Forced to Pay Child Support

Your April 15 article, “DNA Shakes Up Child Support Laws,” proves that men are often trapped into parental roles when they have no desire to be parents. Fathers have minimal legal rights and huge legal financial responsibilities.

If sociologists were really concerned about the importance of the role of fathers, they wouldn’t only look at how much money a father can provide but would realize that a father should be more than a weekend visitor. A father paying child support should have the right to see that his support payments are going toward the children he’s supporting, and he should have equal input into the decisions being made concerning his children. To force a man to pay support payments to a child he does not claim as his is an outrage.

Joseph Davis

Covina

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Two possible solutions to keep these situations from occurring in the future: 1) Mandate DNA testing for newborn babies and their parents. Some people might find this too Big Brother-ish, so an alternative is: 2) Require DNA testing in all child support court cases. In addition, require DNA testing of any man paying child support, if paternity has not been previously established, or have the man waive his right to the testing.

Matthew Klipper

Hollywood

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Your article is a wonderful illustration of the warped attitudes of some organizations. Taking the twisted logic of these groups one step further, an individual falsely condemned to death row would still be executed for the good of the victim’s relations if some relatively short period of time passed prior to exonerating DNA analysis. A man having a substantial portion of his income expropriated to support someone else’s child is not a father but rather a victim of the courts.

Dean Buehler

Corona

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Although I agree that the welfare of children is important enough to force a man to pay for a child who didn’t turn out to be his, I think there should be consequences for the mother who has repeatedly lied and broken the law. After having had sex with at least two different men in a short period of time, she chooses the most gullible of the group to exploit. She lies to him, she lies to a judge and she lies on the birth certificate.

I suggest that on the child’s 18th birthday, the mother should become liable for past child support and pay it back.

Adam Taylor

Laguna Niguel