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I’ll raise the issue of paternity testing as potential culture war fuel.
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the specifics. But anyway, the practical reality is that a husband having such a test done on the kids without consulting anyone else is illegal. Basically there is never any permission given to do such tests.
On one of the now-defunct Manosphere sites, namely Dalrock’s blog, a regular commenter who went under the online name Novaseeker made a prediction about 10 or more years ago: not only will there not be any new legislation making paternity tests easier, as usually demanded online by angry men’s rights activists, but the opposite will happen. Namely: a growing number of men, usually in case of facing an initiated divorce, will start tinkering with these laws, covertly getting paternity tests done, basically on the black market, and this in turn will result on corresponding legislation becoming even more punitive and restrictive. There’ll be heavy fines, maybe even prison sentences etc.
Again, this was written more than 10 years ago. I wonder if anything of this has materialized or not.
I’d love to read a steelman for
Why a father should be forced to pay child support without a paternity test
Why, if the biological father is different, they shouldn’t be the one required to pay the child support instead
For example, I care about the mother’s and child’s interests, but how will 1) not create animosity from suspicious fathers, and 2) not decrease child support since the resentful adoptive father will try to evade it (at least as much as the biological one)?
My first big scissor statement was reading Reddit (outrage fanfiction) “my husband asked for a paternity test and I divorced him”. But I now understand that perspective: believing that your husband will always be suspicious of you, that they think with apathetic game-theoretic logic, while you want selfless and unconditional “true love”. I understand that acting like an unemotional autist is not rational, not harmless, not me (because I have emotions, desires, and even my logic is biased for them).
But I can’t even imagine a decent argument for 1) or 2).
The best argument I can think of is that someone needs to pay for the kid. The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense, partly for the sake of the kid. If the state starts paying child support, odds are the state will also want a say in how the child should be raised. I believe having such a large faceless entity be directly responsible for any individual leaves a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. So while it is unjust to demand child support while denying a paternity test, there is a decent argument it is helpful to the kid.
As for why it is not the woman who pays, that is tradition. The law has not caught up to gender equality in the labor market, and I imagine feminist activists will work hard to keep things that way, considering this is something that disproportionately benefits women to the detriment of men.
I also think it is partly due to cheap DNA testing being a relatively new thing. It has not been that long since sequencing was an expensive, time consuming task mostly done as academic research. While mandatory DNA testing may well be a reasonable demand today, 20 years ago it would have been ridiculous.
The primary custodial parent receives child support this is usually but not always the woman and in general is determined by who was the child's primary caretaker during the marriage. A stay at home dad would be extremely likely to receive primary custody and child support.
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Its fascinating to me that the state paying for other people, such as the sick and the elderly, is accepted, but paying for our children is somehow a bridge too far. Why? Its not like the government begins to regulate the behavior of old people to my knowledge, or prevents life saving healthcare, etc. I don't see a problem with them paying for the kid, but leaving how they are raised up to parents. Thats not even getting into the fact that we already have entities like CPS and the education system that play some part in how children are raised.
I think the unstated assumption is that assuming state responsibility for the welfare of bastards would be enabling the irresponsible behavior of their biological parents, and most citizens don't want that. Paying for the sick and elderly is similarly generally seen as the state's responsibility only when other options are unavailable.
Err, given Medicare, SSDI, and ordinary old age social security, this seems obviously false in the US. I believe it is even more false in Europe.
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No surprise, kids can't vote. If we banned elderly from voting entitlements like social security would be among the first things to be cut.
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The state already takes a strong view about how any child is raised, most notably via the education system.
Well yeah. That and the adoption system is pretty good evidence in my eyes that giving the state more power over children is not a good thing.
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How about Bill Gates? He's wealthy, and was just as involved in the kid's creation.
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I agree with almost all of this, but I think the major exception is load-bearing:
If you type 60wpm, it took you 17 seconds to write this sentence and a half, over which period of time the federal government disperses an average of $2.2M in transfer payments, $250k of which are specifically for families and individuals facing economic hardship. Taking on that sort of task is something that the state already does, on such a massive scale that adding another hundred thousand kids' child support payments would literally be within rounding error on the commonly reported figures. Since our chief remaining worry is indeed
then we want that kid's expenses to be at least backstopped by the almost-incomprehensibly rich state, which is guaranteed to pay, not by some random guy who might delay or evade payment. Once that's assured, our remaining concerns are much less pressing: justice vs deadbeat parents, and well-being for innocent taxpayers. We can fix both concerns by finding the biological father and getting him to pay, but can we improve either by squeezing a non-father?
Justice vs deadbeat parents can't be improved by punishing a non-deadbeat non-parent.
