Please read this as entertainment.
Not only is my memory not what it used to be, but people are telling me that it is 200% better. That is, half of what I remember never happened; or so they say.
This is a memory from WAY back, maybe twenty years ago. If I recall, the couple who wanted the baby lived in California and the sperm-donor lived in New Orleans.
You cannot give away what is not yours
Picture in your head a same-sex couple (women) who want to have a child. Rather than adopting, they decide to find a like-minded man and do it the old-fashioned way.
They find a suitable sperm-donor in a distant city. A document is drawn up and the lesbian couple both sign that they will NEVER pursue child-support payments from the sperm-donor. The gay man does the deed. The woman who was to be the "birthing parent" conceives and bears a child.
The lesbian couple broke up. The birthing parent found herself in economic distress. She sued for child-support. The gay man who lived 2000 miles away produced the quit-claim-deed on his income.
The judge ruled in favor of the mother.
The judge's logic was that child-support is not the mother's right to be disposed of at her discretion. It is the child's right. The judge said "You cannot give away property or rights that don't belong to you, even if you are the parent/guardian of the person they do belong to."
A secondary consideration is that the legal system takes a dim-view on people blindly signing away the future. For example Anti-Competition clauses that are often a feature of severance-of-employment are rarely enforced because many judges willing to rule that they are bullshit: I doubt that there is a judge alive who would enforce the agreement if the former employee had to compete with their former employer in order to feed their family.
Said another way, nobody is competent to read the future. So a contract might be held invalid if the signer was under-the-influence of cold medicines (for instance) because if the box has a warning "Do not operate equipment" on it, then the person is probably not competent to sign contracts.
Walking off with clients is slightly different. The "Roldex" typically belonged to the employer. Employers continue to use them because it does intimidate many ex-employees even if their legal standing is shaky if challenged.
Using that line of reasoning, one must wonder how WOKE parents can sign-off on having their children's body-parts chopped off and tossed into the incinerator. That practice fails on both counts. It fails because it is not the parent getting their junk or boobs chopped off. It fails because it irreversibly closes the door on future revelations of "gender" in the future.
Its a mess, the whole quandry.
ReplyDeleteThat was a tell, at the time, too. Nature doesn't operate this way. Darwinian laws extinguish the flame early on. Rational is the only way forward, these are abberrations.
The legal system does what it does seldom because of established law but much more often because of the beliefs and agenda of those who run it....chiefly the judges. "Child support" was never an issue till divorce became a blue ribbon first prize for dissatisfied women. Before "women's lib" in the 19th century and before women who sought to leave their husbands also had to leave their children. The practice of making a man pay for his children while not having anything to do with them is a very recent development historically. A poor legal decision that created a precedent that has grown into a monster. And like almost everything that is related to the practice of divorce on a whim it has caused much societal damage. The quandry of the sperm donor vs the lesbians is just a variation on that theme of societal destruction.
ReplyDeleteYou make an interesting point, but just adding some not-legal-advice information on the child support point.
ReplyDeleteNot your lawyer/general info/not legal advice/disclaimers/yada yada:
The general standard in most states in Family Court is "the best interests of the child", but there are other fudge factors added in. However, the over-riding primary goal is still the best interests of the child. Some states have specific laws addressing this situation. In a state that doesn't have a specific law addressing this situation or a case law on point, the court will almost always come to the conclusion that the child's best interest is dad pays child support.
People have, to me knowledge, successfully argued for reduced child support on the public policy grounds that granting full child support would create an incentive for falsely entered into arrangements and otherwise be anti-natalist. Also, a dad could likely contemporaneously argue for a relationship with the child (might not get much more than a 2 week vacation a year + video chats, but it'd be something).
Cases have (to my knowledge), on occasion extended this to tampered with condoms/condoms recovered from trash and used to produce a child.
Putting it another way, the court is more interested in evidence the mother is a nutter when it comes to awarding the father more custody, but this evidence doesn't reduce the obligation of the bio-parent's to pay for the raising of the child as it is still in the interest of the child.
Perhaps said differently ERJ, fads are fads because they are so overpowering in the present without any anticipation or thought as to what the impact will be in the future. If the current trend continues, in 20 to 30 years I suspect we will see a bevy of court cases about how individuals were "forced" into making decisions for which there will be no recompense.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe not. As Yoda said (and he was right on this): "Always in motion is the future. Difficult to see."
"[O]ne must wonder how WOKE parents can sign-off on having their children's body-parts chopped off and tossed into the incinerator. "
ReplyDeleteTrue, but it can be difficult to contrast that with a parental authorization for, say, cancer surgery, so long as we make the (IMO) error in calling these transition surgeries a form of medical treatment. Parents get to give the go-ahead for medical treatment for minor children, and we are usually ok with that.
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