Women as Mothers

Another Self-Serving Comment from a Surrogate Mother

2011-12-23T14:31:00.000-05:00

Well it's time for another re-post since I got a comment this morning telling me that another surrogate mother is very pleased with her decision...BUT what is so difficult for these women to understand that it's not about the best interest of the surrogate mothers, it's about the innocent children they are bringing into the world.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006
More Issues Concerning Surrogate Mothers--Disturbing
The article below doesn’t really surprise me.

Basically it shows that the women who are being hired as surrogate mothers are pretty much from the most unstable and unfit population in every society, the most damaged group from the bottom rungs in each, all probably suffering from undiagnosed personality and other more serious disorders. Which, by the way, research has shown more and more of these traits to be hereditary such as depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, even more everyday personality traits such as shyness and aggression are being shown to have genetic components as well.

So not only are the persons hiring these women to bear children for them taking advantage of a vulnerable damaged population, but they are helping bring children into this world at risk of inheriting the same mental and personality disorders as their mothers: children who would not otherwise exist except for the money being paid to these surrogate mothers to have them. I mean look at most of these surrogate mothers' backgrounds (and I don’t just mean this woman as most of the rest have a similar unstable history from Mary Beth Whitehead, first US surrogate mother, right through to the woman featured in the story below) and contrast it to the candidate pool of their counterparts from the male side of the equation: anonymous sperm donors, for instance.

As anyone, who has studied this issue for any length of time, knows most male sperm donors are college students, some of the most privileged persons in western civilization (and that means in the world really). Who after graduation will go on to become the highest earners in our society: the cream of the crop, so to speak. Donating sperm is used by them as a means to make a little extra income while going to school; at most a 45 minute exercise with little investment for the student and no marked impact on his future emotional or mental state. Contrast this picture with the one painted below of a surrogate mother, and again, as I said not an unusual story at all, and you can see the vast differences between the two populations.

Probably a lot of the women who become surrogate mothers would never even have gone on to have their own children if not lured into being a surrogate mother by the promise of an unrealistically high income for the education and training they have. Or at the very least, would have had far fewer children then they have now; as only the most damaged woman is going to continue having one pregnancy after another, only to hand over her infant at the end of each one.

Actually a good number of these surrogates would have probably been weeded out of the ordinary candidate pool as wives and mothers long ago, maybe having one child and then disappearing from it’s life, since few men would marry and have families with the more obviously damaged amongst them. So their line would have eventually died out just as in nature a damaged mother will either abandon or even eat her own young, thus effectively killing off her own defective gene line. This surrogacy business however continues the damage for generations as again, you are severely damaged as a woman, if you continue having one baby after another and giving it away. There is something wrong with you. A woman who does this is mentally and emotionally unstable, no matter how many gender neutral proponents would like to compare these women to men who are anonymous sperm donors.

It’s not the same thing.

Women simply invest, contribute, and risk more in bringing children into this world. Those few mentally unstable women who can so easily turn and casually walk away from that investment are quite simply damaged goods. No matter how many people benefiting from the instability of these women try to tell us different.

AND they are probably passing along many of their disordered traits to their children.

Thus this practice should be stopped.

As not only is it damaging the woman themselves who are an unstable and mentally ill population, but the children are liable to be suffering from many of the disorders of the mothers as well. Not to mention that I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in surrogate mothers to have multiple children (such as twins or even triplets) since the payment is higher for this, then for just having one child. So now even physical risks can be added to the mental problems for these children as twins and triplets are more apt to have physical disorders.

Let’s face it a perverse incentive exists for these women in the common lump-sum payments of from $10,000 or $15,000 dollars per infant paid to someone with no marketable skills or education, plus all their expenses covered while pregnant (frequently paid for by either the family hiring them or even the taxpayers) as once pregnant no matter how you accomplished that (from either doing the entire football team to having an angel sneak into your bedroom window one night to inpregnate you) any which way you accomplish the deed, it entitles you to extra taxpayer funded benefits in most western countries.

So can someone tell me any good reason why the taxpayers should be funding this sort of incentive to spawn more vulnerable children from an already damaged population????

What purpose or higher good is served by this?

Absolutely none.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=402180&in_page_id=1879

Daily Mail
24 hours a day

I've given away seven babies, but I'd like to keep the next one

By HELEN WEATHERS,
Daily Mail Last updated at 00:28am on 25th August 2006

Of all her pregnancies, this - her seventh - is proving to be by far the most challenging for Jill Hawkins.

Plagued by crippling headaches, dizziness and nausea, she can barely drag herself out of bed some days and feels constantly tired.

So debilitating are her symptoms that the 42-year-old legal secretary has been signed off work by her GP from virtually the moment she fell pregnant in March and, 25 weeks into her pregnancy (emphasis mine: Probably living off publicly funded benefits for the duration of her pregnancy) she can't wait for the baby - a girl - to be born in December.

Of course, it will all be worth it when her baby finally arrives - only Jill won't be taking her home. Just like the other six babies she has borne, this one will go home with a childless couple who paid Jill £12,000 in expenses to be their surrogate (emphasis mine: Are they also paying her living expenses now I wonder or have they managed to shuffle this cost onto the taxpayers of their home country as well).

If her past experiences are anything to go by, Jill knows what is in store once her job is done (emphasis mine: $12,000, possibly tax free).

She will return to her two-bedroom flat in Brighton, where she lives alone with three rescue cats, and cry her eyes out, telling herself that she is simply feeling hormonal and it's not the baby she weeps for.

"This is definitely the last one," says Jill. "This pregnancy has been much harder than all the others. In the past the pregnancies have fitted around my life, but this one has completely dominated it. I'm also getting older now, so, no, there won't be any more surrogate babies."

Jill, however, has said this before. She said it after baby number four, baby number five and baby number six - born two years ago - but always explained away her change of mind by saying she was 'addicted' to being pregnant (emphasis mine: Or more likely addicted to the nine months paid leave of absences with benefits and $12,000 cash payment at the end of them. As I can’t imagine this woman is much of a star employee either).

This time, she insists, she really means it. She has apparently conquered her addiction.

"I feel very differently about this pregnancy. Before, I had such low self-esteem the only time I felt needed, special or loved was when I was carrying a baby inside me," says Jill, who admits she has never had a serious relationship and has been celibate since she became a surrogate 14 years ago (emphasis mine: no surprise there, few men would have married or planned a family with a woman with so many apparent personality and other mental disorders).

"These couples were so grateful for what I was doing for them, and knowing that I could transform their lives by giving them a baby gave me real purpose, confidence and self-esteem. It was the one thing I knew I was good at.

"But I don't feel like that any more. For the first time in my life I feel happy with who I am. I feel complete and don't need to do this to feel good about myself.

"With my other pregnancies I always became good friends with the couple I became a surrogate for. We'd go out for meals or to the theatre because it made me feel worthwhile and part of the family, but this time there is none of that.

"I very much like the couple whose baby I am carrying and they come to all the scans and ante-natal appointments, but there is no socialising.

"I feel more detached. My friends and family kept telling me to stop after the last two pregnancies, that I'd done enough. But I wanted to experience pregnancy one last time and help one final couple - and, if I am honest, I needed the money." (emphasis mine: Okay, at least she’s being honest.)

So what has happened to change Jill Hawkins's mind? So much so that - after years of firm insistence that she has never wanted children of her own - she is now talking about the possibility of falling in love, getting married and having a baby. Her own baby.

There is, as yet, no suitable candidate on the horizon - she is five months pregnant after all - but for the first time she feels good enough about herself to believe it could happen, even if it never actually does.

This dramatic shift in attitude came after a cataclysmic series of events. After the birth of her sixth surrogate baby, Alexandra, in August 2004, Jill plunged into the depths of depression - something she has suffered from, on and off, all her adult life (emphasis mine, many researchers are beginning to see genetic roots in depression).

Her weight - which she has battled to control since she was a teenager - ballooned to 19st 7lb and during a lonely Christmas at home alone she gradually became increasingly suicidal (emphasis mine: same as above, genetic roots in suicidal behavior as well).

Her beloved rescue cat Sindy, who she'd doted on for 16 years, died from cancer, and a surprise holiday to Gran Canaria she'd booked for her younger sister Susan, 39, and herself to cheer herself up had to be cancelled because her sibling couldn't make it.

Bereft over the loss of Sindy, disgusted at her obesity, lonely, and wrongly convinced in her depressed state that no one - not even her sister - liked her, let alone loved her, she decided that no one would even notice if she was gone and the world was better off without her.

She took an overdose of anti-depressants, but one hour later phoned for an ambulance when she suddenly became frightened, realising she didn't really want to die and that her actions were a cry for help.

Her family and friends' utter devastation at her actions and their reassurances of love made her realise just how wrong she had been, and it proved to be a critical turning point.

After she was treated in hospital (discovering that the overdose of anti-depressants wouldn't have killed her anyway) she underwent counselling and then, in April 2005, paid £7,500 to have a gastric bypass operation in a last-ditch effort to lose weight.

Jill, who has since lost 7st, insists that her depression was not caused by the emotional strain of giving away so many babies, but rather by underlying issues which have always been there - but one wonders if she is being entirely honest with herself. (emphasis mine: Yep. She is)…

For the two appear to be inextricably linked.

"The catalyst for me was that suicide attempt. I think I had to reach rock bottom before I really started to confront the issues which I'd tried to ignore for 25 years," says Jill, who decided to become a surrogate after reading a magazine article when she was 27.

"If anything I think the surrogacy actually kept me alive by giving me something to feel good about. But at the same time, perhaps if I hadn't become a surrogate I might have confronted my problems sooner.

"In a way, it's like running away from yourself. You can put your life on hold and leave your problems behind for nine months.

"I have been a yo-yo dieter for years and I loathed myself for being fat. I loved being pregnant because you are allowed to be fat when you are carrying a baby. My main motivation for becoming a surrogate was to help childless couples, (emphasis mine: Now she’s running away from the honesty observed above) but if I am honest I was doing it for selfish reasons, too."

And, bizarrely, I'd lose weight when I was pregnant as I would eat very carefully and exercise because I was responsible for someone else's baby. I never thought of it as mine. After each baby was born, after the inevitable tears and sense of loss, I would feel great about myself and what I'd done to help this couple and try and stay healthy by going to the gym.

"After the fourth baby was born I went right down to 11 stone and I felt fabulous, but the weight would always creep back on. I wasn't stuffing myself on chips or takeaways.

"I was just eating too much and eating between meals. I just couldn't stop and was so desperate I took appetite suppressants - which I never did when I was pregnant - but after a while they stopped working.

"When I went to see a counsellor after my suicide attempt, I said to her: 'There is nothing that you can say to make any difference until I lose weight.'

"That for me was the root of my self-loathing and until I did something about that the rest would be pointless.

"After the bypass operation the weight just dropped off and it is the best money I have ever spent. It has completely changed the way I feel about myself and how I relate to other people. I am still on antidepressants, but the self-loathing has gone.

"I didn't really need to go ahead with this seventh surrogate pregnancy and in some ways I didn't want to, but having lost so much weight I might need a nip and tuck in the future to tighten up my saggy tummy and lift my breasts, so I needed the money. (emphasis mine: back to the honesty).

"After this baby is born I am hoping to join an internet dating agency to meet new friends. I'm not saying I'll necessarily meet the love of my life, but if it happened before I was 45 then I wouldn't rule out having a baby of my own. I feel ready for that now." (emphasis mine: like what normal man is even going to think of her as a serious candidate as a wife and mother when he hears her history).

There is no doubt that Jill Hawkins is a complicated, curious woman. A warm, gentle and genuinely compassionate person, she gives the impression that she would make rather a good mum - only, as she admits herself, she prefers her cats.

The eldest of three children born to businessman Brian Hawkins, 65, and Brenda, 61 - now retired and living in Spain - she always thought her childhood was happy, but now after counselling she is trying to understand the root causes of her low self esteem and comfort eating.

Her mother, whom she still adores, was - she says - a rather domineering woman and Jill was impressionable. Because she loved her mother so much, her opinions became Jill's opinions and the only area where she felt she had any control was food.

Intensely shy as a child and suffering from partial deafness caused by a viral infection, she found it difficult to make friends and - desperate to be liked - turned to food for comfort when she felt rejected. The bigger she grew, the more she hated herself and the more she ate.

"Men never asked me out. I was 15 stone by the time I was 15 and my weight put them off. I never felt good enough for a relationship, and never even wanted children of my own, but I felt this intense yearning to become pregnant," she says.

At 26 she approached COTS (Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy), set up by Britain's first surrogate mother, Kim Cotton. At first they were reluctant to take her on, because they preferred women who'd completed their families, but when she convinced them she would not want to keep the baby they put her in touch with her first couple.

So began an odyssey, motivated not by money but an emptiness food could not fill. All the children she has given birth to are biologically hers - Jill self-inseminates with the husband's sperm, rather than being a 'host' surrogate where a fertilised embryo is implanted using IVF. (emphasis mine: meaningless distinction which the people profiteering from this sort of enterprise like to make. She would have been the childrens’ mother no matter, as bonding and other interaction take place between the mother carrying the child, no matter how the fetus was produced.)

Today, she regularly sees all her surrogate children Lucy, 14, Bertie, 12,

Jamie, eight, David, five, Sam, four, and Alexandra, two - whose pictures adorn her bedroom wall - and remains good friends with their parents.

She is fond of them all, but there is no maternal yearning. "They are all great kids, but when I see them I don't think 'That's my daughter' or 'That's my son'. (emphasis mine: like I said damaged goods as even adoptive mothers who never see their children generally have feelings of grief and sadness whenever confronted with the reality of their decision.)

"I think of them as my friends' children. Their real mothers are the women who are bringing them up, loving them, nurturing them and shaping their lives and personalities.

"All the boys look like their fathers but people say Lucy looks like me, though I can't see it. I only ever see the children on an invitation basis, and I feel very privileged that the parents want to keep seeing me as a friend, for who I am, rather than out of any sense of obligation.

"Over the years I have become better at dealing with handing these children over because initially you do feel very empty and upset. Your body has spent nine months nurturing this baby and suddenly it's not there anymore, so emotionally it can be quite traumatic.

"The first time, with Lucy, was the worst because I'd never had a child before. I experienced feelings I'd never had before, overwhelming emotions of wanting to protect this little baby. I didn't know if I would want to change my mind or how I might feel once Lucy was born, whether I would bond with her.