Well-being for innocent taxpayers you might think can be improved by getting some poor sucker to pay instead of them, but that poor sucker is in the set of innocent potential taxpayers, and the marginal utility of money decreases. A priori most people would probably prefer a certainty of paying a tiny amount over a tiny chance of being unjustly pushed into paying a much larger amount. And that's just considering the financial aspects; someone who's been cheated on in this way is paying to have those extracted finances managed by their victimizer, which is definitely negative-sum in well-being.
There is a more subtle problem with just letting the state pay in these cases: doing so removes all incentives the mother might have to help the state track down the biological father. That wouldn't necessarily be a new problem, though (why bother tracking down biodad if the guy you tricked is already paying?), just a still-unsolved one.
This has been my mental response to the idea of the state's motivations being a primary driver. It's still irrational and immoral. We're already using children as a vehicle for UBI at an astonishing scale - making fathers slightly less likely to be financially cucked is the easy button nobody will push.
At the end of the day it's difficult to chalk it up to anything beyond "Women are Wonderful"
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But why not the biological father?
(And if he’s dead/incapable, maybe the state has to pay, but that’s the case when somebody isn’t tricked. Or that can be an exception, since the adoptive father would have less reason to envy him, although I still think it’s bad)
You don't know who the biological father is, so you would have to find him first. You don't know how wealthy he is, so there is no guarantee he is even capable of paying child support in the first place. You will have to take him to court to find out. During this process as you locate and sue the bio dad, who pays for the kid? And what if he is just too poor to pay anything? It seems to me that the incentives, at least in the short term, favor the assumption that the boyfriend/husband is also that goes out the window if you do a test and find out it isn't the case.
That sad, I personally still believe the injustice of paying for another man's kid when doing so is easily avoidable is too great an injustice to be justified by this. But it is the best explanation I can come up with, and I do think it is logically coherent.
Why not Elon? Or Bill Gates? Well, we think that’s wrong because that would be stealing.
So why are we forcing it on the chump who got played and his world destroyed (kid isn’t yours but you have to pay for the kid nonetheless).
But that's the trick right there. Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played. With the test being unavailable, we maintain the convenient narrative that the "chump" is in fact the father, and should take responsibility as such.
A shame, because those exist? That's like claiming that we wouldn't need speed limits on the interstate highway if motor vehicles didn't exist. They do.
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I'm assuming a setup where the wife has a brief time of cheating on her husband and gets pregnant, then the cheating guy is gone, and the wife is silent and wants the husband to raise the family. It's not very satisfactory on moral grounds but probably the answer is that the biological father is typically more of a swindler type who may already be far away and has a personality and attitude that makes collecting stuff from him a bigger hassle. Meanwhile the other guy, who married the woman, is probably a more prosocial guy, who settled properly, has more job stability, follows rules more and is just easier to extract money from.
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Are you asking about situations where the man is married to the mother? Or other situations?
I'm not an expert on this subject, but as far as I know:
(1) If the man is not married to the mother and does not acknowledge the child, then if she wants child support from him over his objection, she has to pursue a proceeding to establish paternity. In that proceeding, he is generally entitled to a paternity test. Probably there are some injustices in this process, for example if the man is tricked into acknowledging paternity, that could be a problem. Or if he is unaware of the paternity proceeding, having not been properly served. But for the most part, a cautious man can avoid being tagged with child support for another man's children, provided he is not married to the mother.
(2) If the man is married to the mother, it's a much bigger problem for him. In a lot of jurisdictions, he's completely screwed. In others, he has a limited amount of time to dispute paternity. I am pretty sure this rule has its roots in common law traditions from the distant past, in which there was no DNA testing available. (Of course, back then arguably a man was in a better position to prevent contact between his wife and other men.) I would guess it carries on today out of a combination of cultural inertia and gynocentrism. To be sure, it's very unfair to men, but there are still workarounds. For example, a man can secretly test his children and if he is not the father, make an excuse to move the family to a jurisdiction where this would be a basis to disclaim paternity.
Again, I think it's mainly a matter of cultural inertia. Although it would be interesting to see what would happen if a married woman ended up getting pregnant with the child of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.
The prohibition on challenging paternity only applies when the parties are married. Changing this wouldn't even make sense because you don't make support payments or deal with visitation rights when living in the same household. If you file for divorce then the marriage ends and you very much can challenge paternity. While you won't have to make child support payments, you also won't get any visitation rights.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Do you disagree with anything I have said?
I'm not sure what the point would be of legally disestablishing paternity would be if you're married. If you want to do it for your own edification then buy a test off of Amazon; there's no role for the court to play here.
You can't think of why a married man would want to legally establish he'd been cheated on and duped?
