January 5, 2014 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
It seems that we here in the decadent West haven’t completely cornered the market on lunacy when it comes to issues of paternity fraud and child support. This article out of Taiwan gives the lie to that notion once and for all (Global Times, 1/1/14).
A Taiwanese businessman started having an extra-marital affair back in 2003. By 2008, the Other Woman announced that she was pregnant with his child. The man stepped up to the plate.
In 2008, the defendant gave birth to a boy who she said was fathered by the plaintiff. At the hospital, the plaintiff signed a surgical release form as the woman’s husband.
In his letters to her, he acknowledged that the boy was his son. After the boy was born, the plaintiff started transferring money to a bank account under the boy’s name.
For reasons not disclosed by the article, the man started to think the boy might not be his after all, so he went to court to get a DNA test. But, in an event worthy of the worst rulings of western courts, the court asked the mother’s consent to do testing which she refused. What a surprise.
Of course she claimed her refusal was all about the emotional well-being of the boy, but from here it looks like she knows the man isn’t the father and used her power in family court to thwart not only his legitimate interest in knowing the paternity of the child but also that of whoever the father may be. Then there was the matter of child support that she’d stand to lose if her bet on the boy’s genetics proved wrong.
In perhaps the rudest aspect of the case, in denying the man’s request, the court blamed him.
In 2009, the plaintiff began asking for a paternity test. The defendant always refused, which made the plaintiff suspicious, the court said.
After the lawsuit was filed, the defendant said she was unwilling to consent to the paternity test because she believed it would hurt the boy’s feelings.
The court ruled that the defendant’s refusal wasn’t enough to prove that the plaintiff wasn’t the boy’s father. It determined that the plaintiff did not provide any evidence to support his claim that he was not the boy’s father.
Yes, that’s what happens when the law places access to the only evidence that could prove or disprove paternity in the hands of the mother; the father can’t produce evidence of paternity. That the court would somehow conclude that that was anyone’s doing but hers is astonishing to say the least.
We see this sort of thing in the U.S. and throughout the English-speaking world all the time. Oh, we’ve generally gotten past allowing mothers complete and utter control over the rights and duties of fathers and men the mothers name as fathers. For example, men who want genetic testing done to determine paternity, can usually get a court to agree. And when they do, courts usually go along with the results of the testing. Not always, but usually.
But what we do see is the routine placing of fathers’ rights in mothers’ hands. A well-placed lie about anything from paternity to child abuse is usually sufficient to either shove a father out of a child’s life or shanghai a non-father into one, all depending on the desires of the mother. When it comes to adoption, it’s even easier, especially for single mothers. All she needs to do is break-up with the dad early in her pregnancy and like as not he’ll never know he has a child and therefore will never suspect it’s been placed for adoption.
If he does get wind of the little tyke, well, Utah is just a plane flight away, and once there, single mothers find an adoption industry ready willing and able to do just about anything short of murder to deny the dad any say in the process.
Until we right the basic (and apparently unconstitutional) wrong of denying fathers any real say in their own rights to their children and children’s rights to their fathers, our kids will continue to grow up without fathers. And we’ll continue to wonder why young men and women exhibit such dysfunctional behavior and why mothers can’t seem to earn or save as much as fathers.
The solution to all of that is to give fathers real rights that only they can either exercise or waive. Until we do that, we’re just kidding ourselves about gender equality and about even the concept of a sensible society.
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