"I never thought of her as my own and I never wanted to keep her, but it was very hard to deal with once she was gone. I went to my parents, who've always been very supportive, and just cried for days.

"My way of dealing with it now is to spend half an hour of private time with the baby before I hand it over to mum. That way I will always have a memory that is mine alone, which I can relive if I need to."

She adds: "I like being pregnant, my body was built for pregnancy and I have the fertility of a rabbit, so it seemed to me a shame not to use that to help people who couldn't have children naturally."

Jill's remarkable story can't help but raise some disquieting questions about the morality of surrogacy; questions those involved appear reluctant to confront. In their desperate quest to become parents, do the childless couples who seek out women like Jill ever know just how emotionally needy or damaged they might be, or question their true motives? And if they do know, do they care enough to think twice about proceeding? (emphasis mine: Probably not. Anymore then people using a puppy mill will question whether they should purchase that cute puppy. So it’s up to the rest of us to stop them. Obviously).

Jill's latest couple are married professionals aged 50 and 45. (emphasis mine: old enough to know better). The woman suffered a miscarriage before discovering she had breast cancer.

Chemotherapy left her infertile. They are overjoyed at Jill's pregnancy.

But has Jill told them everything they might feel they have a right to know?

"I have told them about my depression and the suicide attempt. They know I am taking anti-depressants, which are safe to take during pregnancy, and they don't appear to be concerned about it," says Jill, before making a startling admission.

"I haven't told them about the gastric bypass operation, but they can see I have lost a lot of weight. (emphasis mine: I've noticed a lot of ads for surrogate mothers recently highlighting height and weight requirement as again, yes, these physical traits are genetic in origin as well. So obviously people don't want to pay $12,000 for a kid who is going to grow up to be fat. This could have disqualified Jill if the parents purchasing her child actually realized how overweight she had a tendency to be.)

"I don't know why. Perhaps I was worried that it might put them off, but doctors have assured me that the pregnancy will not be affected although I have to take extra vitamins and nutrients for the rest of my life."

The chances are this baby, along with all the others, will be a beautiful, healthy child who will bring joy to its parents and whose picture will join those on Jill's bedroom wall. But will it really be the last?

"You know, I am really looking forward to the rest of my life. I am going to start doing things for me now because I don't feel bad about myself," says Jill. "I want to do more travelling and meet new friends. After this pregnancy I want to get down to my target weight of 11 stone. I really do feel very happy."

If that happiness proves to be short-lived, will there be surrogate baby number eight? (emphasis mine: Yikes…)
posted by NYMOM | Wednesday, September 06, 2006
12 Comments:
silverside said...
Good points. Although it does seem on some psychological level this woman is addicted to pregnancy; it some how soothes her massive feelings of unworth. I really think the whole surrogacy thing should be banned. Even when these women come to their senses and develop normal feelings for the child they are carrying, and want to care for the baby like any mother would, they are harrassed. And frankly, evidence from the children who have come into the world via these situations is not good either. The social "mom" often has problems bonding with a child that is related to her husband, but not to her. She is really no different than a stepmother, and the kids feel this. The fathers don't really bond either, because father-bonding is totally influenced by how bonded they are to the mother who bore their child. If they love her, they love the kids. If they don't, they don't. Seldom do fathers really love their children when they are indifferent to and/or hate the mother. And besides, the father doesn't raise the kids. The "mother" does. So the kids grow up knowing something is missing, knowing they are rejected.
10:29 AM
bloggernoggin said...
I am sorry we fought. Please come back to Redstatefeminst's site so we can compare notes again. I really miss you!! Hope you are alright.
3:49 PM
Anonymous said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
3:55 PM
NYMOM said...
"Please come back to Redstatefeminist's site so we can compare notes again. I really miss you."

That's an interesting sentiment bloggernoggin, especially considering I rarely posted on redstatefeminist's site in the past...

I just came in that one time to make a few comments about Matt Dubay concernng his "Roe vs. Wade for Men" case...

I do this on many blogs, post for a while and then maybe not post again for weeks or even months.

Someday I will probably post again on redstatefeminist's site.

I can't say when however.
7:12 PM
NYMOM said...
Well that was a lot of stuff to digest silverside.

I'm not 100% sure I agree with all of it.

I think there could be something in what you said about the father's feelings for the children being impacted by indifference or even contempt for the surrogate mother at some point. I have a feeling the same could be said for both parents, especially as the children get older and start looking like or even acting like the women that are their biological mothers.

I also have to wonder how these surrogate families are feeling now that this woman went public with her medical history????

I mean I would be kind of embarrassed if I were them and had to own up to allowing her to be the parent of my kid...

Of course she probably wasn't so obviously damaged at 27 when she started this as she is now at 42...

Youth covers a lot of flaws, I actually heard even the royal family had said about Princess Diana that they never would have allowed that marriage to take place if they realized how seriously damaged she was from her own childhood...
7:22 PM
Sharon said...
I feel that you should not base your judgement regarding Surrogacy and Surrogate Mothers from reading this article. As a past Gestational Carrier (to TWO sets of twins) a married (23 years) mother of 2 and a business owner I resent the fact that only the lowest of the low are 'lured' into the surrogacy world because of financial gain. I would write more but perhaps I should have you read my blog and uncover the facts for yourself, not only from my experiences (of running a surrogacy agency) but from others who have written about their own surrogacy path.
7:57 PM
saguiar said...
I completely agree with Sharon. You must not judge every Surrogate based on this one bad example. I was also a Surrogate, a Traditional Surrogate at that. I did not become a Surrogate for financial reasons, but rather having watched a few close friends battle infertility, I was inclined to help someone on their journey to parenthood.

Since my Surrogacy, I am now running my own Agnecy. Having already given an amazing gift to a most deserving couple, I am honored to help couples create their families. To watch these parents hold their babies for the first time...to watch the closeness with everyone involved...is priceless. I must say that I have the best job in the world! I wish you could find the bright side of this issue...
9:02 PM
NYMOM said...
How totally self-serving: you both have your own agencies now. I find it a little hard to believe you are claiming humanitarian motives but then run agencies where you can profit from this business. If you are only concerned with helping so-called 'deserving' couples, no one is stopping you from doing that.

It's the money that should be disallowed.

Many of you overlook that little caveat.

You want to do this for nothing, fine...

By the way, further back in my blog is a story of a mother who lost custody of her first two children because she tried to pay off her debts by becoming a so-called surrogate mother.
4:54 PM
Sharon said...
If running a surrogacy agency to insure that all parties are treated fairly, screened properly, are not taken advantage of, and are guided with a knowledge of Assisted Reproductive Technology experience is 'self serving' then so be it. But in stating this you would also have to throw in the Reproductive clinics, Drug companies, Psychologists, and Attorneys as well...and lets not forget the hospitals and their entire staff who make a living on delivering these Surro-babies...because all of these professions make money when a surrogate or egg donor is involved. The compensation to a surrogate is minimal when compared to what the clinic is asking. I think that this argument needs to be put into prospective. Saying that a woman who volunteers to be a surrogate mother shouldn't have her bills paid is ridiculous. Are we horses to be bred? I think not.
10:22 PM
NYMOM said...
By encouraging this behavior, Sharon, you put ALL WOMEN at risk of being viewed as cattle to be bred for the convenience of others. As you and your associates continue chipping away at the fundamental 'sacredness' of motherhood, we're left with women being viewed as brood mares for the convenience of others.

Think about it Sharon and wake up.
11:30 AM
Anonymous said...
I am a married mother of one, BA-degree (graduated number one in my class), worked in an international executive career that paid me ALOT more than 12,000 pounds... and I am still interested in becoming a surrogate mother.

While all surrogates may not come from my gene pool, they also do not all come from that of the woman posted in your article... A wise person looks at the world through a lens of many shades of gray, not just black and white.

What a truly disheartening and disturbing site. Good riddance.
12:39 AM
NYMOM said...
"Good riddance."

Likewise.
7:57 PM
Post a Comment

Still Unsettled Issues Around Divorcing while Pregnant,

2011-10-26T09:57:00.000-04:00

Here's another oldie but goodie that I was just reminded of when someone made a comment on it, even though the post was almost 6 years old...it just goes to show how the same issues remain relevant over time.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Allowing Divorce for Pregnant Mothers

The recent ruling in Washington State will not prove to be a good thing for mothers.

Allowing women to divorce while pregnant (the classical Trojan horse strategy) will eventually allow men, always looking for an excuse to dodge their responsibilities anyway, to take advantage of this loophole to divorce pregnant women leaving them without provisions for housing, food, medical care and other necessities.

Women are vulnerable when pregnant. It is NOT the time to be hit with divorce papers and have to prepare to relocate into a friend's or relatives' house or apartment, worry about bills being paid or being able to have medical coverage for routine prenatal care.

As many people know, the FIRST thing an attorney will advise a husband to do is to immediately empty ALL joint checking/savings accounts while at the same time to STOP paying all bills for the upkeep of the marital household from the mortgage or rent to the electric and phone bill, cut off ALL joint credit cards, and begin transferring as many joint balances to spouse's card as possible; thus using up all of pregnant mothers' available credit.

This is standard operating procedure, standard. It is an attempt to force the lesser income party (which is still usually women, pregnant mother, a given) to settle as quickly as possible with as few marital assets as possible.

Well, of course, now many will say, well Judge will eventually straighten it all out making allowances for these discrepancies. Sure, I say MAYBE in a couple of weeks or months, maybe it will be straightened out. Sadly, however, a pregnant womens' needs are immediate: housing, food, vitamins, ongoing medical care, etc., and these needs cannot always wait for the pace of American justice.

Then, of course, along with the threat of winding up virtually penniless out in the street, will be the usual emotional blackmail of a 'custody war' ensuing if this is not settled by the time infant is born.

Again, standard operating procedure today, very standard.

Overall this is an extremely stressful time for a pregnant woman anyway, thus the last thing she needs is to have to deal with a divorce.

In spite of the fact that it is two women featured this week as being the initiators of divorces while pregnant, mothers do NOT be fooled. The two women featured in the articles below, both classical Trojan horses'(asses), if I may say so myself, are not representative of most pregnant women.

Most of us dwell in the vast middle of the standard bell-shaped curve, but BOTH of these examples of mothers divorcing while pregnant are more representative of the small group of pregnant women who exist at either end of the spectrum.

The bottom line is that the people who overall have the most to gain from having the legal right to divorce while spouse is pregnant are husbands, not their pregnant wives. Allowing men to divorce while wife is pregnant will put them in the exact same legal position of a boyfriend, who after getting a woman pregnant, is responsible for NOTHING until after he is determined to be the father of child AFTER birth, so basically we will be allowing ALL men the potential to do the same thing.

Like I said, classical Trojan horses'(asses) strategy.

State House passes bills on DNA testing, divorce
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
OLYMPIA -- The state House on Monday passed a bill allowing convicted felons to request DNA testing that could exonerate them.

The House also passed a bill that would prevent judges from using a woman's pregnancy as the sole reason for denying a divorce.

The divorce bill was inspired by the real-life case of Shawnna Hughes. A Spokane County Superior Court judge ruled last year that because Hughes' ex-husband didn't know she was pregnant at the time the divorce was granted, the divorce was illegal and must be revoked.

Because Hughes was on public assistance, the state had objected to the divorce because it might leave the state unable to pursue a father for repayment of welfare money used to support the child.

Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, said the Spokane ruling wasn't an isolated incident.

"There is no uniformity in the law nor in how judges view pregnancy in divorce proceedings," Dickerson said. "Similar rulings have been made on both sides of the Cascades."

The bill passed unanimously and now goes to the Senate.

Information courtesy of http://Seattlepi.newsource.com

Shawana Hughes is NOT representative of most pregnant women.

First of all she is already a self-contained economic unit (being supported on public assistance) depending upon nobody but the state to provide for all of her needs. Whether or not she divorces is immaterial, as her husband, as well as boyfriend of child she is carrying, are BOTH in prison 'BOTH' one a drug dealer, another a gang banger. Thus neither of these men are a factor in her life for providing any economic wherewithal whatsoever.

They simply are not relevant in this area.

Shawana Hughes has all of her economic needs taken care of from her rent to her medical care. Additionally she is assured of SOLE CUSTODY of this child, as well as the others, since BOTH of the fathers of her brood are in prison. Which is not a given for all mothers in a divorced while pregnant situation, as depending upon a number of variables a pregnant woman facing divorce could also shortly thereafter be face-to-face with losing her infant as well.

Shawna Hughes, divorcing while pregnant, will pretty much impact only her. She already has all of her financial and medical needs (as well as the needs of her children) cared for whether or not she's married. Thus, her decision to divorce while pregnant is not reflective of what is appropriate for the mainstream of pregnant mothers. Many of those mothers NEED their husbands to be married to them and legally responsible to provide all the material things that are required to maintain their lifestyle, while mother, herself, focuses on the most important job which should be bringing forth a normal, healthy, reasonably high-functioning infant.

Now we will examine the second case.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters)

Model turned actress Denise Richards has filed for divorce from actor Charlie Sheen, her husband of 2 1/2 years, according to court papers made public on Thursday.

Richards, 34, who is six months pregnant, filed divorce papers in Los Angeles on Wednesday and asked for custody of the couple's year-old daughter as well as the baby she is expecting with Sheen.

Sheen, 39, whose film credits include "Wall Street" and "Platoon," is currently starring in the CBS sitcom "Two and a Half Men."

He met Richards in 2000 after a tumultuous decade that included convictions for drug abuse, an attack on his then girlfriend and an association with Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.

The court papers listed irreconcilable differences as the reason for seeking the divorce. There was no comment from spokesmen for the couple.

Information Courtesy of Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Once again mothers, let's not allow ourselves to be fooled by the surface disparities in the two situations between the pregnant women, Denise Richards, in this article and the pregnant woman in the previous one, Shawna Hughes.

Denise Richards, again, like Shawna Hughes, is really a self-contained economic unit. She was a model-actress BEFORE she met Charlie Sheen (and whether or not he gives her anything and I'm sure he'll give her something), nevertheless, she will be able to function financially quite well without him. Let's look at the example of Liz Hurley, for instance. Steven Bing, her child's father, gives her nothing, nada, zip (he's only a freakin billionaire after all) but he puts all the child support he's supposed to be giving her into a 'college fund' for their son. Which if you believe either Hurley or her kid is going to see a dime of that money, by the way, I have a lovely large bridge to sell you in Brooklyn, but that's another story.

