Child Support Gold-Diggers by Carey Roberts

Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.

April 5, 2006 — Laws that protect the fairer sex from rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment all rest on a simple assumption: women who claim to be victims are almost always telling the truth. Maybe it's time to revisit that belief.

Three weeks ago the National Center for Men filed a lawsuit on behalf of Matt Dubay, 25, who claims his girlfriend repeatedly assured him that she was unable to get pregnant. When she later bore a child, the state of Michigan went after Mr. Dubay for child support.

That's what people used to call entrapment.

But chivalrous pundits rose to defend the honor of this damsel in distress, dubbing Mr. Dubay a “sexual predator,” “deadbeat dad,” and — horrors! — a “weasel.” And if you happen to believe that men should be shouldered with the responsibilities and women enjoy all the rights, their criticisms certainly ring true.

Recently That's Life! magazine polled 5,000 women and asked them if they would lie to get pregnant. Two-fifths of the women — 42% to be exact — said “yes,” according to NCM's Kingsley Morse.

Yikes!

But that was just a hypothetical survey. Women would never stick it to a man they actually knew. Or would they?

Consider the paternity scam. Here's how it works:

Find any dim-witted man to get you pregnant. Then look up the name of some unsuspecting Joe who's got a steady job — it doesn't matter that you never met the poor bloke. Put his name on the baby's birth certificate.

Now cross your fingers and hope the man is out of town when the sheriff delivers the papers. In California, such default judgments account for 70% of paternity decisions, according to a 2003 study by the Urban Institute.

Or defraud one of your previous boyfriends, assuming he's a good breadwinner, of course. That's what happened to Carnell Smith of Georgia, who willingly assumed financial responsibility for a child, shelling out more than $40,000 in child support over an 11-year period. But when the mother went to court to up the payments, Smith requested genetic testing. That's when he learned, to his great surprise, that he wasn't the girl's father.

Stung by the injustice, Mr. Smith founded Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, a group that works to protect men from being cheated by these modern-day Welfare Queens.

Last year Michael Gilding, sociology professor at Swinburne University in Australia, reviewed studies from around the world, and concluded that 1-3% of children were fathered by someone other than the man who believes he's the daddy.

Let's run the math. Four million children are born in the United States each year. Using the mid-range 2% figure, that means 80,000 men become victims of paternity fraud. [EJF note: And at least 1.4 million (80,000 x 18) men are presently indentured servants for 18 to 21 years.]

Yikes again!

Ready for the next scam?

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This one involves false allegations of domestic violence. Each year, one million restraining orders are issued that serve to evict a person — usually a man — from his own home.

Restraining orders have become so commonplace that family lawyers refer to them as silver bullets, slam-dunks, or simply, “divorce planning.” It has been estimated that one-third of those orders are requested as a legal ploy in the middle of a divorce proceeding. Not only are the orders easy to get, in many states a restraining order automatically bans a father from gaining joint custody of his children.

So the restraining order granted on the flimsy grounds that he caused “emotional distress” becomes the woman's meal ticket to many years of child support payments. Prosecutors never go after persons who commit perjury, anyway.

And state welfare agencies don't get upset either, because the federal Office for Child Support Enforcement reimburses 66% of the costs of states' child support enforcement activities. Think of it as a bounty payment for deleting daddies.

So let's see...42% of women admit they would lie to get pregnant. Each year 80,000 non-biological fathers become victims of paternity fraud. And about 300,000 restraining orders are issued in the middle of a divorce.

Assume a father so defrauded finds himself on the hook for $250 a month for each of his children. Over an 18-year period, that comes out to a cushy $54,000, all legally-enforceable, tax-free, and no strings attached.

In the past the American legal system was guided by the rule, “No person shall benefit from their own wrong-doing.” But now, hundreds of thousands of women replace that dictum with the self-indulgent excuse: “Get while the getting is good.”

Carey Roberts has been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Alliance.

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| Chapter 7 — Paternity Fraud Epidemic |

| Next — Who's Your Daddy? by Cecily Ruttenberg |

| Back — The Innocent Third Party: Victims of Paternity Fraud by Ronald K. Henry |

Added September 18, 2006

Last modified 4/20/20