I wouldn’t care.My Body, My Choice—Your Body, No Choice
NO CHOICE TO CONSENT TO FATHERHOOD
We are already moving toward a society in which women have colonized reproduction, along with childrearing, and men will have less and less incentive to participate fully in family life and more and more penalties if any problems arise.
—Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young in Legalizing Misandry1
Men’s rights are very much dependent on how honest she chooses to be.
—Michael Higdon, Professor of Family Law, The University of Tennessee
I often see cars with female drivers who have bumper stickers that proclaim “My body, my choice” or “Keep your laws off my body,” and I wince. Why? Because the owner of the bumper sticker probably has no idea of the hypocrisy of her statement. I looked up the “My body, my choice” bumper stickers online and the first site I came to had the following as a description for the sticker:
The Constitution says that the government may not seize our persons, our bodies. That’s why, when it comes to personal decisions like reproduction, it’s my body, my choice.2
The Irregular Times site describes itself as a “liberal button and sticker shop.” My guess is that the only issue they are liberal about is their own reproductive freedom; when it comes to men, liberal women and the white knights who support them are more than happy to throw this slogan under the bus. As Warren Farrell makes clear in The Myth of Male Power, although it’s his body, a man has no choice when it comes to deciding whether or not to be a dad. He states:
In the 1990s, if a woman and man make love and she says she is using birth control but is not, she has the right to raise the child without his knowing he even has a child, and then to sue him for retroactive child support even ten to twenty years later (depending on the state). This forces him to take a job with more pay and more stress and therefore earlier death. . . . He has the option of being a slave (working for another without pay or choice) or being a criminal. Roe v. Wade gave women the vote over their bodies. Men still don’t have the vote over theirs—whether in love or war.3
Though this book will not get into the issue of the draft or war, it will tackle the area of love where it seems that men are as behind as they ever were. Many men, particularly young ones like Max in the last chapter, have no idea what their rights are (very few) until it’s too late. Boys and men are rarely taught about their paternity rights, reproductive rights, or obligation to pay child support.
Yes, it is true that girls and women might not have formal classes or information in these areas, but there are many organizations such as Planned Parenthood or the National Organization for Women (NOW) that have very active groups involved in every area of politics and women have laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that protect them specifically as a group, even though many of the ways they are protected are at the expense of men’s civil rights and due process. Women are also protected under the law when it comes to reproduction by abortion laws and other laws that look out for their interests.
For example, courts almost exclusively favor the mother and force men to pay child support to mothers regardless of whether she used false information or made false statements to the man concerning birth control.4 Because women are given special privilege under the law when it comes to reproduction and men are held fully responsible for their acts, it is very important for men, and teen males and their parents, to educate themselves in regard to paternity rights and child custody in order to make informed decisions. As the book Legalizing Misandry points out:
. . . fatherhood can be a nightmare—legal, financial, and emotional—due to the laws governing divorce, custody, and access. These laws are not going to prevent all men from investing in family life, certainly not those who consider marriage a religious covenant, but they have already made many other men think twice before becoming involved in what could easily become a no-win situation. Why invest so heavily in family life after all, if your children can be taken away from you or even turned against you so easily?5
And that is what can happen if you want your child or children. What if you had no say in becoming a dad? There are some nightmare situations that all men should be aware of, such as becoming a father as a result of trickery or rape. Yes, men and boys can be raped or coerced into sex by women, though many people think otherwise.
I once wrote an article asking if a man could be raped by a woman, and the answers I received were shocking, to say the least. Many of the commenters felt that men were asking for it, should keep their legs crossed, or should have known better than to allow a woman to harm them.6 This sounds like what women used to be told about rape fifty or more years ago. Are men now being treated like the women of yesteryear? That’s an interesting thought, but let’s turn to educating ourselves on the responsibilities for those boys or men who become fathers without their consent.
