Tag Archives: Custody

Commentary

How divorce courts put men in debtor’s prisons

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Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.

[…]Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.

Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”

About 45% of first marriages end in divorce, with women initiating about 70% of divorces and getting full custody about 90% of the time. False accusations are regularly used by the person who initiates the divorce in order to get restraining orders and de facto custody of the children, and the child support payments that go with them. It is a massive transfer of wealth from men to women at gunpoint, and a massive loss of liberty for men.

People keep expecting men to step up and take on the role of husband and father, but when the chips are down, 77% of young unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and his policies of destroying the economy. A job is a requirement for men to marry and to take on the role of husband and father. Not only are the schools and universities biased against men, but the industries where men dominate have also been hit hardest by the recession.

We need to spend less time on fashionable causes like environmentalism, gun control, pacifism, animal rights and universal health care, and more time on economics. It’s men who have the most to lose emotionally and financially from a divorce. Not only that, but women commit domestic violence against men at rates equal to men, but the laws (e.g. – VAWA) don’t recognize the truth. The vast majority of the social programs are for women only.

A good start would be to read this summary of the divorce courts by Stephen Baskerville, and also listen to the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage. Either we are going to encourage men to marry and praise them for marrying or we are going to discourage them and then blame them for not marrying. Men respond to incentives. As long as society as a whole chooses to remain ignorant of the facts and chooses to continue to blame men, men won’t marry.

News

New study compares donor-conceived vs biologically-conceived children

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The study is here. (H/T Dr. J from RuthBlog)

Dr. J writes:

The Institute for American Values has just published a new study, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, of how donor conceived persons are doing in comparison with those who were born and raised by their biological parents and in comparison with those who were adopted.

And she notes this comment from a gay man who thinks that the fact that he and his partner PLANNED their donor-conceived child, that they are therefore justified morally in doing so.

The gay man writes:

I’m a gay man who has had a child, with my partner of 8 years, through surrogacy and egg donation. The egg donor and surrogate will be known to our son.

One way that I explain to people our experience with the artificial reproduction process is that it is the opposite of being ‘knocked-up’. We were very involved in the planning and conception and the growth and birth of our child. Our child’s conception and birth was considered, thought about, planned for, dreamed about, fantasized about. He was most definitely wanted. He is loved and treasured.

We did not have sex to have our child. We did not have wedded, heterosexual, within marriage, we-want-to-have-a-child-sex. We did not have wedded, passionate, spur-of-the-moment at the wrong time of the month (or the wrong time of our life) sex. We did not have wedded, spur-of-the-moment, right time of the month sex. We did not have any of these types heterosexual sex as unmarried heterosexuals.

But so many children are born to heterosexual couples via each of these eight scenarios. So many. Many more, around the world are born in wider range of unloving scenarios.

And then one of the authors (Elizabeth Marquardt) of the new study responds by citing evidence.

I just want to note that one way of looking at the My Daddy’s Name is Donor study is as a study of three groups: The first completely one hundred percent wanted and intended — that is, the donor offspring. The other two groups made up of a lot of unintended pregnancies — that is, the adopted and those raised by their biological parents.

Which group is faring the worst? The 100 percent wanted, planned, intended group. The donor offspring, overall, even with controls, are twice as likely to have struggled with substance abuse and delinquency, and 1.5 times as likely to have struggled with depression, compared to those raised by their biological parents (and these differences are significant). The adopted generally fall in between except with regard to depression in which case they were higher than both the donor conceived and the raised-by-biological.

No one is saying, T, that “all” of those raised by biological parents are doing great. But when you look at these populations, measured by our study, you find that, contrary to today’s conventional wisdom, being wanted isn’t enough. What the child is born into — who the child is raised by — matters.

Some more stats from Maggie Gallagher.

Excerpt:

Forty-five percent of these young adults conceived by donor insemination agree, “The circumstances of my conception bother me.” Almost half report that they think about their donor conception a few times a week or more. Forty-five percent agree, “It bothers me that money was exchanged in order to conceive me.”

Nearly half of donor offspring (compared to about a fifth of adopted adults) agree, “When I see friends with their biological fathers and mothers, it makes me feel sad.” Similarly, 53 percent (compared to 29 percent of adoptees) agree, “It hurts when I hear other people talk about their genealogical background.”

This is not fair to children – it treats them like a commodity instead of as a gift from God to be treasured and nurtured.

Commentary

Barbara Kay asks whether men or women commit suicide more often

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Here’s a nice column by Barbara Kay.

Excerpt:

…men, of course, are far more likely to commit suicide than women altogether, although the fact is rarely brought to public attention as a matter for special concern, even when it would be appropriate to do so. Three students at Cornell University in New York State in the last month alone committed suicide by jumping off a bridge on the campus into a deep gorge. These were not “cries for help” — they were irrevocable decisions to die. The students were male. Yet Cornell president David Skorton said that “… suicide among young people is a national health crisis.”

Well, it isn’t a crisis amongst young people, but it is a crisis amongst young males. In Canada over 80% of suicides are male (77% in the U.S.). Suicides amongst men rise dramatically after separation or divorce, especially amongst men deprived of their family home and children, while suicide rates amongst women remain flat.

If the figures were reversed, and women were committing suicide at the rates of men, we can be sure that it would be considered a national crisis, one on which a great deal of money, media attention and authentic concern would be lavished. As of now, the only research being carried out on male suicide is being done by activists in the fathers’ rights movement.

I don’t always agree with Barbara Kay, but I like this column.