Anyway, careers such as acting and modeling revolve around very independent schedules (not like most of us who need to be at a job from 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week) and if you are important enough, many of these studio heads will provide separate dressing rooms for you, which can be luxurious enough to function as a small luxury apartment on the set. Most women like this, make much MORE money then the average person. So Denise Richards is not just making more money, but has a place to bring her infants (with their nurse/caretaker), which is probably just steps away from where she will be working.

Actually it's the situation MOST mothers would LOVE to have, but except for the rare exceptions, never will.

Thus, Denise Richards, like Shawna Hughes, is really a self-contained economic unit independent of her husband, and yet still able to spend more time with her children then MOST OF THE REST OF US MOTHERS ever will (again, just like Shawna Hughes).

Now regarding custody issues, ironically enough both Denise Richards and Shawna Hughes are in very similar situations vis-à-vis custody.

Charlie Sheen has been one of those Hollywood 'badboys' now since he was in his mid-20s, I think, and is probably the legal equivalent of Shawna Hughes's husband and boyfriend. The only difference between the three being that Charlie Sheen is not in prison for his offenses. But he, like them, has a record as long as your arm involving drug offenses, drunken brawls, beating up his girlfriend, carrying on with his 'posse' of Hollywood idiots, in and out of trouble for the last decade or so.

Anyway, I think looking at the moral, legal and character issues here, Denise Richards is a shoo-in for custody as well.

I think even Charlie Sheen might agree with that one.

Thus I think it is fair to say that while Shawna Hughes exists at one end of the bell-shaped curve, Denise Richards exists at the other; neither of these women, however, very representative of the vast middle of the curve where many pregnant women reside.

To sum up, the idea of divorce while pregnant, although currently being painted as a good for women, is one of those ideas (like communism) that will hopefully enter the 'dustbin of history' sooner, rather then later.

It is not something the average pregnant mother should be made to deal with while in a vulnerable state emotionally, physically and often financially. Being in this state could result in homelessness for her while pregnant and might even eventually cost her custody of child at birth. Since no court will award custody to a homeless woman or someone doubling up with friends or relatives, or very few will anyway.

Stability is the key word here that pregnant women need to be focusing on and divorce is the polar opposite of stability for pregnant women and their children.

The people hawking this as a new 'right' for women are misguided (as per the example of the two women in the articles above) as both of these women are in unusual situations, which many pregnant women are not in. Many pregnant women work until either just before or after delivery and then wish to take the 3/6 months in maternity leave that is provided by most jobs today. Mother uses that time to recover from her ordeal, as well as to bond with her infant before having to return to the 'hurley-burley' of work.

Taking advantage of this leave, requires a stable home with a husband who is willing to provide the lion's share of income to maintain that stable home, until mother is back at work again.

I think it is fair to say that most pregnant women are not self-contained economic units who can just afford to divorce (or be divorced) while pregnant. Most pregnant women are not on public assistance where everything from rent money to medical coverage will be provided for them via a benevolent state; or a model-actress who is going to be given the equivalent of a luxury apartment on set to have someone watching the children within, while making millions of dollars just a few steps away.

I wish it could happen that way for most mothers, I really do, but planning the future on either of those two things happening is going to be a long shot for most pregnant women.

Thus, let's just say no right now and make it clear that we are against allowing divorce of a woman while pregnant.
posted by NYMOM | Saturday, March 05, 2005
37 Comments:
Anonymous said...
Actually, the woman invovled in the case that this law - to allow women the right to divorce when pregnant - was the one seeking the divorce. BECAUSE HER HUSBAND WAS HITTING HER. By your logic, a divorce is more dangerous than spousal abuse. WOMEN ARE NOT PROPERTY AND SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE THE RIGHT TO LEAVE THEIR HUSBANDS. The woman in this case won her divorce and then a judge intervened to dissolve it - because they wanted to determine the "legitimacy" of the child first! If this isn't the most backward, feudal logic, I don't know what is. And defending this - especially in today's political climate when those in the highest offices of the land would gladly make divorce IMPOSSIBLE since it is a "sin" - is AT BEST misguided. Supporting the government to say a woman doesn't have the right to leave her husband IS DANGEROUS. Open your eyes. This is not about protecting the stereotypical vulnerable pregnant woman. Quite the contrary. It's about TO WHOM does she belong - herself or her husband (who, in this case, was abusive)? THIS SHOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT TO ANSWER.
11:00 AM
NYMOM said...
This woman's husband was in jail as was the boyfriend...so this was NOT about abuse...but about allowing a pregnant woman to GET a divorce...and now, of course, since it's okay pregnant women can BE divorced as well...
11:02 AM
Anonymous said...
So pregnant women should universally be completely cared for by the husband (whether or not he's the father?)

I'm not saying I disagree, but both feminists (women do not "need" men) and men (why should I pay when it isn't my baby, even though we're married) might disagree.

How do you dismiss both feminists' and men's concerns there? And why should some gal who decided to screw every delivery man merit the same rights as a woman who got preggers by her own true husband, by the way?

I'm a woman, but I'm not getting the logic here. It seems not only tilted (which I can understand due to the vulnerability of pregnancy) but utterly unbalanced.
3:30 AM
NYMOM said...
"So pregnant women should universally be completely cared for by the husband (whether or not he's the father?)

I'm not saying I disagree, but both feminists (women do not "need" men) and men (why should I pay when it isn't my baby, even though we're married) might disagree."

Sadly when you marry someone, by law you accept the full responsibility for that person until you are divorced or they pass on as they accept the same for you.

Just as a wife would be responsible for the debts of a husband who was irresponsible and ran up a credit card he (they) couldn't afford or didn't pay his income tax or even had a child while married to another woman (as yes, Virginia, there are states where step persons CAN be forced to assume financial responsibility for stepchildren), so too husbands are and should be responsible for wife's bills while pregnant...

Once she has child, husband can always get a paternity test and at that time divorce and not be responsible for her or child going forward...

Until that time however you are and should be responsible...just as wife would be responsible for the debts of an irresponsible husband...

Judges don't prorate marital debt according to good behavior...

"And why should some gal who decided to screw every delivery man merit the same rights as a woman who got preggers by her own true husband, by the way?"

Because one thing has nothing to do with the other...

For instance, if you found out your husband was screwing all your neighbors' wives everytime they left for work, would that mean a Judge would say okay you're not responsible for his share of the marital debt then????

I don't think so...

People need to understand that you assume a financial obligation to each other when you marry...and if you made a bad choice, do NOT think that everyone else is going to absolve you of your responsibility because of your husband or wife's irresponsible behavior...nor should they...
3:20 PM
Anonymous said...
Well it sounds like that really gives women full license to behave irresponsibly and immorally. It's pure favoritism and special treatment for women over men.

Your example doesn't hold because men aren't generally the ones incurring marital debt.

Sounds like a free ride and high times for immoral women.

As a decent human being I would NEVER marry someone just to do that to him. Any woman who would isn't worthy of ANY man marrying her. Encouraging it in law is reprehensible.

As a woman yourself, I don't see why you have to denigrate us all so horribly. Decent women would not do such things to anyone, much less their husbands. This is why women get a bad name.
6:31 PM
NYMOM said...
"Your example doesn't hold because men aren't generally the ones incurring marital debt.

Sounds like a free ride and high times for immoral women."

That isn't true...Men make more, have higher limits on their credit cards because of it...of course, they probably generate more debt...just as higher income households generate more debt then lower income ones.

Plus I believe it is safe to say that men cheat more...but no one takes that into consideration during a divorce today and saids well you know she was such a good woman married to such a lowlife. Let's just give her a little extra money/property here because of it...do any Judges do that??? No...

"As a decent human being I would NEVER marry someone just to do that to him. Any woman who would isn't worthy of ANY man marrying her. Encouraging it in law is reprehensible."

Encourage what? What are you talking about? You get your wife pregnant, you stay married until after she delivers the baby... PERIOD...

"I'm a woman, but I'm not getting the logic here."

Well maybe you should go back to school then and get some more education as the logic is pretty simple...When you are married to someone and they get pregnant, you STAY married to them until they either abort or deliver child...

Okay...

It's not brain surgery but simple common sense I think...
3:06 PM
Anonymous said...
"That isn't true...Men make more, have higher limits on their credit cards because of it...of course, they probably generate more debt...just as higher income households generate more debt then lower income ones."

And 75% of the marriage income is spent by the wife.

"You get your wife pregnant, you stay married until after she delivers the baby... PERIOD..."

What she's talking about is when he WASN'T who got his wife pregnant. Take your blinds off.

"When you are married to someone and they get pregnant, you STAY married to them until they either abort or deliver child..."
When you are married to someone, you get pregnant only of him, and stay faithful until death sets you apart.
12:27 PM
NYMOM said...
"When you are married to someone and they get pregnant, you STAY married to them until they either abort or deliver child..."

This is the LEGAL situation as it is and should be vis-a-vis marriage and pregnancy.

"When you are married to someone, you get pregnant only of him, and stay faithful until death sets you apart."

This is the MORAL situation and as you know our courts CANNOT rule on morality...
1:06 PM
Anonymous said...
"This is the LEGAL situation as it is and should be vis-a-vis marriage and pregnancy."

"Should" isn't "is".

"This is the MORAL situation and as you know our courts CANNOT rule on morality..."
But they can rule on legality, and it is legal to divorce a cheating wife, even if she's pregnant, when you're not the father. After all, she can go to the real father to ask for help.
11:54 AM
NYMOM said...
"But they can rule on legality, and it is legal to divorce a cheating wife, even if she's pregnant, when you're not the father. After all, she can go to the real father to ask for help."

AND as I said before the law does NOT distinguish between a cheating wife and a good church-going one on the issue of divorce...can you understand that...

This law applies to EVERY WOMAN NOW...ALL OF US..

NOW it is legal for a pregnant woman to be divorced...it's that simple...this was another law passed with the support of women who just weren't thinking very clearly when they supported it...

But it's a moot issue now, it's passed...

...a decade or so from now women will be once again kicking themselves in the a@@ over this one and wondering who were the dumbells who supported it...so give me your name so I can let them know one of the main ones...
2:22 PM
Anonymous said...
"AND as I said before the law does NOT distinguish between a cheating wife and a good church-going one on the issue of divorce...can you understand that..."

Yes, I can understand it. Can you understand that law indeed do distinguish between both, when child support is the issue?

"NOW it is legal for a pregnant woman to be divorced...it's that simple..."
Yes, as you said in your other thread, now women can have a fulfilling life without men. What? That they didn't want men's presence but they wanted men's support? Oops... perhaps they indeed screwed it up :D:D:D

"and wondering who were the dumbells who supported it..."
What about the National Organization of Women?

"so give me your name so I can let them know one of the main ones..."
Ok, my name is MAN.
3:31 PM
NYMOM said...
"AND as I said before the law does NOT distinguish between a cheating wife and a good church-going one on the issue of divorce...can you understand that..."
Yes, I can understand it. Can you understand that law indeed do distinguish between both, when child support is the issue?"

No...you are wrong...child support is for the child...it's not awarded according to how GOOD a mother is...and child support is an issue AFTER the child is born...how is a pregnant woman supposed to exist up to that time...

"NOW it is legal for a pregnant woman to be divorced...it's that simple..."
Yes, as you said in your other thread, now women can have a fulfilling life without men. What? That they didn't want men's presence but they wanted men's support? Oops... perhaps they indeed screwed it up :D:D:D"

Fine...what are women who are divorced while pregnant supposed to do until they deliver their children...move into a cave in the hills somewhere or maybe a homeless shelter as I have heard of men dumping pregnant girlfriends off in those...

The point of marriage while pregnant is that a husband is still responsible for a wife until they are divorced...NOW since women can be divorced while pregnant it means EVERY man can now be like a single father, who is responsible for NOTHING until AFTER the birth and paternity is established...he doesn't have to worry about providing a pregnant women with so much as meal or a vitamin...

"and wondering who were the dumbells who supported it..."
What about the National Organization of Women?"

This means nothing to me as they have supported much legislation that I've disageed with...

"so give me your name so I can let them know one of the main ones..."
Ok, my name is MAN."

It figures...men always looking for ways to dodge responsibility...here's just another example...
4:59 PM
Anonymous said...
"No...you are wrong...child support is for the child...it's not awarded according to how GOOD a mother is...and child support is an issue AFTER the child is born...how is a pregnant woman supposed to exist up to that time..."

You are wrong here, dear. It's not "for the child". It's "for HIS child". If the child isn't his, he has no obligation whatsoever to him.

"Fine...what are women who are divorced while pregnant supposed to do until they deliver their children..."

Who cares? After all, it's their child, their pregnancy, their freedom. Why should we care about her? After all, you said we contribute NOTHING.

"men always looking for ways to dodge responsibility..."
If we have NOTHING to do with it, then what responsibility are you talking about?

Dear, why don't you say what you really want: Men should give women their income and slave themselves supporting them, so women can be free. You know what? Women can be as free as they want. And freedom also means she earns her own money, cleans her own house and cooks her own money. Pregnant or not, it is irrelevant. After all, why can't other free women take care of her sister?
7:07 PM
NYMOM said...
Once again playing stupid and refusing to discuss the serious issues that I post about here...

Allowing men to divorce their wives while pregnant will result in MANY men chosing to divorce their wives when they are pregnant in order to absolve themselves of any financial responsibility until AFTER the birth of the child...

AND men will continue becoming more and more useless in this society...so you're all just condemning yourselves by your own actions.
7:49 PM
Anonymous said...
"Allowing men to divorce their wives while pregnant will result in MANY men chosing to divorce their wives when they are pregnant in order to absolve themselves of any financial responsibility until AFTER the birth of the child..."

If a man divorces his wife when she's pregnant of HIS child, he's scum. If she's pregnant NOT with HIS child, she's scum and he's right in giving her the boot. So, she should be sure to have children only from her husband.

"AND men will continue becoming more and more useless in this society"

Who is the judge to decide who is useless or not? You?

"...so you're all just condemning yourselves by your own actions."

In what way we are condemning ourselves? You said yourself, we are living the life we want to live. So, we're ok. It's you who is not having the life you want, because we oh-so-evil men are refusing giving you happiness in a silver platter.
7:55 PM
NYMOM said...
"If a man divorces his wife when she's pregnant of HIS child, he's scum. If she's pregnant NOT with HIS child, she's scum and he's right in giving her the boot. So, she should be sure to have children only from her husband."

