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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.
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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