Thankfully, there are educators out there like Professor Michael J. Higdon, who teaches at the University of Tennessee Law School and brings these cases to light. Higdon has an article on this topic titled “Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.”7 In the article, Higdon describes three different cases of men who have been forced to be fathers against their will. One case involves a young man only fifteen years old named Nathaniel, who had sex with a thirty-four-year-old woman, Ricci, about five times. The woman got pregnant and, although in the state of California a minor under the age of sixteen cannot consent to sex, the court saw fit to force Nathaniel to pay child support to the woman who committed statutory rape against him.8
In another case Higdon highlights, an Alabama man, S.F., attended a party at the home of a female friend, T.M. He arrived intoxicated and passed out on her couch for the night. He was in her sole care and, when he awoke the next morning, he found all of his clothes removed except his unbuttoned shirt. According to Higdon:
Over the next few months, T.M. would openly boast to several people about how she had engaged in sexual intercourse with S.F. while he was unconscious. She would even go so far as to describe the evening as one that had “saved her a trip to the sperm bank.” T.M. did in fact give birth to a child, and genetic testing confirmed that S.F. was the biological father.9
The last case that Higdon presents is that of Emile, who is from Louisiana and in 1983 was visiting his sick parents at the hospital. One evening while he was at the hospital, a nurse named Debra offered to perform oral sex on him, but only if he wore a condom. After the act was complete, Debra offered to get rid of the condom filled with Emile’s sperm and must have impregnated herself, because nine months later genetic testing showed that Emile was the father of her baby. “The two never had sexual intercourse, only the one instance of oral sex with a condom.”10
The commonality in these three cases was that a man or boy was forced into fatherhood against his will and was then forced by the court against his will to pay child support. Can you imagine the uproar if a fifteen-year-old girl had sex with a thirty-four-year-old man and she was obligated in any way to him by the courts? Or if a woman passed out at a party and a man had sex with her and she was then forced to have the baby? As Warren Farrell says about reproductive rights for men:
He realizes that when a woman and he have created a pregnancy, the issue is not the rights of the female vs. the fetus, but the rights of the female, the fetus, and the father. He realizes that a woman who says “It’s my body, it’s my business,” and then chooses to have a child that she makes him pay for; forces him to take a job he might like less just because it pays more; forces him to stress himself out and die early—forces him to use his body for eighteen years. If it’s his body being used for eighteen years, and his body dying sooner, shouldn’t it be his business, too? Isn’t two decades of a man’s life worth nine months of a woman’s?11
And if men’s lives aren’t worth much to the courts, the life of a boy who has been sexually assaulted by a woman is worth even less. Higdon reports that there are “numerous cases in which an adult woman became pregnant as a result of sexual relations she initiated with a minor child.”12 However, every time the question arises of whether a male victim of statutory rape should be made liable for child support, “every single court has answered it in the affirmative—holding that yes, the minor father is liable.”13
Now the boy has been victimized twice: once by the woman who abused him, and again by the courts for the next eighteen years while he engages in involuntary servitude to pay for a child that the law claimed he was not even able to consent to at the time. Does anyone care about the psychological abuse they heap on a kid like this? Of course not; he’s male and probably deserves it. After all, he asked for it, just like the girl who was asking to be raped by wearing a short skirt. Again, I ask, is it still 1950 and are boys the new girls?
What about a female who was the victim of a sexual assault: Would she, like her male counterpart, be held liable for the support of her children? Of course not. Reproductive rights are for women. Higdon highlights the case of DCSE/Ester M.C. v. Mary L, where a mother refused to provide support for her three minor children because they “were the product and result of an incestuous relationship with her brother” and as such “it was not a voluntary decision on her part to have children.”14
The court ruled that “[i]f the sexual intercourse which results in the birth of a child is involuntary or without actual consent, a mother may have ‘just cause’ . . . for failing or refusing to support such a child.”15 I thought that it was all about the “best interests of the child” when it came to child support in the United States. Apparently, that’s only if the parent is male. As the saying goes, “women have rights; men have responsibilities.” Not only are men responsible for kids whom they didn’t consent to fathering, but they are also responsible for kids whom are not even theirs genetically.
