| | Argh... I did an edit of my preceding post and it disappeared, even tho it says I edited it...
Here: http://www.glennsacks.com/california_governor_davis.htm
OK. This is just one of the stories that appeared in the Pulitzer Prize winning OC Register on the issue. 1.5 million men paying for kids not related to them? That sounds high, but it's possible.
My take: in our modern society, the woman is always totally responsible for the child. Period. She made the choice. There were other choices. Unless she has a signed contract with someone else - man, woman, or whatever - to provide support for a child as a joint venture, in which the other party gets something of substance in return, she is 100%, solely, totally and completely responsible.
So, any attempt to force a man to pay for an unwanted child is pure thievery and effectively slavery when the state steps in and takes his income.
There is a HUGE market in children. Children are a valuable commodity. Of course, you can't "own" another human being, which means that you can't "sell" another human being either. However, as the mother, and as father, if there is an explicit or understood contract, you DO have rights to the care and upbringing of the child that you paid for with your money, time and PAIN, in the case of a woman. And those rights are transferable. And it is nobody else's business, unless they have reason to believe that the child is being abused or something similar.
When I came to Ca in '76, one of my employers tried to get me to try to convince my just-18 roommate to have a baby for he and his wife, who were totally infertile. He was willing to go $20,000, no strings. My roomie was interested, but then he lost his position and the offer disappeared.
The biggest roadblock to this of course is the State, which takes the perfectly reasonable position that you can't sell a person. True. But that isn't what is taking place. You're only selling the right to bring up the child and act as its parents. However, the State view is implicitly that the parent is primarily responsible for the child, and that this responsibility for raising the child is non-transferable, except via its own processes and institutions. Never mind that the foster care and adoption systems of the State have been shown repeatedly to be profoundly susceptible to every variety of corruption and irresponsibility.
I say that the parents gave the child a great gift, LIFE. If they later decide to abandon the child, because they can't afford him or her, or the kid turns totally evil, or whatever, that is their absolute right, altho they would be truly stupid in most cases to do so, given the market demand for children by childless couples.
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