I suspect what's going on here is that @Rov_Scam is attacking some kind of straw man. Why would a married man wish to establish non-paternity? Obviously, the answer is that -- if the law allows it -- he would like to get a divorce and get out of paying child support. If he discovered he was not the father, either through an informal DNA test or some other way, then in theory he could file for divorce and, as part of that proceeding, ask for the Court to find that he's not the father and therefore he's not on the hook for child support. As part of that proceeding, he would presumably request a formal DNA test. (Of course this is only if a non-paternity proceeding is permitted in the relevant jurisdiction.)
Here's what I said before:
Now, obviously it kind of goes without saying that if a husband is formally disputing paternity, he's going to be doing it in connection with a divorce proceeding. Admittedly, I did not spell that out. Which -- I suspect -- was the opening @Rov_Scam needed to come in and pretend that I was talking about a non-paternity proceeding brought without any kind of divorce. Which I agree would be silly.
Which is why I strongly suspect that @Rov_Scam is just going after a strawman for whatever reason. But who knows? In another post I asked him to QUOTE me if I said anything he disputes.
I'm not trying to establish a straw man, I just don't understand why you continued to argue after I said you could disestablish paternity as part of a divorce proceeding.
I arbitrarily looked at the laws in the number of states and I couldn't find any that prohibited this.
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No, I can't. The legal consequences of disestablishing paternity are irrelevant if the man and woman are married and living in the same household with the child. The three things that are legally at play here are support obligations, visitation rights, and the right to make decisions. Married guys with kids don't pay child support to their wives, and visitation isn't an issue when you live together. And he doesn't need a court order to let his wife make all the decisions.
I'm not sure where you're from, but on planet Earth, cheating is generally cause for not being married any more, notably even in religions that are normally incompatible with divorce.
It not being the husband's kid is undeniable evidence that this happened, and further, undeniable evidence that the wife concealed that fact. (The mother is not confused- the baby comes out of the mother.)
The purpose of this law is simply to limit the woman's liability for cheating in a relationship, while leaving it unlimited for the man (any intent behind that is an exercise for the reader). It's consistent with the other laws that limit the duties the woman has to the man in a marriage.
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Having legally established that you'd been cheated on and tricked into raising somebody else's kid isn't going to be a relevant factor in the following divorce case?
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It can potentially get you out of paying child support if you get divorced. Which presumably a lot of men would do if they discovered they were the victims of their wife's paternity fraud.
Like I said, if you're suspicious you can get a test done through a lab, it just won't be able to be used in court. If you decide to get divorced based on the result, then you can have a forensic-grade test done. I also don't know what kind of universe you think exists where a guy could initiate proceedings questioning the paternity of one of the marital children that wouldn't result in the wife just filing for divorce anyway.
Again, I am not sure what your point is here. Let's do this: Is there anything I said which you dispute? If so, please QUOTE it.
And by the way, do you have any precedent to support your claim that for a conviction under the Federal wire fraud statute "the government would need to identify a particular person that saw the representation, relied on the representation, and that the organization made money off of that reliance."
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The opposite: once the husband asks for a paternity test, there's already an argument and suspicion, and the only way it would be resolved is if the test confirms they're the father.
I agree that the father should stay. But I argue that forcing him to pay child support is actually counterproductive here.
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I'd wager status quo continues for another 10 years unless a child somehow ends up dying from a lack of support from the not-father. Like, not-father takes a secret paternity test and stops paying child support and divorces the wife. Wife and child goes to live with the real father. Real father murder-suicides the family. People point fingers at the not-father for triggering the divorce, when the secret paternity test is discovered.
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As opposed to, and at the cost of, the father's interests.
"But women > men" is the only real argument here.
Here's my "women > men" argument.
When women > men, a bit of polygyny is tolerated and population ratio quickly evens out. If the ratio is dramatically in favor of women, the remaining guys have a really good time while it lasts.
When men > women, excess males get aggressive and tend to result in internal conflict or external wars. If the ratio is dramatic enough, your society collapses because it cannot maintain population unless you kidnap women from another society.
Ergo, women > men because it never hurts to have more women, and when you are in shortage of women your society is gone. Humans probably feel this at a genetic level, we are all probably descendants of kidnapped women at some prehistoric time.
Since women > men, always prioritize womens needs, especially over the complaints a few excess males or cucked husbands.
I think your parent poster meant "women are better than men", not "there are more women than men".
Oh, yeah I know. And then I used a quantity argument to say the available quantity of women proves women are more valuable then men. Probably a crappy argument because it doesn't prove women are better than men.
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Here the interests don’t compete: getting non-biological fathers to pay child support (instead of biological ones) usually doesn’t benefit the wife and children.
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