But how is he to know that until after she delivers the child and is DNA tested...we can't have men divorcing their wives all over the place under this pretext can we????

I mean this could rapidly turn into a game of Russian Roulette...

"In what way we are condemning ourselves? You said yourself, we are living the life we want to live. So, we're ok. It's you who is not having the life you want, because we oh-so-evil men are refusing giving you happiness in a silver platter."

You're condemning yourselves through your selfishness...
9:37 PM
Anonymous said...
"But how is he to know that until after she delivers the child and is DNA tested...we can't have men divorcing their wives all over the place under this pretext can we????"

AFAIK, DNA can be tested even in the womb. And if a guy uses this reason as grounds of divorce, he should be ready to pay all the costs related to the test (which, if the kid isn't his, should be repaid by the mother).

"You're condemning yourselves through your selfishness..."
And you're condemning yourselves through your man-bashing and excessive demands. What is the difference?
9:59 PM
NYMOM said...
"AFAIK, DNA can be tested even in the womb. And if a guy uses this reason as grounds of divorce, he should be ready to pay all the costs related to the test (which, if the kid isn't his, should be repaid by the mother)."

Any test performed on a fetus inutero has the possibility to endangering the fetus...

You mean to tell me that you would endanger the life of a child JUST to ensure that you were the father...that couldn't wait until AFTER the birth...

So yes, I repeat, you are selfish...

AND remember what I have said before about the use of acronyms...I don't know what that one you used meant but if you post anything vulgar, it will be deleted...

I know you all use that filthy language on the other blogs you post on but I'm not allowing it here...
5:57 PM
Anonymous said...
"Any test performed on a fetus inutero has the possibility to endangering the fetus..."

That small detail has never prevented mothers from aborting their children, hasn't it? I'd say that's a lot more endangering to the fetus than a simple DNA test.

and AFAIK = As Far As I Know. You can find it everywhere in the web.

And I see you didn't say a thing about women's selfishness and the way it drives men away.
8:49 PM
NYMOM said...
"Any test performed on a fetus inutero has the possibility to endangering the fetus..."

That small detail has never prevented mothers from aborting their children, hasn't it? I'd say that's a lot more endangering to the fetus than a simple DNA test."

So I guess it's okay with you then to perform a test in utero that might destroy or deform your own child...just to assure yourself that your are the child's father BEFORE it's born...because people you don't even know have abortions...

That's your reason...

Well it doesn't even make any sense.
11:33 PM
Anonymous said...
So I guess it's okay with you then to perform a test in utero that might destroy or deform your own child...just to assure yourself that your are the child's father BEFORE it's born...because people you don't even know have abortions...

If the guy has some reason to believe that the child may not be his, it's a good reason.

Besides, what difference it does, if he divorces her during or after pregnancy? If the kid is not his, and he divorces after the delivery, he still has no obligation whatsoever to support the slut and her bastard.
12:01 PM
Callum said...
NYMOM Said:"Sadly when you marry someone, by law you accept the full responsibility for that person until you are divorced or they pass on as they accept the same for you. "

Callum says: Exactly what "responsibilities" do women legally have towards their husbands then?
12:27 PM
Anonymous said...
"Callum says: Exactly what "responsibilities" do women legally have towards their husbands then?"

Absolutely none. What are you thinking, that only because they marry they have to lose their freedom and independence? :P

At least, NYMOM says it clearly: Women have all the rights and none of the responsibilities. Anything different is unbearably oppressive (for women, that is. Men shouldn't be so selfish and accept their bromide without a complain).

I wonder were is her husband.
12:51 PM
NYMOM said...
"Besides, what difference it does, if he divorces her during or after pregnancy? If the kid is not his, and he divorces after the delivery, he still has no obligation whatsoever to support the slut and her bastard."

That's right...but it makes a difference to the rest of us in society as to how the woman get supported until she delivers her child, whoever the father is...
4:30 PM
NYMOM said...
"Callum says: Exactly what "responsibilities" do women legally have towards their husbands then?"

Husbands and wives are BOTH responsible for each other's debts including credit cards, loans and medical bills...

Same for both...
5:01 PM
NYMOM said...
"Absolutely none. What are you thinking, that only because they marry they have to lose their freedom and independence?

At least, NYMOM says it clearly: Women have all the rights and none of the responsibilities. Anything different is unbearably oppressive (for women, that is. Men shouldn't be so selfish and accept their bromide without a complain).

I wonder were is her husband."

Both husbands and wives have exactly the same rights and responsibilities, one to the other...

Most of my proposals if you notice are geared towards changing the situation vis-a-vis never-married men having rights to children, as they should have none...

AND regarding my ex-husband, like many other things, that is none of your business.
5:04 PM
Anonymous said...
"Most of my proposals if you notice are geared towards changing the situation vis-a-vis never-married men having rights to children, as they should have none..."

No rights, no responsibilities. If those men have no rights to children, they they shouldn't have responsibilities, either.

And since I'm not married to any single mom, I'm not responsible of providing a cent to support them or her offspring, whether directly or through my taxes.
5:18 PM
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5:18 PM
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5:18 PM
Anonymous said...
To the above... I am pregnant and he did cheat and wants to marry the other woman who he currently lives with. Can we say felony adultery? Yes, i'm in Oklahoma. I left him, of course he forced me by saying he was not going to pay rent. I am not my own economic unit. I am below 150% the poverty level. I'm on TANF and live in section 8 for free. Which automatically kicks me into the child support bracket...and so forth. You guys should not be aruging about whether you can or can't get divorced. you should be arguing why there isnt a legal support system in place for either way. Another point.. whats going to happen to my newborn if i have no money for a lawyer and he does and legal aid wont take me? Why does it take an average of 3 yrs to establish child support in my situation if you don't have a divorce? Thats some things that should be taken into consideration... One more... I am a displaced homemaker and cannot file taxes and he gets to claim the kids.... tanf might take it back but that still leaves me with absolutely nothing! how bout them apples.....thank you
1:11 PM
Anonymous said...
In Norway, if a man has sex 1x with a woman and she gets pregnant, she goes to the court and puts his name in a book and the country/ state sends the man a letter at his last known address notifying him, if the man does not contest within 2 weeks, life long paternity is automatically assigned to him and for 18 years his checks are garnished. If the man does not wish to pay for his child he must leave the country.
Judges in Norway do not care if the man had sex with the mother behind a hotel in a one night stand or was married to her for 10 years, the fact is, a baby is here and it needs to be fed for 18 years minimum and the man is responsible for keeping his address current and being responsible for where he puts his penis.
the lowlife model tries to evade child support by calling the woman a slut and the child a basterd, that does not work anywhere in the world. Men must wisen up as to where they put thier sperm deposits and women must keep thier legs crossed until a man proves he can provide and support a wife and child.
5:36 AM
Anonymous said...
move to Norway then
9:57 PM
Anonymous said...
I am terribly saddened by the posts on the thread. I am a married mother-to-be just looking for some guidance. My husband is emotionally and physically abusive. I want a divorce, but since I am a housewife, I have no way of leaving my situation without having to deal with the hardships of homelessness and poverty. I cannot find an employer williing to employ a woman 5 months pregnant. I am not trying to take advantage of my husband's finances, but what am I to do when I can't secure a way to take care of myself and my unborn child? I am totally at my wit's end on this. I hurt too much to continue with this marriage, but if I can't even take care of myself and baby in utero without him, is it really worth anything?
1:32 AM
Anonymous said...
This is just another way of the government controlling the situation. If a person wants a divorce it does not matter which party, they should be granted it at any time.

If women are working they should be able to handle the situation. The government should stay out of it. They were not in it when they first got married or when they started having problems in their marriage, so they should not be in it if they are getting a divorce during pregancy.
10:48 AM
NYMOM said...
Didn't you read the previous comment?

Common sense tells us we cannot be allowing men to walk away from pregnant women when they have a built-in obligation which the government (meaning you and me)will be obligated to assume...
2:13 PM
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Mothers on Trial - A tour-de-force by Phyllis Chesler

2011-09-15T12:41:00.004-04:00

I am only going to give a brief intro to this post because it is such a long one.

First, I do want to say that I positively love this woman. I contacted Phyllis Chesler a few years back because I wanted to do a joint project with her. I was turned down due to issues of time and limited resources, but I would have loved to work on something with her...

She both talks the talk and walks the walk...

For instance I love the way she acknowledges that feminists are actually the mothers of the fathers' rights movement and how a majority of fathers win custody when they take their cases to court. Which is why I always advise mothers to avoid litigation, if at all possible, as the courts are not a friend to mothers.

Phyllis Chesler acknowledges things that no one else in her position would dare to and I'm sure it has cost her in public appearances and scheduled lectures as she's on the far side of political correctness with this situation.

Anyway read it and weep as here is an excerpt from her book: "Mothers on Trial".

I had tears in my eyes after reading some of the passages she highlighted from the mothers she interviewed.

Read an Excerpt From Phyllis Chesler's Book -- 'Mothers On Trial'
By Phyllis Chesler
Published August 05, 2011

Courtesy Lawrence Hill Books

Editor’s note: Fox News Opinion presents the introduction and an excerpt from the completely revised second edition of Phyllis Chesler's book "Mothers on Trial":

This is a book that cried out to be written. I first heard that cry in the mid-1970s and, after years of research, published the first edition of “Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody” in 1986. At the time, the book created a firestorm and was widely, if controversially, received.

In the last twenty-five years, there have been some improvements, but matters have decidedly worsened. The book you are holding has been revised and updated and brought into the twenty-first century.

Myths about custody still abound. Most people still believe that the courts favor mothers over fathers—who are discriminated against because they are men—and that this is how it’s always been.

This is not true.

For more than five thousand years, men—fathers—were legally *entitled* to sole custody of their children. Women—mothers—were *obliged* to bear, rear, and economically support their children. No mother was ever legally entitled to custody of her own child.

During the nineteenth century, pro-child crusaders gradually convinced the state that young children required maternal “tenderness”—but only if their mothers were white, married, Christian, and moral. The children of American slaves, of Native American Indians, of immigrant, impoverished, sick, or “immoral” parents—all were untenderly appropriated by slave owners and by the state. They were clapped into orphanages, workhouses, and reformatories or farmed out into apprenticeships for “their own good.”

By the turn of the century, a custodially challenged American mother enjoyed an equal right to custody in only nine states and the District of Columbia—and only if a state judge found her morally and economically worthy of motherhood. Until the 1920s, no American mother was entitled to any child support. Since then, few have received any.

The maternal presumption was never interpreted as a maternal right. The maternal presumption has always been viewed as secondary to the child’s “best interests”—as determined by a judge. This “best interest” was always seen as synonymous with “paternal rights.”

The contemporary fathers’ rights (or fathers’ supremacist) movement, which has been wildly successful in instituting joint custody and false concepts such as “parental alienation syndrome,” is also a throwback to the darkest days of patriarchy. It is not the modern, feminist, progressive movement it claims to be. Individual men may indeed be good fathers, and, like good mothers, they too may encounter discrimination and injustice in the court system. What I am talking about here is an organized political, educational, and legal movement against motherhood that has turned the clock back.

This book is about what it means to be a “good enough” mother and about the trials such mothers endure when they are custodially challenged. This book is not about happy marriages or happy divorces—it is about marriages and divorces that erupt into wild and bitter custody battles.

By now, many books have been written about the role of caring and responsible fathers, about male longings for a child, and about a child’s need for fathering. This book clarifies the difference between how a “good enough” mother mothers and a “good enough” father fathers. It clarifies the difference between male custodial rights and female custodial obligations.

Since Mothers on Trial was first published in 1986, thousands of mothers have called or written. “I’m in your book,” they say. “It’s as if you knew my story personally.” “You showed me that it’s not just happening to me, that it’s not my fault.” And, “Can you help me save my children?”

In the first edition of Mothers on Trial, I challenged the myth that fit mothers always win custody—indeed, I found that when fathers fight, they win custody 70 percent of the time, whether or not they have been absent or violent. Since then, other studies, including ten state supreme court reports on gender bias in the courts, have appeared that support most of what I say. (The Massachusetts report actually confirms my statistic of 70 percent.)

Although the majority of custodial parents are usually mothers, this doesn’t mean that mothers have won their children in a battle. Rather, mothers often retain custody when fathers choose not to fight for it. Those fathers who fight tend to win custody, not because mothers are unfit or because fathers have been the primary caretakers of their children but because mothers are women and are held to a much higher standard of parenting.

Many judges also assume that the father who fights for custody is rare and therefore should be rewarded for loving his children, or they assume that something is wrong with the mother. What may be wrong with the mother is that she and her children are being systemically impoverished, psychologically and legally harassed, and physically battered by the very father who is fighting for custody.

Today more and more mothers, as well as the leadership of the shelter movement for battered women, have realized that battered women risk losing custody if they seek child support or attempt to limit visitation. Incredibly, mothers also risk losing custody if they accuse fathers or physically or sexually abusing them or their children—even or especially if these allegations are supported by experts.

An ideal father is expected to legally acknowledge and economically support his children. Fathers who do anything more for their children are often seen as “better” than mothers, who are, after all, supposed to do everything.

The ideal of fatherhood is sacred. As such, it protects each father from the consequences of his actions. The ideal of motherhood is sacred, too. It exposes all mothers as imperfect. No human mother can embody the maternal ideal perfectly enough.

Given so many double standards for fit mothering and fathering and so many anti-mother biases, I wanted to know: Could a “good enough” mother lose custody of a child to a relatively uninvolved or abusive father? How often could this happen?
I first interviewed sixty mothers who had been their children’s primary caregivers, were demographically similar to the majority of divorced white mothers in America, and had been custodially challenged in each geographical region of the United States and Canada.

On the basis of these interviews I was able to study how often “good enough” mothers can lose custody when their ex-husbands challenge them. I was able to study why “good enough” mothers lose custody battles and how having to battle for custody affects them.

On the basis of these interviews and on the basis of additional interviews with fifty-five custodially embattled fathers, I was able to study the kinds of husbands and fathers who battled for custody, their motives for battling, and how and why they won or lost.

I was also able to study the extent to which the custodially triumphant father encouraged or allowed the losing mother access to her children afterward.

