperm banks as victims, and men who donate sperm as criminals.  Both those statements are incredibly erroneous.

Interesting thing about "medical history" that people usually mention when talking about the right to know who your biological parents are - actually no one is entitled to ANYONE'S medical history, and just knowing who your biological parent is will not change that.  So let's say you find out that Joe Blow is your biological parent.  Do you think that means that you're going to be able to go to Joe Blow and demand his medical records and history?  Uh, I don't think so.  That's private, and no one has to share any of that with anyone.

Even if you have parents who raised you, you might not know their medical history if they feel like they need privacy and have kept it to themselves.

That said, I do think that adopted people have a right to know who their biological parents are.  But that reason (the medical history of your biological parents) is not really a valid reason, in my opinion.  And of course, this right to know who your biological parent is raises privacy concerns for women, too.  Who I have sex with is my own business, and even if I get pregnant from it, I'm not sure that anyone should be allowed to force me to disclose who I had sex at the time.

Certain species of weasel and ferrets have been reported to perform the mesmerizing weasel war dance, after fighting other creatures, or acquiring food from competing creatures. (Wikipedia)

Men's rights organizations have been organizing since the late fifties through aggressive columns in mainstream pornography magazines, by recruiting men and extending to them child support and alimony evasion justifications and techniques. (Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 1983). Twenty-five years ago, they were already telling men 'Don't pay unless you are entirely satisfied with divorce arrangements.' (Association des hommes séparés et divorcés du Québec, Open letter to La PRESSE). They have stepped up their whipping divorced men into a frenzy since child support payments have ceased being tax-deductible (1997, after the R. v. Thibodeau decision) and after payments were tied to Justice Canada-defined minimum guidelines (1998). These groups have developed "joint custody" demands, mostly (by their own admission) as a tool to escape child support obligations through the usually unrealized promise of "co-parenting". We all know that men who refuse to pay child support have developed myriads of ways to do so: threats and violence, quitting their job, hiding their income, putting their assets in the name of third parties, leaving town, etc.

Many anti-poverty groups have opposed child collection schemes because a) welfare recipients are now forced into suing for it; b) the money goes not to the caretaking parent but to the State, since it deducts that amount from welfare payments; c) mothers end up suffering the father's aggravation, since men tend to intimidate women in attempts to weasel out of their obligations. Some feminists are now demanding a livable income for all and wages for housework rather than hoping for the State to obtain payment of child support from all biological fathers.

Making paternal child support a moral issue begs the question of whether money owed caretaking parents for their work should come from the other biological parent or from society (taxes, corporations, etc.); moralization tends to maintain the privatization of what ought to be a social issue, with essential tasks justifying salaries and resources, as education and health care have become.

Beside women who choose artificial insemination for reasons of their own - with men who agree to A.I. but NOT to become fathers -, many women come to prefer not to have Dad involved, e.g. when he can't be trusted to pay child support on time and in full, or is otherwise untrustworthy (drugs, incompetence, etc.). They especially need to sever links when he has abused them or the children. Indeed, many women remain under threat and must hide their whereabouts from fathers. Men who pay child support tend to work harder at regaining control of "what they pay for" and they have an incentive to intimidate women away from their entitlements, if these are defined as entitlement to Dad's contribution rather than entitlement to a salary for their work.

I am not saying these patterns are right or that they point to any simple solution, just that they are real and must be taken into account when trying to hold men and society accountable for children's and caretaking parents' rights.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if caretaking parents had the power to decide the issue among themselves and have society implement their solutions?

I'm curious about what is a valid reason to know who your biological parents are.  How is it a right, where does the entitlement come from?  I'm not saying it isn't, I just don't understand why it should be.

My first reflex is to say that once a child is adopted, the legal and moral obligations are transfered to the adoptive parents, therefore the biological parents should be out of the equation. 

Will an adopted child eventually want to know who his/her biological parents are? Sure, possibly.  But do they have a "right"? I just feel that the biological parent might not wish for the contact, it is a privacy issue. 

So I guess what  I need is to understand why an adopted person has the right to know who his/her biological parent(s) are/is.

What about their medical history? If the history is divulged without divulging the biological parent(s) name(s)?

I do think people should have the right to see their original birth certificates and that both biological names should be on them. This is off-topic really to the thread title - which involves a ridiculous proposition in the opening post. If sperm donors are forced to pay for child support - then could they also sue for custody? It seems like it would open up a whole host of legal complications.

Ghislaine, that article does not say that all biological parents must disclose their medical history except for sperm donors.  It says that doctors are required to report certain serious communicable illnesses to the public health authority (e.g. HIV, Hepatitus) but it doesn't say that people have a right to demand that their parents divulge their medical records to them.  There is a grey area on issues like Huntington's or Tay Sachs or other illnesses that are genetically passed down to the next generation, but those are some pretty major exceptions. 

I think there are ways of ensuring that such information comes with anonymous sperm donations without identifying the donor.  That said, though, I think everyone should know the identity of their biological parents if they wish to know.  I don't think you even have to go as far as using medical history as a reason.  The reason is simply because people want to know this about themselves and it's important.

This whole discussion is founded on the premise that the responsibility for children lies solely with their parents - and then, of course, you have to determine who the parents are.

It would be nice to have a society which provided for all children, whether their parents could or would or not.

