Family Law

I just wrote a rant elsewhere about how America tends to cover Viagra -- "little blue pills" -- for men but doesn't want to cover birth control pills -- "the pill" -- for women and how messed up that is. I recently did some traveling and between two bus trips became passingly acquainted with three young women who each had multiple children by multiple fathers and possibly never married any of them.

That's evidence of some societal something. They referred to the fathers as "my baby daddy" rather than husband or boyfriend, so this is a cultural trend that has new terms that didn't exist when I was growing up.

There's no doubt a lot of different forces at play shaping that, including lack of good paying jobs with good benefits appropriate to supporting a family. There are probably also positive trends -- things we want to happen -- contributing in ways no one anticipated.

Two of these young women talked about "In every relationship I've had, they treat me like an ATM." So probably these are both women who work and make decent money.

This means women are more free to have sex with men they like and not try to save it for marriage while looking for a guy who is husband material, which is often not far removed from selling your body to the highest bidder and making a deal with the devil you may not be able to escape.

These are women who can leave even though the relationship resulted in a child. Historically, having a child trended towards trapping you in the relationship, which sometimes meant staying with a wife beater or alcoholic.

I was married for twenty-two years. I was able to do the full-time homemaker thing and I enjoyed doing that.

I left him to save my life in the face of a deadly medical diagnosis under circumstances where I felt staying would be the death of me and no one would blame him. They would blame my medical condition.

Leaving was hard and roughly two decades later, I still have not adequately established a middle class lifestyle on my own recognizance. It's been very hard and some of that is because I had almost no work history or work experience prior to leaving.

Pregnancy can also leave a woman permanently impaired. Fathering a child is unlikely to ruin your health beyond the same risk women also take of potential exposure to STDs.

At one time, I spent a lot of time on Hacker News. It's an overwhelmingly male forum and men openly complained about having to pay child support as if the lazy ex-wife should just magic up a well-paid job after years of not doing paid work to raise their offspring or taking a Pink Collar Ghetto job to prioritize family so he could pursue a hard charging career with long hours to support the family.

It seemed to never cross anyone's mind that women routinely stop working for a time because they have kids and this constitutes a significant hit to her lifetime earnings capacity. They just implicitly assumes she would raise the kids and didn't count this as any kind of cost to her, while loudly complaining about the cost of child support payments.

I frequently appreciated male observations that "Well, on average, men put in a lot more hours at work than women and that accounts for part of the lifetime earnings difference." I did not appreciate men implying women are all lazy, over entitled, simply unwilling to work hard and he shouldn't have to help pay for the children he fathered if the marriage ended and she got custody.

Odds are high he didn't want custody. He liked having a hard charging, well-paid job with long hours and took it for granted he was entitled to that and took it for granted that the woman was obligated to raise any resulting kids and his time was not to be imposed upon in that fashion.

I'm contrast, Tom Fejeran switched careers from hard charging urban planner to parent-friendly school teacher shortly before I met him and he kept custody of the kids when his second wife moved out.

I'm aware there are a lot of social, cultural and biological forces pressuring human beings to split up parental responsibilities the way we typically do, with expecting him to be the financial provider and her to do the caretaking. 

But we've largely done away with alimony and we currently act like women can just get a job when they divorce, and never mind we all know it's hard to get a job at all with a significant employment gap on your resume, much less one capable of supporting you. It's nigh impossible to get one capable of supporting you and your children that isn't some variation on sex work, like stripping.

The US is seeing insane political reactions criminalizing women for abortion or even miscarriage. This implies to me that someone is freaking out big time about lower birth rates in the US.

Our current policies are a policy of quiet genocide, actively discouraging American women from having children at all and then practically guaranteeing that those children will grow up in poverty, left alone for long stretches and at high risk of being abused because of it. This is guaranteed to foster a long, steady decline of quality of life in the US.

And this is apparently Donald Trump's idea of making America great again. I have no idea why anyone voted for him at all unless it was perhaps to vote against the other revolting candidate in our broken two-party political system which often presents Americans with no meaningful choice. 

(One year, someone did an article about how the two presidential candidates were distant cousins.)

If you are a judge, being aware of such patterns can help you administer whatever crazy making laws you are coping with in a less societally suicidal fashion.

I'm aware that historically women required permission from their husband to get a job at all, that women couldn't get a bank account in their own name and that some of the problems we currently have are due in part to women wanting careers and earned income and fuller lives. 

It's still not only genocide, it's self- inflicted genocide for the US to create policies that so harshly punish women and children so men can do seemingly any damn thing they want.

Historically, those big salaries men typically earn from serious careers with benefits used to be viewed as family income, not his income. And if he was an alcoholic, sometimes the employer paid his salary to his wife so she could pay their rent and buy groceries rather than allow him to blow it on a bender.

The US Federal government did so for military members in the living memory of my late father.