To repeat: Seventy percent of my “good enough” mothers lost custody of their children.

Today the same experts who once tyrannized women with their advice about the importance of the mother-child bond appear, in the context of custody battles, ready to ignore it or refer to it, if it all, as of only temporary importance. They view the mother-child bond as expendable if it is less than ideal or another woman is available. Perfectly fit mothers are viewed as interchangeable with a paternal grandmother or a second wife.

In 1975 New York judge Guy Ribaudo awarded sole custody of two children to their father, Dr. Lee Salk. Their mother, Kersten Salk, was not accused of being an “unfit” mother. It was clear that Kersten, not Lee, had reared their children from birth “without aid of a governess” and that Lee would probably require the aid of a “third party” housekeeper-governess were he to gain sole custody. The judge used an “affirmative standard” to decide which parent was “better fit” to guide the “development of the children and their future.” Kersten Salk’s full-time housekeeping and mothering were discounted in favor of Lee Salk’s psychological expertise and “intellectually exciting” lifestyle. Lee was widely quoted as saying the following: “Fathers should have equal rights with mothers in custody cases and more and more fathers are getting custody…The decision in Salk v. Salk will touch every child in America in some way. It will also give more fathers the ‘incentive’ to seek custody of their children”

This case swept through public consciousness; it was an ominous warning, a reminder that children are only on loan to “good enough” mothers. They could be recalled by their more intellectually and economically solvent fathers.

Although mothers still received no wages for their work at home and far less than equal pay for equal work outside the home, and although most fathers had yet to assume an equal share of home and child care, divorced fathers began to campaign for equal rights to sole custody, alimony, and child support and for mandatory joint custody.

Fathers’ rights activists—both men and women—picketed my lectures, threatened lawsuits, and shouted at me on television. “Admit it. Ex-wives destroy men economically. They deprive fathers of visitation and brainwash the children against them.

Fathers should have rights to alimony and child support. Joint custody should be mandatory. We’ve already convinced legislators and lawyers, judges and social workers, psychiatrists and journalists to see it our way.”

Indeed, as we shall see, they have.

By 1991, more than forty states had shared-parenting statutes in which joint custody was either an option or preference, and most other states had recognized the concept of joint custody in case law.

The mothers began to find me. Would I testify on their behalf? Marta consulted me as a therapist. She said she was “depressed” and “wanted to kill herself.” Weeping, she told me, “For fifteen years my children were my whole life. I did everything for them myself. Six moths ago a judge gave my husband exclusive custody of our children. How could this nightmare ever happen? At first, I thought they’d come back to me on their own. But they haven’t. Why should they? I have a small one-bedroom apartment. Their father was allowed to keep our five-bedroom house. He gives them complete freedom and the use of their own credit cards. I work as a salesgirl for very little money. Is this a reason to go on living?”

Carol, a complete stranger, asked me for money. “My husband kidnapped our six-year-old son two months ago. It’s what they call ‘legal’ kidnapping. We’re only separated, not divorced. I need money to hire a detective to find them. I need money to hire a lawyer once they’re found. I only have six hundred dollars in the bank. And I’m four months pregnant.”

Rachel, also a stranger, mailed me a description of her custody battle. She entitled it “A Case of Matricide in an American Courtroom.” Rachel had a “nervous breakdown” after she lost her battle for child support, custody, and maternal visitation.

In 1977, when I myself was six months pregnant, I decided to study women and custody of children. The theme had claimed me.

Over the next eight years, I formally interviewed more than three hundred mothers, fathers, children, and custody experts in the United States and Canada and in sixty-five countries around the world. On the basis of these interviews, I conducted three original studies and six original surveys for the 1986 edition of this book. I wanted to understand why we take custodial mothers for granted but heroize custodial fathers, why we sympathize with noncustodial fathers but condemn noncustodial mothers, and why we grant noncustodial fathers the right to feel angry or sad but deny noncustodial mothers similar emotional “rights.” I also wanted to compare what noncustodial mothers and fathers actually do and contrast it with how they perceive themselves and are perceived.

Must custodially embattled mothers be viewed only as victims? Can such mothers also be viewed as philosophical and spiritual warriors and heroes? Gradually I came to view them as such. Under siege, “good enough” mothers remained connected to their children in nuturant and nonviolent ways. They resisted the temptation to use violent means to obtain custody of their children. This is one of the reasons they lost custody. But they never disconnected—not even from children whom they never saw again.

The 2011 Update

What’s changed since I first started researching and writing about custody battles?
Documented domestic violence does get factored in somewhat more than before. Where real assets exist, judges have the power to award more of them to mothers and children. Fewer mothers and fathers automatically lose custody or visitation because they are gay or because they have high-powered careers. However, certain injustices (crimes, really) that I first began tracking in the late 1970s have now gotten much worse. For example, battered women are losing custody to their batterers in record numbers.

Children are being successfully brainwashed by fathers, but many mothers are being falsely accused of brainwashing. Worse: Children who mandated reporters—physicians, nurses, or teachers—report as having been sexually abused by their fathers are usually given to those very fathers. The mothers of these children are almost always viewed as having “coached” or “alienated” the children and, on this basis alone, are seen as “unfit” mothers.

I understand that this sounds unbelievable. But it is still true. The mothers of raped children, who are also described as “protective” mothers, are seen as guilty of “parental alienation syndrome.” The fact that this concept, first pioneered by Dr. Richard Gardner and widely endorsed by fathers’ rights groups, has been dismissed as junk science does not seem to matter. Most guardians ad litem, parenting counselors, mediators, lawyers, mental health professionals, and judges still act as if this syndrome were real and mainly find mothers, not fathers, guilty in this regard. In 2010 the American Psychiatric Association was still fighting to include a new disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the parental alienation disorder, to replace the debunked parental alienation syndrome.

In 2009 and 2010 more than fifty mothers from twenty-one U.S. states and a number of foreign countries all shared their stories with me. Their cases took place between the late 1980s and 2010. Some cases are still ongoing.

In some instances, I spoke with the mothers in person or at length on the phone. Some mothers filled out questionnaires, but many also sent additional narratives and documentation. Some mothers sent me eloquent, beautifully written, full-length memoirs. Some write pithy but equally heartbreaking accounts of their marriages and custody battles.

Custody battles can take a very long time. They range from only several years to more than fifteen or twenty. They may have profound legal, economic, social, psychological, and even medical consequences for years afterward, perhaps forever.
Going through a custody battle is like going through a war. One does not emerge unscathed. Yes, one may learn important lessons, but one may also be left broken and incapable of trusting others, including our so-called justice system, ever again.

With a few exceptions, most of my 2010 mother-interviewees said that the system was “corrupt” and that lawyers and judges don’t care about “justice,” are “very biased,” or can be “bought and sold.” These mothers said that social workers, mental health professionals, guardians ad litem, and parent coordinators—especially if they were women—actively “disliked” and were” cruel and hostile” to them as women. (Perhaps they expected women to be more compassionate toward other women. In this, they were sadly mistaken.)

Also, many mothers found that female professionals were often completely taken in by charming, sociopathic men (“parasites,” “smother-fathers”), dangerously violent men, and men who sexually abused their children.

Perhaps the mothers who sent me their stories were married to uniquely terrible men who used the court system to make their lives a living hell; perhaps mothers who did not write to me had the good fortune to have been married to and divorced from far nicer men.

Good fathers definitely exist. Some fathers move heaven and earth to rescue their children from a genuinely mentally ill mother but do not try to alienate the children from her. If the mother has been the primary caretaker, some fathers give up custody, pay a decent amount of child support (and continue to do so), and work out a relationship with their children based on what’s good for both the children and their mother. These men exist. They do not launch custody battles from hell.

And good fathers are also discriminated against in a variety of ways in the courtroom. For example, mothers who are independently wealthy or who come from powerful families can and do custodially persecute good-enough fathers. That is the subject of another book. And, when fathers do assume primary-caretaker obligations, traditional judges may view them unfairly as “sissies” or “losers.” Liberal judges will award them custody in a heartbeat.

For this 2011 edition, I also reviewed hundreds of legal decision, which I obtained through LexisNexis and which all commenced and/or were resolved in the last quarter century. I interviewed lawyers and judges. I clipped articles about custody battles that appeared in the media from 1990 to 2010. Some were celebrity cases; others concerned high profile international kidnapping cases; some were about one spouse’s murder of the other during the course of a custody battle.

When I was researching the 1986 edition of Mothers on Trial, joint custody was a totally new idea. Now, as I’ve previously noted, “shared parenting” or joint custody (defined in a variety of ways) is the preferred norm. Joint custody is seen as fair, progressive, feminist, and in the child’s best interest—even though a number of recent studies have shown that under certain conditions joint custody may be harmful to the children involved. Other studies conclude that we cannot prove that a particular custodial arrangement is either helpful or harmful to children.

For example, according to a 1989 study, “a link was consistently found between frequency of visitation/transitions between parents and [child] maladjustment.” The study also found that “children shuffled more frequently between parents were more exposed to and involved in parental conflict and aggression and were more often perceived by both parents as being depressed, withdrawn, uncommunicative, and/or aggressive.”

A 2003 study found that “alternating custody”—for example, week on, week off—“was associated with ‘disorganized attachment’ in 60 percent of infants under 18 months. Older children and adults who had endured this arrangement as youngsters exhibited what the researcher described as ‘alarming levels of emotional insecurity and poor ability to regulate strong emotion.’”

Nevertheless, from the 1980s on, the entire national court system and its various helpers believed that joint custody was the preferred way to go.

As we shall see, joint custody research in the twenty-first century is a minefield of dangerous biases, conflicting conclusions, and outright lies.

The View from the Bench

While lawyers and judges are quick to say that joint custody should not apply where
there is domestic violence and incest, they are often the ones who do not believe that domestic violence and incest exist all that much. And, although lawyers and judges also say that joint custody may not work in “high-conflict divorces,” that does not mean that they still don’t encourage or even order it.

From their point of view, if everyone walks away with something, there is less likelihood that their decision will be appealed or that the case will continue to stall. One judge said, “Maybe this will actually force these warring parties to grow up and learn to compromise for the sake of their children.”

Thus, the role of “parenting coordinator” and guardians ad litem has increased considerably. Many mothers view them as impoverishing agents because they are ordered to pay for their services.

Talk to some good judges—those who are hardworking, experienced, and not corrupt—and you will find that their concerns are far different from those who consume the mothers who appear before them. Judicial concerns are not those of the plaintiffs or defendants. What you will hear is about how important it is to move the cases along, how huge the backlog always is, and how impossible it is to spend too much time on any one case. Judges are annoyed, even contemptuous, when rich people can afford to pay for a long, drawn-out trial. They understand that the working poor have no such luxury, and, at both conscious and unconscious levels, the judges may resent this disparity and despair over the arrogance of the rich.

One judge said, “Rich people fight over everything. Even if they don’t need it, they will prolong the case in order to ‘win.’ It can be a second boat, a third home, a million dollar piece of art over another. They are spoiled children and I only pity their real children.”

Talk to judges and listen to them speak, and you will realize that judges do not feel responsible for the perpetual logjams that frustrate, enrage, and impoverish mothers. In fact, judges feel that they too are victims of a system that does not pay them that well. They feel it does not allot resources for the necessary number of judges. The system is beyond bursting at the seams. In addition, the matrimonial bench is utterly devalued because it concerns “families,” “mothers,” and “children,” all of whom are not high on the priority totem pole.

Most judges are overworked and underpaid compared to what the lawyers who appear before them are paid. Judges are not given the proper time to really hear a case. They are forced into forcing plaintiffs and defendants to accept limited, far-from-perfect settlements, because that will close the case and get it off the judge’s roster. They opt for hard-and-fast compromises in the interest in moving a case along.

From the point of view of a “protective” mother whose child is being molested, there can be no compromise. Allowing a pedophile father or a domestically violent husband to have access to his former spouse or child endangers both mother and child. Such mothers protest. They will not play ball. Their relationship to their children is not a corporate-like entity. It is “all or nothing” as far as they are concerned. They resist for as long as their money holds out—and then they go pro se. Their resistance to compromise is viewed as proof of “narcissism” or “mental instability.” The mother who insists on not compromising is also viewed as annoying, difficult, impossible, unrealistic, and perhaps even dangerous to the smooth functioning of an already overburdened system.

Unless she has unlimited funds, it will cost her lawyer hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of dollars to fight for an uncompromised settlement. Some mothers fully expect their lawyers to do so, and when lawyers cannot, or refuse to do so, a mother will often turn on them and sue them for malpractice. “Protective” mothers view a lawyer who needs to make a living as a traitor and a sellout.

Mothers do not understand how to divide a baby in half or share parenting with an absent, neglectful, or abusive father. Judges do not see it as dividing the baby in half at all. One judge pointed on, very reasonably, that in order to keep the nonprimary caretaker involved in a nonembittered way, the judge must give him or her some things to do.

“But what if this father has never taken any responsibility and does not know what he is doing?” I asked.

“All the more reason to bring him in. It can’t be good for a child to have no contact with the nonprimary-caretaker parent.”

Please note the careful, automatically gender-neutral language that one might initially view as a feminist step forward. And it is—except that such language usually “disappears” the much harder work that mothers (primarily caretakers) have undertaken, the higher standards to which they are held, and the nonprimary caretaker’s failure to take primary-caretaking responsibility during the marriage, not just after the divorce.

The judge continued, “Why punish a child because their nonprimary-caretaker parent did not function as a caretaker in the past?

As the child grows, nonprimary-caretaker parents can offer the child different opportunities.”

The judge was right, and yet she was absolutely committed to the following myths:

(1) sane, good parents are ultimately going to do whatever’s in their child’s best interests; (2) all divorcing and custody-battling parents are equally crazy and have to be forced into better behavior; (3) mothers routinely allege battering falsely; (4) mothers are crazier and more difficult to deal with than fathers; and (5) mothers, not fathers, tend to “alienate” the child from the other parent.

These are all myths.

Myth 1: Are divorcing parents really “reasonable grown-ups”? Many parents are far from ideal, even far from adequate. What is known as a “high-conflict” divorce does not involve parents who have their child’s best interests at heart. They are often more concerned with their own interests.