We're a very small part of the way there. Whether a child has one or two or no parents, it can count on free education K-12 and free health care (more or less). If we could figure out a way to expand that social obligation to clothing and shelter and food and other basics and not-so-basics of life, along with free childcare, skills training, employment, and other financial support for the mother, we wouldn't need to worry so much about identifying biological deadbeats etc.

Of course, deadbeat fathers (and no, I'm not including sperm donors!) should be subject to social censure, punishment, garnishment of income, and all the rest. But the wellbeing of the child and the mother should not be dependent on who is rich and who is poor.

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I'm curious about what is a valid reason to know who your biological parents are.  How is it a right, where does the entitlement come from? 

Similarly, what makes a child "yours"? Why don't we just remove children from their biological parents at birth, and give them to whoever is best able to care for them and provide for them? Where do we get this assumption that the very best environment for a child just happens to be with the parents who contributed their DNA?

I expect that if we can clarify parents' right to a child, we'll find the child's right to their parents in there somewhere too.

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And before welfare, well, a girl just had to turn her child over to the nuns who then discreetly passed it on to a moneyed couple.

The babies who were adopted were often the "lucky" ones; some stories from those days are beyond words, The Ideal Maternity Home - Home Of The Butterbox Babies.

(It stood only a few minutes drive from where I grew up; I've had the opportunity to work with the survivors.)

Snert wrote:

 

Similarly, what makes a child "yours"? Why don't we just remove children from their biological parents at birth, and give them to whoever is best able to care for them and provide for them? Where do we get this assumption that the very best environment for a child just happens to be with the parents who contributed their DNA?

 

I expect that if we can clarify parents' right to a child, we'll find the child's right to their parents in there somewhere too.

See, now maybe you are being ultra sarcastic, for some odd reason.  Did I say that a child does not have a right to a parent? Nope.  I asked what makes a child have the right to seek out his/her biological parents.  The child does have parents, they are just adoption parents.  It doesn't make them less parental.  He has a right to have parents.  The same as a parent has a right to have children. 

And to be clear, I'm not even suggesting that a child who's been adopted does not have the right to seek out his biological parents.  I'm just trying to make the argument make sense to me.  Its not clear at the moment.

And Martin D., in Quebec, the Département de la protection de la jeunesse encourages, as a principle, that a child stay in his or her natural environment.  It is only in particular, exceptionnal circumstances that a child will be removed.  And no, its not evaluated by a ultra-vague questionnaire. 

Response to Laura: The questionnaire is called "Projet de vie" and I heard its author present it proudly to an enthusiastic audience at an annual conference of the Association des centres de services sociaux du Québec some ten years ago, where I was presenting about the "fathers' rights" movement.

I couldn't have answered correctly this document's vague questions to save my life: imagine a terrified teenager's chances...

I am well aware of the "principle that a child be allowed to stay in his or her natural environment", but it is just that a principle. In fact, child apprehensions happen every day, as soon as possible after the baby is born in the case of teenage mothers deemed at risk of not "succeeding" this "projet de vie" from the get-go. 

It is all wrapped, of course, in lofty prose like this:"Le Centre de réadaptation Marie Enfant (CRME) du CHU Sainte-Justine a établi un partenariat avec l'OPHQ afin de favoriser une intégration et une participation sociales optimales essentielles à la prestation de l'ensemble des services liés à la réussite d'un projet de vie." Source

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See, now maybe you are being ultra sarcastic, for some odd reason.

I think the word would be 'facetious'. I don't really believe that we're ever going to give all of our children away, but I'm suggesting that to draw attention to the idea that we believe there exists a certain ownership between a parent and child. That we simply could not imagine taking a child from its parents as a matter of standard practice suggests that parents would expect a right to their child that necessarily includes a right to know who their child is.

In response to your adoption analogy, in which an adopted child has "parents", I would suggest that the best analogy from a parental point of view, then, would be that parents put their babies into a pool, then choose one at random. Then they, like the adopted child, would have "a" baby. Would that satisfy them? Would their desire to know which of those babies was biologically theirs be a right? If they would have a right, under those circumstances, to know which child was "actually" theirs then I would argue that any of those babies would have the same right to know which of those parents was "actually" theirs.

Good point Snert.  Thats what I was looking for ;) Its a pretty delicate situation indeed. 

It's certainly easy to knock "ownership" among progressives - but consider that this argument is being used to support the rich forcibly taking their children from the poor (via CAS) and fathers with no substantial record of caretaking taking primary caretaking mothers to Court and winning.

I didn't want to go through the adoption disclosure bureacracy but I believe beginning June 1 of this year in Ontario there will be a mechanism to share information freely.  Sorry for the drift.

What role does the state have in supporting children?

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Again, I repeat, a fathers obligation is to the child, not to the mother, so the mother can not give away or sign away or sell the rights of the child because they are not hers to give.

The obvious question is "if you believe that a mother cannot sign away a child's rights, why did you?"

My "masculinist" comment?  Really.

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She signed away her rights to support from the donor. There was no child at the time, so the question is moot about "its" rights being "signed away" by someone else.

Presumably that will always be the case, won't it? When a woman signs up for artificial insemination, there's not likely to be a child yet, I should think. And FS has indicated that she participated in such a program and now cannot access the identity of the sperm donor, so putting 2 + 2 together, I'm assuming that she signed the document agreeing that the sperm donor would remain anonymous and would not be held financially responsible for any resulting children.

And since FS evidently has very strong feelings to the effect that:

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the mother can not give away or sign away or sell the rights of the child because they are not hers to give.

I don't think it's out of line to ask why she did this, if her beliefs are as they are.