The ideas behind the radical feminist social experiment called "absentee child support" began at the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Women, they said, should be able to leave their husbands, take his children, and still be supported by him. Feminazis have always opposed marriage, believing that "marriage oppresses women." Yet they always believe that women have a "right" to have men support them in the manner they want to be accustomed. In the last half of the 19th century, after Seneca Falls, the divorce rates in the US began increasing as more feminazis left their husbands. Organized feminists began lobbying for judges and legislatures to require that the ex-husband be required to "pay" for the support of the children that the female stole from his home.
Two major social changes profoundly affecting children happened in the 19th century. Prior to the middle of the 19th century children were assumed to belong to their fathers. A mother who left her husband had to leave her children. Far fewer women were willing to abandon their children and marriages generally stayed together. Click
here for the case for father custody published by Fathering Magazine. In addition children were a labor asset until the 19th century. As late as 1900, 90% of Americans still lived and worked on family farms. Most of the rest worked in family owned shops or small businesses. All members of the family old enough to walk were expected to do a share of the work on farm, shop, or business. In cities where there were many immigrants who had no farm or shop a substantial number of children ended up working in factories. Social concern began outlawing child labor, creating a dependent class of young people that has extended longer and longer through the 20th century. The dependent class of young, unable by law to work and earn their own living, now created more of a burden on welfare agencies, especially with more and more feminazis leaving their husbands to avoid the "oppression" of marriage.
Feminazis seized on the radical notion of "absentee child support" as the answer to their demand for forcing men to continually support them after they left. Organized lobbying efforts by radical feminist groups in the late 19th and early 20th century promoted the dual radical ideas of female custody and required payment of "support." It had taken them a century of ratcheted changes in social thinking to lay the groundwork, but by the 1960s virtually all of the United States had laws and judicial fiat requiring 1. Custody of minor children goes to the mother after divorces, and 2. The father must pay the mother under the guise of "support' of the children. Click
here for a longer history of the radical change to a "child support" based slave state. Feminazis aggressively used the lie that fathers abandon families to convince legislatures to enact their radical new laws. The truth is quite the opposite. It was and is almost always the female who abandons her marriage vows. Mothers abandon families and wanted to use the children as an excuse to demand continued her support. Some states also had strong alimony laws, but questions were being asked about how that conflicted with feminist demands for "equality." The "child support" gave them the excuse to play the victim, claiming to be a suffering "single mother" struggling to feed her children while the brute man had run off.
The radical experimental changes called "child support" in the first half of the 20th century were greatly exacerbated in the last half of the 20th century by the establishment of "no-fault" divorce laws that were widely enacted. By the end of the 20th century more than half of US marriages ended in divorce, and about 90% of divorces are filed by women. Surveys show that the reasons so many females abandon their marriage vows have more to do with boredom than anything else. "To find myself" is a common excuse given by females for destroying a family according to studies. In public they frequently lie and blame the nearest available men for their sins. In some US States, females no longer bother to get married in the first place. In California now more than half of children are born to unmarried women. The state vigorously pursues the man who these unmarried bitches claim is the father of their bastards. It has become a powerful legalized extortion, a way for a young and uneducated female to support herself. She can whelp a couple of bastards and live comfortable on "child support" programs for decades. Hard working men who are usually unwilling fathers, only the female has "a woman's right to choose," are bound into indentured servitude, a form of slavery, for 20 years to pay her for bearing a bastard.
None of this is a good solution to anything. All of it is a badly failed radical feminazi social experiment which is destroying millions of families and hurting millions and millions of children. All of it is bad law, bad family law, and slavery. It does not get better by combining the worst features together.
So what is a better solution, some people have asked. And, Bob has frequently proposed better solutions.
First, we have to stop the fiction of "child support." It's not about supporting children. It's the radical feminazi program of forcing men to pay and support women who have destroyed their families. It's the Seneca Falls program, allowing women to leave their husbands, destroy their marriage, and still be supported.
A man does have an obligation to support his children, and his obligation is equal to that of the mother. Both parents have concurrent co-equal 100% responsibility to support his or her child. Does that mean that one parent should ever have to pay the other? NO, it does not. To support a child you put an extra plate on your table at dinner. You put a mattress and blanket in a corner for the child to sleep at night. You provide some clothing and other necessities for the child.
Paying some bimbo who stole your child IS NOT supporting your child. For millions of years females have brought their children to the fathers for his support and protection. It is a parenting system that has worked well and our race has succeeded and become dominate. The radical feminazi experiment is both badly unfair and willfully hurts all the children involved. It uses children as pawns in a game of extortion. It uses and abuses children to allow females who have broken their marriage vows and destroyed their families to be paid for doing so.
In addition, the female also has concurrent 100% responsibility to support her child. If she was not able to support her child she had no business creating one, and she ought to be held responsible for her actions. She had sole and exclusive legal choice to create the child, "a woman's right to choose." She should be held morally and legally responsible for the results of her decisions. After a century and a half of feminists, all women, demanding "equality" it's high time to demand that they take equal responsibility for their decisions, and be held accountable, as any man would be. If SHE decides to make a child, SHE bears 100% responsibility for her decision. The father also has co-equal responsibly to support his child, but in no way does his responsibility relieve her of her responsibility. SHE is 100% responsible to support her child. If she can not, or will not, support her child let her bring the child to his father and beg for his support as females have been doing for millions of years. That system worked. The radical social experiment in slavery of men to pay women for breaking up families does not and can not work. It's high time it be recognized as the monumental social failure that it is and completely abandoned.
The radical experiment called "absentee child support" can not be fixed by adjusting the formula for pay to a more equitable formula. You can't make wrong into right by doing wrong more effectively. A mountain of research shows that children taken from their father's care by divorcing or single mothers badly hurts children. Every decent person who cares about children needs to become aware and demand that this radical social experiment be ended before another generation of children is hurt.
Steps to support families help children and improve life.
1. Strongly encourage the continuation of marriage by awarding residential custody preference to the parent who wants to keep the family together, as defined by the parent who didn't file for a divorce.
2. Strongly encourage the continuation of marriage by eliminating payments for breaking up marriages under "child support," "alimony," or any other legal euphemism.
3. Provide strong social stigmatization to single mothers who bear bastards. Stop making bastards a manner of earning a living for uneducated women.
4. Outlaw the creation of bastards by artificial fertility clinics. (See Bob's essay on Frankenstein Kids)
5. Recognize that "support" for a child means a plate at dinner, not being forced to "pay" someone else to support the child.
6. Recognize the 100% co-equal responsibility of the mother to support her children.
7. End all "absentee child support" laws. No parent should be forced to "pay" the other parent because both are fully responsible.
8. Scale back the dependency of children by allowing youth to work when they are able and desire to do so.
9. Encourage females to take their children to the father for his support as females have done for millions of years.
10. End the debtor's prisons and release the hundreds of thousands of men now in prison for failure to "pay" the female who destroyed his family.
11. End laws on "custody" awards and stop court custody decisions after divorce. Every child has a fundamental human right to both natural parents. Any "custody" decision violates the rights of the child -- who is not getting divorced from either parent.
12. Eliminate persecution of fathers for "kidnapping" their children. You can not "kidnap" your own child.
13. Dismantle the state bureaucracy that feeds on the backs of fathers struggling to survive in the social slavery called "child support."
14. Tar and feather any judge or elected official who hurts children and families by willfully supporting the insanity of "absentee child support."
Bob