Myth 2: Sometimes a father is a charming sociopath. Just as we have no way of distinguishing rapists from non-rapists, we have no easy way to “spot” a pedophile, a parasite, or a wife beater. Sometimes a mother is genuinely sadistic, abusive, or bipolar. This is more quickly spotted, diagnosed, or even assumed by laypeople in the court system. Thus, if a mother has been losing sleep over the possibility of losing her children and/or is exhibiting the normal human response to being battered or terrorized at home, she may also be stigmatized by the belief that women are naturally “crazy” and “impossible.”

Myth 3: Most mothers do not allege battering falsely. Some, a minority, do.

Myth 4: Mothers are not necessarily “crazier” than fathers; some are. However, facing the end of a marriage, the probable poverty it may entail, plus a possible custody loss, is a far greater stressor for mothers than for fathers. It does make them highly nervous, vigilant, overly demanding, unrealistic, and prone to engaging in self-sabotaging tactics. Men tend to recouple more quickly; women don’t.

Many fathers, on the other hand, are more capable of treating a custody battle as just one more businesslike venture. This style is more compatible with what lawyers and judges need. Thus, even if the father is a secret drunk or drug addict, an embezzler, an active philanderer, and a whoremonger and/or treats his wife and children coldly, sadistically, and abusively, these facts will not necessarily come into play in a custody battle.

Myth 5: According to most research and statistical data and my own interviews, it is mainly fathers who brainwash and kidnap children, not mothers. Fathers falsely claim “parental alienation” when it is not true; yet they are believed. Mothers claim brainwashing when it is true, but they are not often believed.

I do not view matrimonial lawyers as the main or sole problem. True—some lawyers are grossly incompetent and fail their female clients in every way: by misadvising them, sleeping with them, and prolonging their cases unnecessarily for monetary reasons. But it is also true that many lawyers serve their female (and male) clients effectively, even nobly.

Lawyers do not cause men to impoverish, batter, or abuse their wives and children; lawyers themselves are often hobbled by a system of laws and by a courtroom pace that is glacial. One cannot blame lawyers because it is enormously expensive to wage a high-conflict divorce. Some women expect their lawyers to actually pay for their divorces and feel betrayed when lawyers will not or cannot do so. With some exceptions, our government will not and cannot subsidize the cost of high-conflict divorces for the parent, usually the mother, who is without resources in a country where money does buy one’s chance to obtain justice, however imperfect.

Custody cases are also very stressful and difficult for the judges involved, many of whom try very hard to do the right thing. The law is not able to cure sociopaths or psychopaths; sometimes compromising with the devil is, unbelievably, the only possible solution. A judge might only be able to “save” one child—not all three. A judge might be able to save a child from the probable horrors of state care by allowing custody to remain with one far-from-perfect parent.

Having said this, I would like to stress that both judges and lawyers, as well as the entire courtroom cast of characters (guardians ad litem, parenting coordinators, mental health experts, social workers, state agency employees, and the police) have acted in tragically anti-mother and anti-child ways. While feminist progress led to more women on the bench and to more female attorneys, many female professionals have shown very hard hearts toward the mothers whose fates are in their hands. So have their male counterparts.

For this 2011 edition of Mothers on Trial, I have given honorable discharges to six previous chapters, although I’ve preserved some of the material throughout the book. I’ve also added eight new chapters in addition to this introduction. The new chapters include “Court-Enabled Incest in the 1980s and 1990s,” “Court-Enabled Incest in the Twenty-First Century,” “Legal Torture from 1986 to 2010,”

“Contemporary Legal Trends, Part I,” “Contemporary Legal Trends, Part II,” “What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Divorce: A Private Consultation with Divorce Lawyer Susan L. Bender,” and a section of resources.

Immediately after first publishing this book, I coordinated a Senate briefing in Washington, D.C., that was attended by some hand-selected custodially embattled mothers, as well as then Congress, now Senate members Barbara Boxer and Chuck Schumer. Together with the National Organization for Women of New York State, I also coordinated a national speak-out about women’s losing custody of children, which took place in New York City in the spring of 1986. Hundreds of mothers traveled from around the country to “speak out,” and many legislators, judges, and lawyers also participated in panels. I videotaped this event but, as yet, have not made these precious videos available to the public. I also appeared on network television programs together with “my mothers,” where we all said amazing things and were fairly well received. Women began organizing similar speak-outs elsewhere; I spoke at several in the United States and Canada the following year.

In 1984 a new nonprofit organization, ACES (the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support), was launched. It now has forty thousand members and one hundred sixty-five chapters in forty-five states.

In 1988 Monica Getz founded the New York-based National Coalition for Family Justice, which offers ongoing support groups for divorcing and custodially embattled mothers. Their mission statement reads in part as follows: “To identify problems and advocate for system changes in the divorce and family court systems in order to make them fair, user friendly, accountable, and affordable; to provide victims and children involved in domestic violence situations with crisis intervention, information, support, legal access, and advocacy.” They do not provide pro bono lawyers. But, in conjunction with the National Organization for Women in New York State, they have hosted important hearings and conferences.

In the mid- to late 1980s, “protective” and custodially embattled mothers also began running away from husbands who were sexually assaulting their child or children. Such mothers were almost all captured and jailed and lost custody of the children they were trying to protect.

By the early twenty-first century, custodially embattled mothers, including battered and “protective” mothers, had begun to form organizations that now meet annually and monthly. In 2003 Dr. Mo Therese Hannah began a new organization, an in 2010 Dr. Hannah coordinated and hosted the seventh national Battered Mothers Custody Conference. More than five hundred women travel from around the country each year to attend it. In 2010 they began a quilt project, Children Taken by the Family Courts, which is modeled after the AIDS quilt. They have asked mothers who have legally lost their children to provide a commemoration panel. Dr. Hannah has also published a book, Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody: Legal Strategies and Policy Issues.

In addition, many mothers throughout the Western world have created listserv groups and websites in which they tell (and keep updating) their own outrageous and heartbreaking stories in the hope that this information might help other women. Some ex-wives have become divorce coaches. Some mothers (including those whose interviews are contained in this book) became matrimonial lawyers and mental health professionals dedicated to helping mothers and children. Some researchers have tried to document ongoing injustices in family court.

Yes, custodially battered mothers whose children are being sexually abused have organized more visibly than mothers who have “merely” been impoverished and legally tormented and who must also share custody of their children with men who hate them as ex-wives and do not respect them as mothers.

On Mother’s Day 2010, a peaceful, silent vigil was held at the White House. In the somber spirit of the U.S. suffragettes, American mothers—along with the Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared, Turkey’s Saturday Mothers, the German Rose Street Women, and the Liberian women who stopped a civil war—gathered at the White House to “ask our President to meet with us and to help stop the systemic removal and oppression of our children by family court.”

What Mothers Have to Say

What to Do When a Custody Battle Invades Your Life

“First, take a deep breath and calm down. Save your strength for the long haul.
Find out what all your options are. Find a therapist for some immediate support.”

“Any mother involved in a custody struggle is the one who’s on trial. You’ll need people to hold your hand, to hold you, to take care of your kids, to cook a meal, to say ‘I care.’ You’ll need people to keep telling you that you’re sane and that you have rights. Find those people now.”

“Never leave home without taking your kids with you—not if you’re fighting over custody. Don’t leave your kids behind to take a weekend vacation. If you’ve just been beaten up and you’re on your way to the hospital, you’d better take your kids along.”

“You’ll need to be on permanent good behavior in order to fight this fight. Your husband or someone will always be breathing down your neck spying on you and trying to make your life miserable.”

“I allowed things to get very bad before I started fighting back. I would never have waited so long if I knew what I know now: that for me not fighting was worse than fighting.”

“If you open up a power struggle with your husband, be prepared to learn how to win. Don’t go on believing that your husband won’t lie and manipulate to cheat you. He will. If he doesn’t, his lawyer will. In order to win on their turf you’ve got to be as rotten as they are. Being fair means you’re going to lose.”

“Keep a record of how often your ex-husband visits and whether he’s on time or late. Tape-record your phone conversations with him so you’ll remember everything. Record any threats he makes to you. Record what he does with the kids. Do they come back unfed, unwashed, late? Are they suddenly critical or distant from you? That could be a sign of brainwashing.”

“Organize your family photos into a ‘Mom and Kids’ showpiece album. Reconstruct a diary of what you did with and for your kids from your old calendars or appointment books. You’ll have to prove that you’re a good mother.”

“No matter what happens, no matter what they say, never let any social worker or lawyer or policeman make you doubt yourself or your self-worth.”

“Believe that you’re stronger than you think you are. Become very assertive about getting what you need from others, but depend only on yourself. You have the most to lose and the most to gain.”

“Once you’re married and a mother, it’s too late to think about how to win a custody battle. The time to think about whether and how you should become a mother is long before you’re pregnant and definitely before you marry.”

“Read the marriage contract. Talk to previously married or still married mothers who are living in poverty or who have lost custody of their children. Maybe it’s more realistic not to have children at all—or to have them through woman-controlled anonymous artificial insemination. But the state can still take your child away if you forge a check, work as a prostitute, use dope, sell dope, kill your violent husband in self-defense, or refuse to do whatever your state welfare worker wants you to do—if you’re economically depended on the state. If your own mother doesn’t like how you’re raising your child, she can call in the state against you. This happened to me. I won. But I never sleep easy.”

“Consider adopting a child as a single mother. I know a number of women lawyers who have chosen this route. And don’t marry or partner up. Not with a man, not with a woman.”

On Hiring a Lawyer

“Get a copy of your legal bill of rights. Refer to it when you’re talking to your lawyer. Interview more than one lawyer. Be prepared to leave a lawyer who doesn’t treat you well and to sue him or her for legal malpractice.”

“Once you’re involved in the court system, you must ask your lawyer’s advice about everything. You can’t start a new job or love affair without first weighing the legal consequences involved. You must assume that everything you do can and will be used against you.”

“Your lawyer isn’t God. He or she is your employee. Don’t let your lawyer pressure you into anything ‘temporarily’ that you wouldn’t want permanently.”

“Talk to other women who’ve been through custody battles. Find a lawyer who’s experience in custody battles, not just in matters of divorce.”

“Don’t let your lawyer convince you that joint custody is the ‘answer.’ It isn’t.
My ex-husband wanted to be the one who’d live with our kids in the house or, failing that, he wanted the judge to order that the house be sold. Then, once the cash from the sale of the house ran out, and I really had to struggle economically, that’s when my ex stopped paying child support. He told the kids that ‘he didn’t have to pay because they lived with him half the time.’ The kids had a much higher standard of living with him than with me. Gradually, they began to live with him full time. Then he moved two thousand miles away to take a very well-paying job. I still have joint custody. I just can’t afford to take my ex back to court or to travel four thousand miles a week in order to exercise my joint custody decree.”

“It’s important to find a good woman lawyer. Treat her with more respect than women usually treat each other. Don’t expect her to be your friend. Expect her to treat you with respect and to use the law vigorously and creatively on your behalf.”
What to Tell Your Children

“In a custody battle, children challenge maternal authority right away. Don’t let them do this. Remind them that you’re still their mother, even if you’re fighting with their father.”

“If one parent is blatantly destructive to the children, it’s the job of the other parent to say so, loud and clear. I don’t believe that cover-ups are good for children.”

“If the state takes you away from your kids, tell them that you love them and always will. Tell them that you’ll always be their mother. Tell them you’ll be out looking for them as soon as you can. Tell them whatever happens, it’s not their fault.”

“I kept quiet for too long. I didn’t believe it was right to involve kids in private adult matters. But my kids needed to hear my point of view too. They needed to know that I loved them too and would fight for them. They also needed to know that I would keep loving them no matter what happened.”

“My children really want to leave me. I fought this for a long time. I should have let them go. They already had my love. They couldn’t have their father’s love if they lived with me.”

CHAPTER 3

What Is a “Fit” Mother or Father? An “Unfit” Mother or Father? Who Decides?

What are our standards for parental fitness? Who determines such standards? Are they the same for both mothers and fathers and for all classes and races? Judith Arcana, in Every Mother’s Son, describes the “idealized mother [as] a woman who is boundlessly giving and endlessly available. She is truly present to her son. The idealized father is practically invisible; he is almost never available, rarely giving; his sparse favor and scarce presence to his son become miraculous and precious when they do appear. He is like the unknowable Judaeo-Christian father-god, who is the epitome of this idea.”

Mothers are expected to perform a series of visible and invisible tasks, all of which are never ending. Mothers are not allowed to fail any of these obligations. The ideal of motherhood is sacred; it exposes all mothers as imperfect.

Fathers are expected to perform a limited number of tasks. They are also allowed to fail some or all of these obligations. In addition, fathers who do anything for children are often experienced and perceived as “better” than mothers, who are supposed to do everything. The ideal of fatherhood is also sacred; it protects each father from the consequences of his actions.

Father-starved and father-wounded sons (and daughters) rarely remember, confront, or publicly expose their absent or abusive fathers. Arcana also notes that we mothers watch our young boys go from expecting to be cherished and nurtured by their fathers to the sullen and bitter understanding that dad will not come across. And then, so powerful is society’s sanction of that “ideal” paternal behavior, we see our sons come to an acceptance so complete that they will defend their fathers even against the criticism and anger they’ve expressed themselves. And all along, the boy will not—or cannot—confront his father. Young sons will not push their fathers the way they’ll push their mothers—they learn early that dad’s affection, such as it is, is tenuous and conditional. Most boys understand all this before they are 12 or 13 years old.

When a father fails his paternal obligations, we don’t necessarily view him as an example of all fathers, nor do we automatically hold other fathers “accountable” for one father’s failure. We may be horrified when a father abuses or kills his child, but we first view him as the exception among fathers.

Or we make excuses for him. He didn’t mean to hit, molest, rape, hurt, maim, or kill his child. He is a man. Men are violent and don’t know their own strength.
Or we blame his wife. Perhaps she “drove” him to it. How could any mother leave her child alone with such a man? Where was she when her child was being hit, molested, raped, hurt, maimed, or killed?

When a mother does irresponsibly abandon or savagely abuse her child, we are truly stunned and terrified. How could a mother of the human race “act like a man”? How could both biology and culture fail to ensure maternal pacifism under stress?

When one mother neglects or abuses her child, we tend to hold all mothers accountable for her failure. One mother’s “crime” forces all mothers to prove—to themselves and to everyone else—how unlike Medea they are and how like the Virgin Mary they are.