For men, there are no reproductive benefits to marriage anymore.
—Blogger Mike T., reflecting on state-sanctioned paternity fraud16
If the genes don’t fit . . . you must acquit.
—Signature line of Carnell Smith, advocate for men accused of paternity fraud17
Sadly, paternity fraud is so rampant that it is hard to get an exact count of how many men are either acting as fathers to kids they think are their own or being forced to pay child support after having been wrongly told that they are the fathers to children that are not theirs.
According to the organization Fathers and Families:
. . . tens of thousands of men have been wrongly assigned paternity and are compelled by law to pay years of child support for children whom DNA tests have shown are not theirs. In many cases, the men have had little or no contact with the children they’re required to support, and some had no idea they were “fathers” until their wages were garnished for child support.18
In 2007, Men’s Health Magazine ran an article asking, “Are You Raising Another Man’s Child?” The article states that “more than a million American men are investing their love, time, and money in a child who isn’t their own. But the worst part about this betrayal? How many people may be in on it.”19 The article comes up with the number of more than a million men by taking a look at studies on what it calls paternal discrepancy, which is defined as follows:
Paternity fraud emphasizes the financial aspect of the phenomenon, but paternal discrepancy (PD) describes the anomaly itself—the disconnect between what men think is true and the genetic reality.20
The article finds the estimate of more than a million men by looking at studies of PD:
After recently reviewing 67 studies on the subject, University of Oklahoma researchers found that PD rates tend to be much higher among men who have reason to believe there’s been more than one dog in the yard. No surprise there. But leave out these men and you end up with a number that can safely be assumed to represent the rest of us. That number is 3.85 percent. Another review of 19 studies by a group at Liverpool John Moores University backs this up, putting the figure at 3.7 percent of dads. It may not seem like a lot—until you do the math. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, there are 27,940,000 fathers nationwide with a child under 18. That means over a million guys out there are taking care of some other man’s kid.21
Paternal discrepancy, paternity fraud. Call it what you will; it’s all bad news for the large numbers of men out there who are affected. And not only are they betrayed by their wives or girlfriends, but there is also a whole industry of professionals in the medical profession who do not see it as their duty to inform the “father” that the child is not theirs.
Of course, lying is nothing new in the world of medicine. As late as 1970, doctors infamously withheld cancer diagnoses “for the good of the patient.” (After all, they figured, these patients were doomed anyway, so what good would knowing do them?) This ended when it collectively dawned on doctors that, good intentions notwithstanding, paternalism was probably not the best approach. But given the nondisclosure policy of most genetic counselors these days, it might as well be 1970 again—except that now, with women dominating 92 percent of the field, paternalism seems to have been replaced by maternalism.22
Many of these female genetic counselors are concerned with how the mother would feel if her husband found out the truth, not the poor duped dad, of course. Talk about a good old girl’s network. But since no one cares much about men’s emotions in these cases—there is little formal research on the emotional damage that paternity fraud has on men—and states just care about extracting money from any man possible, not much is being done to combat paternity fraud.
The emotional stakes and feelings of betrayal have to be very high for a man who finds out a child is not his. In many cases of married men, men who found out they were not the father of a child were devastated and never really got over the shock. Many had trouble with depression, but, for most men, the feeling is anger, which is often said to be depression turned outward. This anger is a common feeling for many men, as you will see from some of my informal research.
Since there is a dearth of formal research on men’s emotional reactions after finding out a child they thought was theirs was not, I decided to conduct my own informal poll23 on my blog at PJ Media and ask men about their feelings on paternity fraud. Here is the question I posed and the resulting responses:
If you found out tomorrow that your five-year-old son or daughter was not yours and that you were also liable for another 13 years of child support for that child, how would you feel?
I wouldn’t care.
