Any fraud a man commits is called a crime. In forty-six states, the
one exclusive to women is protected.
Your wife could have an affair, become pregnant, and tell
you it's your child knowing full well it is not or may not be. She
may even divorce you and have you pay child support. If you acquire
DNA evidence that you and the child are the victims of deceit, not
only is she not charged with an offense, the courts insist that
she's right. The child is yours forever and you pay support, not
the real father who could be found.
Estimates are based on limited data but range from 3% to 5%
of all children may be fathered by someone other than who they call
by that name. The June 3, 2002 Colorado Rocky Mountain News editorial
describes such a case and takes the side of the offender:
"More than 11 years after a man agrees that he is the father
of a child and will pay support, he decides he wants out of the deal
because maybe, just maybe, he isn't the biological dad after all.
Should he be able to cut and run? Of course not. It would wreak
havoc on the life of a helpless youngster . . . at least not if he
waited more than six months after the original decree."
Current laws were written before DNA testing and the divorce
rate was 3%. No one could be certain of paternity in any case so the
assumption had to be made. If a woman lied or was uncertain, there
was no way to tell for sure. Men were held to account for anything
their wives did. You're her husband; you're the father of all
children.
Whether such a law should or should not continue in the
face of hard evidence only now available is not up to the courts,
but us, the public. This Colorado columnist likes the law just fine.
She calls fatherhood, "agrees that he is the father,"
avoiding reality and whether either man involved has a right to the
same certainty about his parenthood as any woman. She asks whether
a husband should be able to "get out of the deal" (making fatherhood
a deal into which men are to be snared) on a "just maybe," then
leaps into a case where everyone knows for certain.
She characterizes the man as heartless and irresponsible
for objecting to being deceived, oblivious to the heartlessness it
took to effect it. She uses the "helpless youngster" as the reason
to pretend it didn't happen (using children for self-interest)
when everyone now knows it did. She gives no thought that the child
may be devastated by this trickery, to the devastation to both men
(men should just take it), nor that a child might have a right to
know his true parentage or at least not be lied to about it.
The net effect of her position is to preserve the mother's
situation; everyone else's life is in ruins and should remain so.
Justice is, "I tricked him fair and square. He had six months to
risk our marriage by calling me a liar, now I've got it all, so
should keep it." Justice does not lie in truth or honesty.
As to the relationship between the tricked husband and
child, since society doesn't care about that in our divorce laws
it's cynical to suddenly raise it here. Surely what becomes of
that should be up to the un-father as we cannot legislate
relationships.
How would that column have read if it was about a woman
deceived by a bigamist? And a man cannot so easily hide a child
he has outside of marriage.
But I am happy to go along with this. No, really I am. So
long as when I murder my wife no one says anything nor puts me in
jail lest doing so upset the children.
Copyright © 2004 K.C.Wilson. K.C. Wilson writes a weekly
column for MenStuff.org
and is author of several books on family and social issues, including
Co-prenting for Everyone and Where's Daddy. See his e-books at
http://wheres-daddy.com.