After reading several news accounts of maternal suicide and infanticide, I read about a mother who failed in her double suicide attempt. She succeeded in killing her child but failed to kill herself. Plunging headlong out the window, she “merely” broke every major bone in her body instead.

I wanted to visit her in her hospital bed. After many phone calls, I was made to understand that her own mother refused to see her and that her husband had vowed never to speak to her again. Women who knew her and her husband tried to dissuade me from seeing her. Women said, “Don’t make a heroine out of her. She’s a real sickie. You wouldn’t have liked her. None of us did. She’s broken her husband’s heart. He’s a wonderful man.” Others said, “Her husband was about to leave her. She knew that her son would follow his father, sooner rather than later. The bitch just couldn’t let go. Why didn’t she die instead of her son?”

Voices without mercy; voices determined that no one comfort her on her cross. This mother was viewed not as human, or even as psychiatrically ill, but as an evil monster, a “loathsome thing,” a “Medea.”

I am always amazed that Medea’s knife, unseen onstage, looms so much larger in our collective memories than Agamemnon’s knife, with which he kills his daughter, Iphigenia, or Laius’s mountaintop exposure of his new-born son, Oedipus. The infanticidal fathers apparently leave no bloody footprint, no haunting shadow.
Are contemporary mothers and fathers as abusive to their children as parents presumably once were in the past? Historians have described medieval European and colonial American children as essentially their family’s “servants.” A girl was her mother or stepmother’s domestic servant and her father’s companion and nurse; a boy was his father or stepfather’s agricultural servant. Both boys and girls were often apprenticed out at young ages. Their wages belonged to their fathers.

According to psychoanalyst Alice Miller, child rearing in the West was a form of “poisonous pedagogy.” Harsh parental punishment was defended for its being “for the child’s own good”:

A sophisticated repertory of arguments was developed to prove the necessity of corporal punishment for the child’s own good. In the eighteenth century, one still spoke of [children] as “faithful subjects” . . . child rearing manuals teach us that: “Adults are the masters (not the servants) of the dependent child; they determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong; the child is held responsible for their anger; the parents must always be shielded; the child’s life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult; the child’s will must be ‘broken’ as soon as possible; all this must happen at a very early age, so the child ‘won’t notice’ and will therefore not be able to expose the adults.”

In Puritan New England, child rearing was synonymous with “breaking” a child’s (sinful) “will”:
Every child was thought to come into the world with inherent tendencies to “stubbornness, and stoutness of mind”: these must be “beaten down” at all costs. One aspect of such tendencies was the willful expression of anger which was, by Puritan reckoning, the most dangerous and damnable of human affects. Children must therefore be trained to compliance, to submission, to “peace.” To effect such training, drastic means were sometimes needed. Puritan parents were not inclined to spare the rod; but more important than physical coercion was the regular resort to shaming.

Mothers worked hard and had little “child-centered” time to spend alone with each child. Although mothers (or women) were exclusively responsible for birthing and rearing children, they were not considered “expert” in this area. “Students of child-rearing literature in England and America tell us that in the 16th and 17th centuries the father was depicted as the important figure in the rearing of children, as well as being the ultimate authority in familial matters. In fact, most of the manuals of these centuries directed advice to fathers.”

In the mid- to late eighteenth century, male experts began to address mothers directly. Formerly viewed as vain and without souls, mothers were now viewed as their children’s moral guardians.

Mothers of the middle class were encouraged to experience biological motherhood as the source of their greatest pride and joy. The influential Jean-Jacques Rousseau viewed motherhood as a personal religious calling:

The true mother, far from being a woman of the world, is as much a recluse in her home as the nun is in her cloister. . . . [A good mother] will not be willful, proud, energetic or self-centered. In no event should she become angry or show the slightest impatience . . . she must be taught, while still very young, to be vigilant and hard-working, accustomed at an early age to all sorts of constraints so that she costs [her husband] nothing and learns to submit all her caprices to the will of others. . . . She serves as liaison between [the children] and the father, she alone makes him love them.

Throughout the nineteenth century, male experts continued to urge women into motherhood as a religious calling. However, these experts insisted that “instinctive” (emotional, “soft”) maternality was harmful to children. They advised mothers to behave in more “manly” ways.

By the twentieth century, male experts told mothers to give up breast- feeding, to feed their infants only at rigid intervals, not to pick up their crying babies, and to toilet train them as soon as possible. Some male experts advised mothers to “bond” with their infants immediately at birth. According to these experts, if mothers didn’t “bond” with or didn’t “let go” of children perfectly enough, they doomed them to “neurosis.” According to psychiatrist Ann Dally, mothers were tyrannized into believing that it was “dangerous” to leave their children “even for an hour.”

We do not know how many women actually succumbed to the tyranny of the male experts. Enslaved or impoverished mothers did not have the time, the literacy, or the resources to act on scientific opinion; wealthy and royal mothers continued to delegate their maternal responsibilities. (Perhaps some royal and impoverished mothers felt guilty about this.) Middle-class mothers were in a position to be most easily tempted by expert promises.

The church fathers always assured mothers that they were important and irreplaceable. They also tried to convince men that it was anti-God and anti-church to divorce their wives or abandon their children.

The scientific fathers shared these churchly beliefs. However, they also promised mothers “control” over the outcome of their maternal labors and over children at home in lieu of “control” over armies, parliaments, churches, or banks.

What about fathers? Did they matter at all beyond their legal acknowledgment of sperm and economic support of families? Did it affect children badly, or at all, if fathers were absent, distant, or tyrannical? What is a “good” or a “good enough” father?

According to our state and church fathers, a “good” father is someone who legally acknowledges, economically supports, and teaches his children to obey the laws of state and church. The scientific fathers failed to consider the paternal role. When pressed, one twentieth-century expert said, “The first positive virtue of the father is to permit his wife to be a good mother. In the child’s eyes the father embodies the law, strength, the ideal, and the outside world, while the mother symbolizes the home and household. . . . The only thing one can usefully demand of the father is to be alive and stay alive during his children’s early years.”

Some scientific fathers went to great lengths to deny the existence of “bad” fathers. Psychoanalysts, for example, were actually more eloquent about the rivalrous impulses of sons than about the murderous deeds of fathers. Most psychoanalysts rarely paid attention to real-world “facts” or held real fathers responsible for anything they did—or failed to do.

Psychoanalysts and other, more popular child-development experts failed to acknowledge their own expert fathering as “responsible” for an increase in maternal guilt and for turning mother blaming into a “science.” For example, the phrase maternal deprivation terrorized countless mothers in the twentieth century. A woman who “maternally deprived” her child was a “bad” mother. Dr. John Bowlby first used this phrase in 1951 to describe what happened to children whose state father had institutionalized them.

Bowlby did not condemn the state father for “depriving” his institutionalized children, nor did he (or his popularizers) hold the state responsible for the crimes such children might commit in the future. The sins of the state fathers were used to control maternal behavior. The specter of “maternally deprived” children kept mothers guilty and sleepless. (State orphanage employees and members of Parliament slept quite soundly.)

Popular accounts of child abuse invariably focus on the “sensational” episode as opposed to the more entrenched forms of child abuse. A male homosexual child molester makes ready headline copy; his more numerous male heterosexual counterparts remain invisible.

A single school or a large church involved in the sexual abuse of children becomes a scandal; the high incidence of male heterosexual abuse of female children, including paternal incest, is denied or minimized.

What exactly is child abuse? Is physical child abuse increasing in America? Most incidents of physical child abuse are probably never reported. Nevertheless, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reports a “dramatic increase” in child abuse.

Naomi Feigelson Chase found that, historically, “serious” child abuse was either underreported or atypical. Chase and Leontine Young attempt to distinguish between severe physical neglect—lack of adequate or regular feeding—and moderate neglect, which includes lack of cleanliness, lack of adequate clothing, and failure to provide medical care.

They also point out that physical neglect is not the same as physical abuse, which, in turn, may be either moderate or severe. According to Young, the prolonged physical and psychological abuse of children constitutes a category all its own, as does child murder: “Severe [physical] abuse is consistent beating that leaves visible results. Moderate abuse occurs when parents beat children under stress or when drunk. [Those in the] severe category are unable to be helped. The abusing parents’ hallmark is deliberate, calculated, consistent punishing without cause or purpose.”

In 1978 Dr. David Gil analyzed the thirteen thousand reported cases of physical child abuse in the United States. Of these, 3 percent were fatal; less than 5 percent “led to permanent damage”; 53 percent (6,890 cases) were not serious; 90 percent “were expected to leave no lasting physical effects.”

These studies of reported child abuse were almost always correlated with extreme poverty, severely “deprived” parental childhoods, mental illness, overburdened and isolated single motherhood, and unrelieved or profound stress.

In view of the high incidence of and extraordinary stress associated with single motherhood and the great amount of time mothers have to spend with children, it is significant that both Gil and Chase found no evidence that mothers “abuse” their children any more than fathers (or boyfriends) do. On the contrary. According to Chase, “a mother or stepmother was the abuser in 50 percent of the incidents and the father or stepfather in about 40 percent. Others were caretakers, siblings, or unrelated perpetrators. However, since almost a third of the homes were headed by females, fathers had a higher involvement rate than mothers. Two-thirds of the incidents in the homes where fathers or stepfathers were present were committed by the father or stepfathers; while in homes with mothers or stepmothers, the mothers and stepmothers were perpetrators in less than half the incidents that took place.”

Researchers studied pregnant mothers who were potentially “high-risk” physical child abusers. All these mothers were young, poor, unwed, and going through with unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. The study found that, as expected, one-quarter of the children was abused psychologically. The researchers explained this abuse in terms of the mothers: they had received no “maternal nurturance” in childhood. The psychologically abusive mothers “don’t know how to be nurturing. Instead of giving to the child, they look to the child to satisfy their own needs for nurturance and love, and the child cannot provide.”

This study actually shows that 75 percent of “high-risk” mothers do not psychologically or physically abuse their children and that “high-risk” mothers need emotional as well as economic support in order to mother properly. The study focuses on maternal, not on paternal, abuse.

Researchers have no control over how their work is viewed or used. This study (and others like it) are used to “indict” mothers in the public imagination, to incite middle-class or married mothers to paroxysms of time-consuming guilt, and to justify the state’s custodial or reproductive punishment of poor, unwed mothers.

Mothers do not physically or sexually abuse, abandon, or neglect their children as often as fathers do. Several statistically sophisticated studies have confirmed that it is mainly men—fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers, boyfriends, older brothers, uncles, and male strangers—who physically and sexually abuse both mothers and children.

How many fathers and adult men beat or rape mothers? No one really knows. Research suggests that anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of all mothers in America are physically battered and/or raped by their husbands or live-in boyfriends.

Some studies (and common sense) suggest that wife beaters also tend to abuse their children physically, sexually, and psychologically. The sons of wife beaters often become wife beaters; their daughters often become battered wives.

How many fathers sexually abuse their own genetic or legal children and grandchildren? No one really knows, though a number of first-person and clinical accounts about paternal incest have been published and publicized.

In the past, according to incest researchers, two to five million American women were paternally raped as children; one in every seven or one in every five American children was the victim of paternal incest or of male sexual abuse; 19 percent of all American women (one in six) and 9 percent of American men were sexually victimized as children. Other studies have shown that perhaps 20–25 percent of American girls were sexually abused in childhood and that 30–50 percent of their abusers were male members of their own family.

It is my impression that the majority of unfit mothers do not kill, torture, maim, rape, or abandon their children outright. The majority of unfit mothers seem physically to neglect and psychologically to abuse their children.

Mothers do spend more time with children than fathers do. Mothers also turn up in emergency rooms alone with battered children. The sight of a mother accompanying a child with a broken arm or a suspicious burn is sickening and impossible to forget.

We do not ask, “Why is she here alone?” or “Where is the child’s father or other adult member of his family?” We do not comment, “Maybe the father (or a man) actually beat this child, and she’s confessing in his place,” or “Perhaps the absence of a supportive husband ‘drove’ her to it.”

Still, it is my impression that when an unfit mother does physically abuse her child, she may do so less forcefully, less often, and less fatally than her paternal counterpart. (There are many exceptions among drug-addicted and mentally ill mothers.)

Physically neglectful or physically violent mothers are more closely and critically scrutinized than physically abusive fathers are. Such mothers have also often internalized certain maternal ideals. Whether they achieve or fail them, they are aware of, and often guilty about, their imperfect or failed maternal performance.
Clearly, children are equally endangered by equally physically violent parents whether they are mothers or fathers. However, women in general are more rigidly socialized into nonviolent maternal behavior under stress than men are.

Female socialization, the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, maternal practice, and the social “watchdogging” of mothers all tend to reinforce maternal physical nonviolence. Children tend to be physically safer with most mothers most of the time. Sara Ruddick observed that most mothers are (objectively) “powerless” women who find themselves embattled with weak creatures whose wills are unpredictable and resistant, whose bodies [they] could quite literally destroy, whose psyches are at [their] mercy. . . . I can think of no other situation in which someone with the resentments of social powerlessness, under enormous pressures of time and anger, faces a recalcitrant but helpless combatant with so much restraint [author’s italics]. It is also clear that physical and psychological violence is a temptation of maternal practice and a fairly common occurrence.

What is remarkable is that in a daily way mothers make so much peace instead of fighting, and then when peace fails, conduct so many battles without resorting to violence [author’s italics]. I don’t want to trumpet a virtue but to point to a fact: that non-violence is a constitutive principle of maternal thinking, and that mothers honor it not in the breach, but in their daily practice, despite objective temptations to violence.

Children are potentially more physically endangered by fathers, whose socialization as men has predisposed them to flight or physical violence under stress and has forced them into a fierce dependence upon obedience from wives and children.

Fathers, as men, are not closely “watchdogged” within the house; in a father-idealizing and father-absent culture, they are romanticized by children. (This dynamic allows children to deny paternal violence against them or to blame themselves when it happens.)

Both nature and culture have prepared women to mother in physically nonviolent ways under very oppressive conditions. Some observers romanticize the female ability to do this; others lament it as a virtue by default. Most mothers are usually able to absorb frustration, humiliation, unemployment, poverty, celibacy, and extreme loneliness without abandoning, seriously abusing, or murdering their children. As such, mothers as a group are rearing their children as well as can be expected of the human race to date.

Does a child physically need his or her father or father figure during pregnancy or childbirth, during infancy, or at some point later in childhood? Common sense and personal experience confirm that men and women do not have the same physical relationship to children.