Anger and fury at the mother.
Depression; I would have a hard time coping with the news.
Glad my genes weren’t passed along and hope that the biological dad’s were genetically superior.
None of the above.
Angry at the system that forced me to pay.
Other.
The question must have hit a nerve as more than 3,200 male readers responded to the poll and the following results were found: 2 percent “didn’t care”; 36 percent felt “anger and fury at the mother”; 6 percent felt “depression”; 18 percent felt “anger and depression”; 0 said they were glad their “genes weren’t passed along”; 2 percent said “none of the above”; 32 percent were “angry at the system that forced them to pay”; and finally 5 percent said “other.”24 The most interesting part of the informal poll was the comments. Here are some examples of how men felt:
Joe in Houston says:
This did happen to me. I was angry at the mother. He wasn’t 5, as in the poll, he was 11. At first I still wanted to raise him, but after the ex continued taunting me by telling him how I wasn’t his father, I severed all ties to the boy. Some may see this as a failing, I see it as self-preservation, and to those that ask the question of whether or not the courts will make a non-biological parent pay child support, pay attention, YES THEY WILL! YES THEY WILL! They see you as nothing more than a source of cash for the child. It seems that a person in these situations should be able to sue the real father for child support.25
tiger6 states:
I pretty much agree with the sentiments already here. Assuming the mother had lied to me, I’m angry with her for cheating on me AND putting me into a position where the state can force me to pay. The state screwing me over I’m mad at, but have come to expect. SHE was supposed to love me and not put me in that position.
But still, if a judge ordered me to pay child support on a child I knew wasn’t mine . . . I would be tempted to tell him to just put me in jail right now because I simply would not pay. I can’t say I would do that for sure, but it’s at least my first instinct.26
Difster states:
Point of note for commenters, in many states, after a certain amount of time you can no longer contest paternity and be forced to pay child support anyway because “someone has to do it.”
That being said, I would split with the mother if it didn’t already happen and do everything I could, probably including outright fraud to get full custody of that child. I wouldn’t punish the child for the actions of the mother and instead of paying, I’d rather just raise the kid myself as my own and kick the mother out of the picture. I wouldn’t resort to violence, but I’d do a heck of a frame job to make sure she ended up in jail for something.27
Old Guy says:
I wanted to choose both anger at the mother for making me a patsy and anger at the system that would still force me to pay. One more example of how men are oppressed by the Matriarchy.28
Cthulhu says:
So, you’ve been going along raising a kid for five years. . . . Chances are, you’ve somewhat bonded with him or her—and we’re talking about an innocent child. But you just found out that the mother had been lying to you for five years about the parentage—there’s room for some anger and betrayal with her, but you might work it out. But to be treated as a cash cow by the state for an additional 13 years regardless of your continuing relationship with mother or child? “Outrage” doesn’t begin to cover it.29
TeeJaw says:
Cthulhu says what I was thinking. The anger and disappointment at the mother, the anger at the system that has inserted itself in the whole thing would be enough to deal with, but also that I probably would have bonded deeply with the child. I would feel like running away to a south sea island where I would never have to see any of them again. One thing sure, there would be a boatload of compassion heaped on the mother and child and absolutely none on the cuckold husband, who would be seen as nothing more than an ATM machine.30
So the most common responses to paternity fraud from the polltakers was anger at the mother who put the man in this position and anger at the state that forces him to pay for a child that is not his. These are good and appropriate responses because they are the fuel that will cause men to act on their own behalf to change the laws.
Remember that in the introduction, I mentioned that men’s rights activist Warren Farrell says two ingredients are necessary for a major movement: emotional rejection and economic hurt. Paternity fraud has these two ingredients written all over it.
