Rieva's Umbrage
Who Knows Father Best?
by Rieva Holycross
7/15/2004
IWF believes that women must accept responsibility for their own actions and that includes getting pregnant and knowing who the father is (pretty onerous responsibility, don’t you think?). California and plenty of other states allow a woman to pretty much name whomever she pleases as the father of her child and sic the state on said dad to collect child support.
Feminist organizations including the National Organization of Women (NOW) has objected to legislation that requires the courts to vacate paternity judgments against men who aren’t, in fact, the father. Think about that. NOW wants some man, any man, to make child support payments. The woman who doesn’t even know who the father is, should not be held responsible for her actions, is a sweet, loving, blameless mother who seeks only to care for her child and if naming some schmuck as father who never saw her before in his life helps her provide for the innocent babe, well then, that’s fine. Innocence is no excuse. Pay up.
In arguing against California’s Paternity Justice Act, NOW claims that its passage would harm children. Harm children? This from the every-baby-deserves-federal-day-care, there’s-no-school-too-bad-for-our-kids crowd?
This is one more item in NOW’s misguided and misbegotten agenda that seeks to exempt women from taking responsibility for their actions and their lives. Their mantra that it’s not your fault; find somebody to blame; find somebody to pay is a horrible model for today’s woman. And, further, in the case of nailing innocent men for child support, it is legalized theft, pure, unalloyed misandry. No wonder the NOW gals liked it so much.
Here's Wendy McElroy's take on the issue:
On June 30, a California man being forced to pay child support for a child he had not fathered got his day in court when the Second District Court of Appeal of California overturned a paternity judgment against him.
Los Angeles County, which had imposed the judgment, knew that Manuel Navarro was not the father of the child in question because DNA testing had proved so. Yet under both federal and state child-support laws, the county was still able to demand Navarro pay child support.
The court's landmark decision in Navarro's favor may well become the controlling authority for contested paternity in California and a legal precedent nationwide.
Navarro's case is typical of the false paternity claims and child-support laws that prompt men's-rights activists to condemn the family-court system as being virulently unfair to men.
http://www.iwf.org/issues/issues_detail.asp?ArticleID=638
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