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I would agree that there are many laws whose motivation for being bear very little to relation to their stated purpose.
Sure, but she has less going on in her life now that needs any support. Hard to say from this one alone. Which brings me to:
Well, I would say we take a look at whose benefit the terms of the policy correlates the most with, which leads me to Exhibit A, the smoking gun:
I am once again left to wonder if children of rich fathers need more food and clothes than the children of poor ones. What's the thing that children need more of when their father is richer? I really can't overstate how damning it is that the amount of funds demanded for child support bears almost no correlation whatsoever with the needs of any actual or theoretical children being supported.
You used the word "punitive" to describe my likely motivation for having skepticism toward modern child support policy, but to me it seems like a great descriptor for how child support policy itself actually works. Its terms make very little sense if you want to believe that it's actually about supporting children, and much more sense if you impute that its actual motivation has much more to do with look dude, ya had sex, now pay up.
I'd feel a lot better if the number were derived from what children actually need, rather than how much we think we could and should extract from a given man.
I know how it works. It's absurd. In most places, if you go and fuck some loser who works at the grocery store deli, you get like eighty bucks a month which isn't nearly enough—and then me and other taxpayers have to pitch in to make the difference. But if you manage to sack a Guy In Finance, you get a gorillion dollars.
It gets really bad if you think of all the myriad, trivial ways that the funds could be made to better seek the actual needs of actual children that could be implemented but aren't. I'd be way less offended about how the numbers are calculated if the funds that were clearly in excess of what the child's needs went into some general pool that was drawn off to support tougher cases. But that's not how it works, all of that excess needs to go to the mother who bagged a high value guy. I suppose that's the bounty she earns for a sexual conquest that puts a high earner to work for society's reproductive needs. Sorry, little Timmy: apex maneater Stacy needs her meal ticket.
There's a practical, happy medium of oversight that exists between none at all and hellhole 1984 panopticon. I find it suspect that we choose one of these extremes. I've given you an example of a trivial to implement solution that would substantially increase the auditability of funds ostensibly earmarked for the support of children for very little added friction and inconvenience to the people involved. I could probably think of a dozen more, but I'm not going to waste too much effort on this one as I doubt that anything I could offer would change your opinion about me. I mean, you've already read my mind over TCP/IP and know my true sentiments:
My most preferred model is that accountability for reproductive outcomes be assigned based on possession of the power to shape those outcomes. Things have gotten more complicated since Dobbs, but before that, here in the States, the entire process of human reproduction from start to finish was considered a woman's private affair by the most supreme court in the land. Responsibility should have been assigned accordingly.
I understand that this isn't how it works, and probably not how it will ever work for reasons that may never cease to frustrate me. My second-preferred solution is that we keep the spillover as contained to the most nearby man as possible, and in a way that empowers individual men to avoid this situation as far as practical.
I understand that this probably won't happen either, and that I'll probably just be made to pay women to fuck other men and bear their children for the rest of my natural life.
But I am allowed to complain about it.
There aren't. Not here in the States. I've looked. I did, however, find cases of children afflicted by these diseases suing their mothers for what she did to them and losing due to being considered as having no standing. Can you at least understand why I might be quite unimpressed with what our civilization demands from women when it comes to reproduction, and why I might not see where exactly it gets off demanding anything from men?
Why? Would it be too inconvenient to her to not have to fucking poison her own child?
"Fuck the children" is indeed the position of our civilization whenever the interests of women and children collide—and yes, if we are going to continue to do that, I would like the trifling, self-centered interests of grown-ass men to prevail over the welfare of children, too. Fuck 'em.
Biology doesn't write our laws or determine how they're adjudicated. Simple as. Men are biologically stronger than women but that doesn't stop rape from being illegal.
This would, in fact, be what peak justice in reproductive affairs looks like. Although as a matter of implementation detail, I'd much prefer an opt-in model. What women do with their bodies is nobody else's business, or it is. Pick one.
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