Luckily, there are activists who are out there fighting to change the laws that force men to pay for children that are not their own, even if they find out years later. This is what happened to a friend of State Senator Stacey Campfield, and it gave him the courage and impetus to try to change the antiquated laws in Tennessee that force a man to pay for another man’s child against his will. His friend found out that he was not the father of a young child whom he was raising. Once his friend came forward, Campfield says he has also heard from numerous Tennessee men who have been the victims of paternity fraud and he believes that fairness in the law is important as “people lose faith in the system and think that cheating is the only answer.”31
Campfield is no ordinary politician; controversy is his middle name. The local weekly alternative in Knoxville, the Metro Pulse, ran a front-page story asking the question, “What the Heck Is Wrong with Stacey Campfield?” In the article, it mentions that Campfield has (gasp!):
. . . proposed a range of legislation on things like child support, orders of protection, and sexual-abuse allegations, that, as a Nashville scene blogger put it a few weeks ago, seem to derive from a sense “that women are crazy lying bitches men need protecting from.” . . . And yet, it is hard to escape the contradictions underlying his geniality. He is a family-values conservative who has never married, a fathers’ rights advocate with no children.32
So, is the article implying that politicians or activists are only normal if they fight for the rights of those who are just like them? I sure hope not, because there would be fewer rights for women, African Americans, gays and many others if the only activists allowed in the fight were those who met the criteria of the group whose rights they were fighting for. And frankly, given that much legislation in the area of family law and domestic violence makes guys out to be potential drunken louts out to rape, beat or abandon women, why all the outcry? After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as the saying goes.
Luckily, Campfield feels some sense of duty to men who are the victims of paternity fraud who are being forced to pay child support for kids who are not theirs. Jesse Fox Mayshark, the writer of the Metro Pulse article on Campfield, sums up the criticism by opponents of such a bill:
The child support bill, the criticism of it was that it could actually harm children. If you withdraw one parent’s support but you don’t necessarily have that other biological parent there providing support, the child ends up with less support.33
To which Campfield replies:
You can say the same thing about someone who might be in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. The victim may feel wonderful that there’s a person in prison, but if that person has been proven by DNA evidence they didn’t do whatever, then I don’t think it’s fair that we should hold them behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit.34
No, it’s not fair, and Campfield put forth a bill to the Tennessee state legislature to try to change the law:
(n) Upon application of either party, the court shall decree a termination of support when scientific tests to determine parentage of the child or children, or to establish paternity in another person, are performed and such tests exclude the obligor from parentage of such child or children. The results of such parentage testing shall only be admitted into evidence in accordance with the procedures established in §§ 24-7-112.
Campfield also emailed me with a follow-up to this bill:
Helen, here is a copy of the bill as amended (the second document). I am having another bill drafted to compliment [sic] this one. In cases where this happens the original “father” can go after the real biological father for the back child support payments that were paid as part of the original child support agreement.35
The bill passed the House of Representatives in Tennessee but unfortunately failed in the Senate. However, there is good news. In October 2012, Stacey let me know that there was a victory for DNA victims in the state of Tennessee.36 He wrote on his blog:
The State Supreme court has just ruled unanimously a person mislead into believing they are the father of a child may sue the mother for back payments made if it is later found they are not the biological father of that child.
I tried to pass a piece of watered down legislation a few years ago when the Democrats were in power that would have allowed the non biological father to stop making future payments on their non child. It went down in spectacular flames.37
It’s amazing what can happen with persistence and a little luck.
There are other states that are adopting bills pertaining to paternity fraud that increase the chances of fairness for men. For example, Georgia passed a paternity fraud bill that gives men the right to terminate child support if they file a paternity test showing zero percent chance that they are the father, and if they also meet other conditions.38 Carnell Smith, an engineer in Decatur, Georgia, who was a victim of paternity fraud, started a group called U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud that lobbied for the law in Georgia and won.39 Smith is a true advocate for men’s rights and has been involved in getting paternity laws enacted for men in twenty-nine states.40 His story is told in more detail in the last chapter of this book on “Fighting Back.”
But until paternity fraud is treated as a serious issue and men are protected in all states, there is still much work to do. Men still have few choices when they are lied to about the paternity of their children and forced to pay child support for kids who aren’t theirs, but they can also encounter the boot of the state against their neck just as severely or even more so if they do not pay for children who are theirs, as we will see in the next section.
NO CHOICE IN PAYING CHILD SUPPORT (AND JAIL TIME TO BOOT)
Across the U.S. on an average day, roughly 50,000 persons are in jail or in prison for sex-payment debt.
—Douglas Galbi41
We can probably expect that most of those persons in jail for child support nonpayments are male, since the majority of child support is paid by men and law enforcement is reluctant to put women in jail. Custodial fathers make up only about 17.8 percent of custodial parents in the United States,42 leaving more than 82 percent as noncustodial parents who would be responsible for the bulk of child support. In an article at MSNBC.com, the author notes that many of the men who cannot pay child support and end up in jail are poor and had not even talked to an attorney prior to being imprisoned:
“Languishing in jail for weeks, months, and sometimes over a year, these parents share one trait . . . besides their poverty: They went to jail without ever talking to an attorney,” according to the lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Southern Center of Human Rights in Atlanta.
While jailing non-paying parents—the vast majority of them men—does lead to payment in many cases, critics say that it unfairly penalizes poor and unemployed parents who have no ability to pay, even though federal law stipulates that they must have “willfully” violated a court order before being incarcerated.
They compare the plight of such parents to the poor people consigned to infamous “debtors’ prisons” before such institutions were outlawed in the early 1800s.43
And if jail is not bad enough, due process and the Constitution are thrown out the window when it comes to men and their inability to pay child support:
The ability of judges to jail parents without a trial is possible because failure to pay child support is usually handled as a civil matter, meaning that the non-custodial parent—or the “contemnor” in legal terms—is found guilty of contempt of court and ordered to appear at a hearing.
He or she is not entitled to some constitutional protections that criminal defendants receive, including the presumption of innocence. And in five states—Florida, Georgia, Maine, South Carolina and Ohio—one of the omitted protections is the right to an attorney.44
No one ever makes this point, but one of the reasons that this type of atrocity is allowed to happen is that it is men who are thrown in jail. Yes, occasionally a woman may be jailed to make a point, but not often. Our society is not that willing to throw women in jail or strip them of their Constitutional rights. Some estimates find that up to 52 percent of men will be arrested at some point in their lives, and that a man is about four times as likely as a woman to be arrested.45 I was once in a continuing education class of psychologists where the speaker asked how many of the men in the audience had been arrested. More than one third raised their hands. If you don’t believe me, ask twenty male friends or colleagues if they have ever been arrested for any reason, and you may be surprised at the answer. I have dealt with male clients sent for evaluation by the courts or their attorneys who have been jailed or had family members (all male) in jail for child support payments or false domestic violence charges. These men don’t seem upset because of learned helplessness in dealing with a justice system that views their bodies as belonging to the state in matters of family law.
Add to jail time the fact that in many states there are other penalties for not paying child support, such as losing driving privileges, professional licenses and passport privileges.46 So now, you can’t get around, you can’t work and you can’t even leave the country if you are a dad who can’t or won’t engage in involuntary servitude. At the beginning of this chapter, I discussed the bumper sticker that pro-choice women stick on their cars that read, “My body, my choice.” All I can do is shake my head and think “what hypocrites.” Women in the United States can decide whether to be a mother, can have a child and in some states give it up for adoption without even informing the father, and can use men for eighteen years—and sometimes more—to pay for their children. Men have no say in reproduction. Maybe now you understand why the “My body, my choice” bumper sticker has a hollow ring to it.
With so many men in jail or suffering to pay child support, is it any reason that younger men are reluctant to get too involved with marriage and fatherhood? Add the potential for eighteen years of involuntary servitude and it’s no wonder that some men are going on strike or no longer putting their all into a career, which brings us to the next chapter on the college strike.