It is crucial to remember that many children grow up without any fathers or father figures. Studies suggest that such children are no different from children with fathers—if severe impoverishment is not confused with paternal absence. Perhaps few children are physically fathered whether they live with fathers or not.

It is also clear that fathers have an effect on children whether they are absent or present, that fathers may influence a child directly or indirectly, and that paternal influence can be “advantageous, disadvantageous, or neutral.”

A number of feminist theorists and researchers have written about the psychological importance of “fathering” and about men’s potential ability to “nurture.” Such researchers have tried to show that a “good “father is potentially as good as (or similar to) a “good mother.”

These studies have essentially shown that white, middle-class, well- educated fathers can, under experimental conditions, “bond” with infants and can perform many of the physical and emotional tasks of “maternal nurturance.”

However, studies also show that “good enough” fathers tend to spend radically less time with infants, toddlers, preadolescents, and teenagers than mothers do; that fathers tend to “play” with children rather than physically to “service” them; and that fathers tend to “mother” children for comparatively short periods of time.
In real life, some (married) fathers are indeed physically “nurturant” to their children. However, unlike most nurturant mothers, such fathers are unwilling or unable to “nurture” children all day, every day, for all the years of each child’s childhood.

Fathers do not get pregnant. They do not give birth to, breast-feed, or routinely take care of newborn infants. Traditional fathers and mothers do not view these tasks as men’s province.

Researchers have found that “good enough” fathers are not able or willing to do what “good enough” mothers must do physically in related areas in order to maintain family life. For example, past studies confirmed that American wives did 70 percent of the housework, whether they were employed outside the home or not.

In their study of American couples, Drs. Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz found that married men had such an intense aversion to house- work that when wives insisted they do it, intense acrimony and a greater probability of divorce resulted.
Even if a “good enough” father is unemployed, he does much less house-work (and child care) than a wife who is a full-time employee outside the home. One of my interviewees said, “My ex-husband was once unemployed for about a year. I taught full time and rushed home at three, collected the kids, shopped, and cooked dinner. I was very tired by the time I put the kids to bed and finished the dishes. I begged him to cook dinner. He refused. After much battling he agreed to cook every Friday night. He finally cooked dinner about twice a month. We all had to praise him and eat everything. I had to clear the table and do the dishes. Everyone said I had to be very understanding because he wasn’t employed.”

Of course, a father may be able to earn more money or physically lift more weight than a mother can. Such (innate and cultural) abilities may have nothing to do with satisfying the daily physical needs of children directly or with satisfying these needs in a physically nonviolent way, especially at times of parental stress.
Is physical punishment always a form of child abuse? Is a slap the equivalent of a broken arm? Is physical abuse the most serious form of child abuse? Is a child who is made to feel “unloved” or “unworthy” more severely abused than a child who is physically punished?

What do we know about psychological mothering and fathering? “Good enough” fathers may be psychologically cold, cruel, demanding, rivalrous, ambivalent, smothering, and abusive toward their sons and psychologically seductive and incestuous toward their daughters. A “good enough” father may also be infinitely more psychologically patient, understanding, relaxed, and generous to his children (especially to a daughter) than a mother may be.

“Good enough” mothers may be psychologically cold, cruel, demanding, rivalrous, ambivalent, smothering, and abusive toward their daughters (and to a lesser extent toward their sons). They may also be either more positively— or negatively—“maternal” toward their children than a father may be.

Drs. Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit have noted that the “best” parent-child relationship is both “positive” and “negative”; that it “fluctuates” over time; that “wanted” children may be “excessively valued” to their detriment; and that “good” parents cannot guarantee ideal child development even when they are their child’s psychological parents—that is, present and active in daily and physically caring ways.

Most parents do not view the psychological abuse of children as an epidemic with “devastating” consequences. According to psychoanalyst Alice Miller, most parents unthinkingly “murder their children’s souls.” Parents suppress their children’s “vital spontaneity” by the “laying of traps, duplicity, subterfuge, manipulation, ‘scare’ tactics, withdrawal of love, isolation, distrust, by humiliating and disgracing the child, scorn, ridicule, and coercion even to the point of torture. The former practice of physically maiming, exploiting, and abusing children seems to have been gradually replaced in modern times by a form of mental cruelty that is masked by the honorific term child-rearing.”

Miller may or may not be right. However, she rarely distinguishes between paternal and maternal behavior. She merges what mothers and fathers do (and don’t do) into “parental” behavior. Also, Miller’s psychologically high standards, while admirable, are rarely applied to fathers—or to mothers of all classes and races.
Unless or until we (and the “experts”) are prepared emotionally to judge all parents by the same standard, several conclusions are in order about how most mothers and fathers behave today.

Mental health experts, like the rest of us, tend to blame mothers, not fathers, for any problems a child may have; to praise fathers, but not mothers, for the good they may do; and to have one set of expectations for mothers and another, lesser set for fathers. Experts also tend to pathologize mothers when they fall short of idealized expectations of motherhood.

Seattle attorney Martha O. Eller notes a disturbing trend: “We are very disheartened by social workers’ and psychologists’ willingness to ignore issues of domestic violence, over-emphasize the value of a working father and under-value the contributions of a full-time homemaker, and [their] general tendency to despise a woman for having boyfriends without carefully inquiring of the father along the same lines. The [child] guardians ad litem, including psychologists, tend to evaluate the mothers harshly, even more so than the judges.”

Some mental health professionals have encouraged fathers to consider co-parenting or joint custody as their right and encouraged mothers to consider co-parenting or joint custody as their obligation, both of which are “in the best interests of the child.” Unbelievably, mental health professionals tend to trust what a father tells them and to distrust almost everything a mother says. They routinely minimize male violence and routinely pathologize the normal female response to violence. For example, read the following evaluation from a Michigan case:

The mother presents as a tense, suspicious person rigidly fixated on her ex-husband’s so-called potential for child abuse. She and the maternal grandmother, an overly intrusive, controlling woman, have convinced this child to fear her father. While the father admits to engaging in mildly inappropriate fondling behavior with his young daughter and to an incident of “joyriding” with her, I believe these were isolated occurrences and would not occur if the father-daughter relationship was stabilized. The father’s continuing inability to pay child support should not be used to deprive him or his child of their relationship. I recommend visitation to the father and therapy for the mother to help her deal with her pathological dependence on her own mother.

Here is an evaluation from a New York case:

The mother claims that her son has been terrorized by his father during so-called drunken rages.

She claims that the father allegedly threatened to kill the boy’s dog if his son didn’t obey him.

The wife claims she has been battered and that her husband tried to control her every waking hour. I don’t see this. She is too self-confident, too bossy. This woman has her own business and earns more than the father does. The father has been in treatment for alcoholism and says he is now recovered. He lives with the paternal grandparents, who are prosperous. The boy needs to live with male role models, his father and grandfather, especially since his mother has a career and is obviously hostile to men.

It made no difference to either evaluator—one a man, the other a woman—that both fathers were verified as having been treated for mental illness and alcoholism, had been fired from jobs for “losing their tempers” and for repeated absences, and had often “disappeared” from home. That both mothers had been their children’s sole support, psychologically and economically, and had sought help from the police, hospitals, and, in one case, a shelter for battered women. None of this impressed the evaluators. Incredibly, these reports—and they are typical—found the mothers “guilty,” the fathers “innocent.”

How can one fight such an incredible catch-22?

At some level, the evaluators do believe that the fathers have done some- thing “wrong,” but they don’t want to penalize them for their actions. In fact, when allegations of paternal violence are believed, the father is then exonerated by virtue of having a mental illness. While male mental illness is seen as either temporary or amenable to “therapeutic” intervention, women are often seen as suffering from near-permanent mental illnesses. Judges have been reluctant to order a wife batterer or child abuser out of the house or into jail; based on such psychiatric evaluations, they have instead ordered violent fathers into therapy or mediation. Violent or mentally ill fathers rarely lose their rights to visitation or custody; mothers, however, do. The following paragraphs are from an Illinois case and a Rhode Island case, respectively:

I guess I had a post-partum depression. I was always so tired, but I couldn’t sleep. What if I fell asleep and my babies needed me? I was all they had. I might not have needed pills or a two-week stay in a hospital if my husband had helped or allowed me to hire someone for the twins. When I put myself into a mental hospital, my in-laws persuaded my husband to move in with them, start divorce proceedings, and take custody away from me. Twice, when I and my parents, who finally decided to help me, tried to see my babies, my in-laws physically threw us out. The third time they had us arrested. The police threatened us. The judge said I was too sick to be a mother.

My ex-husband is charming, well-dressed, well-spoken, and comes from a very powerful family. He first beat me two weeks after we were married. The beatings continued. When I was pregnant, he kicked me so hard between the legs that he broke my water. I gave birth prematurely. During that beating I grazed his arm with a fork. I also pressed charges. He said I’d gone too far and I’d have to be punished. On the basis of his version of what I did with the fork, the custody psychiatrist stated that I was the abusive spouse. The psychiatrist pre- scribed a minimum of three years of therapy to cure my violence. He recommended that I have limited, supervised visitation and that sole custody go to my ex-husband and his live-in housekeeper. The judge agreed. I haven’t seen my child in three years.

“Good enough” mothers behave (and are trained to behave) differently toward children from the way “good enough” fathers do. Most mothers give birth to children after successful pregnancies.

Most “birth” and adoptive mothers do not physically abandon or physically abuse their children once they have gotten involved in caring for them.

Some mothers do physically neglect their children. A small (and unknown) percentage of mothers sexually abuse, torture, and kill their children.

All other things being equal, the majority of mothers physically nurture and support their children adequately, continuously, and in nonviolent ways.

All mothers are psychologically imperfect. Some are also psychologically abusive.

Most fathers are trained to neglect their children physically. Many fathers physically abandon their children. As we have seen, perhaps one in seven fathers (and stepfathers) sexually abuses his daughters; perhaps 50 percent of fathers economically abandon their children.

All fathers are psychologically imperfect. How many are also psychologically abusive? Most? Some? Few?

In a woman- and mother-hating culture, it is emotionally difficult or psychologically forbidden to acknowledge female or maternal superiority even—or especially—in the areas of female “specialization.” In a man- and father-idealizing culture, it is emotionally difficult or psychologically forbidden to acknowledge male or paternal inferiority even—or especially—in the areas of male nonspecialization. These are two of the reasons we “forget” that a “good enough” mother is different from a “good enough” father.

As adults, we respond “indignantly” to news of an abused child. We experience child abuse as something extraordinary, not ordinary; as something that other parents, mainly mothers, do; not as something that our own parents, or fathers, once did to us; not as something that we as parents do to our children; and not as something that fathers allow to happen to large numbers of children in their name and without their protest.

As adults, we confuse images of maternal psychological imperfection with maternal psychological and physical unfitness. For example, the idea of a mother’s locking her child into a room arouses our rage and a deep sense of heartbreak. (Why? Were we all once left in rooms alone? If so, do we think that this constitutes “child abuse”? Does it?)

The idea of a mother’s verbally tormenting or refusing to speak to her child at all or the idea of a mother’s neglecting or beating her child provokes the greatest fury and terror in us. (Why? Did our mothers or fathers beat us? If not, why do we so empathetically identify with the image of an abused child? Are we by nature altruists?)

As children, none of us could escape or protest whatever minor or major abuse we suffered at maternal and paternal hands. Now, in one mighty adult voice, we vent our long-suppressed fury at the mother in the child-abuse headlines. She is utterly evil and can never be rehabilitated. (How can she be? She is a “stand-in” for so many mothers.) She is very powerful. This time she must not escape us.

Given male violence (or indifference), how can our own mothers accept or defend the way things are? (And they do, they do. . . .) How can our own mothers bear to hear our cries and do nothing? How can they leave us alone in the tiny rooms of our lives?

Given male violence and our fear of it, we scapegoat mothers instead. (They are trained to “take it” without killing or abandoning us.) Given male violence and our fear of it, we ask: How dare any mother refuse to become pregnant? How dare any mother have an abortion or abandon, abuse, or kill a child—because if she can, then there is no respite on earth, no one to bear the brunt of our imperfections, and no one to save us. We, the innocent, are damned.

Medea—not Jason, not Creon—is still the one we blame.

In summary, an ideal mother is very different from an ideal father. A real mother is also different from a real father. Traditionally, an ideal mother is expected to choose married motherhood for her future at a very young age. She is expected to become pregnant, give birth, psychologically “bond” with her children, and assume bottom-line responsibility for her children’s physical, emotional, and economic needs. She is also expected to behave in physically nonviolent and psychologically self-sacrificing ways.

Nevertheless, this female socialization into and practice of motherhood is devalued and taken for granted. We experience the same parental abuse as “worse” when a mother performs it. We condemn mothers more than fathers for failing the parental ideal, for performing parental work inadequately, for being psychologically imperfect, and for being physically abusive.

With such double standards and anti-mother biases, what kind of custodially challenged mother would automatically be viewed as a “good enough” mother? (A person might say, “There must be something wrong with her. Why else would her husband or the state challenge her?”)

Do judges, priests, politicians, psychiatrists, or social workers view unwed, imprisoned, or “career” mothers as maternally fit? Would they view their custodial victimization as unjust? Do white married mothers or white social workers view nonwhite or welfare mothers as maternally fit?

Most custodially challenged mothers blame themselves for being imperfect. What kind of custodially challenged mother would view herself, or be viewed by other challenged mothers, as a truly “good enough” mother?

I decided to study sixty custodially challenged, predominantly white mothers who had internalized the Western ideals of motherhood and were demographically similar to the majority of divorced white mothers in America. These sixty mothers were custodially challenged in every geographical region of the United States and Canada between 1960 and 1981. In addition, I interviewed fifty mothers who were black, brown, yellow, and red. Some, but not all, were part of this study. They are very much a part of this book.

In general, the sixty mothers I studied married as virgins—or they married the first man they slept with. They both married and gave birth at relatively young ages. They assumed the bottom-line domestic, emotional, and primary child-care responsibilities of traditional marriages. In general, these mothers stayed at home until their youngest children were of grade-school age. Both psychologically and physically they put “work” or a “career” second to motherhood.

During our interviews together, these mothers casually and matter-of-factly described performing at least twenty-five very specific maternal domestic and child-related chores—quite separate from domestic chores that are husband related.

As I noted in the introduction, I was exploring a worst-case scenario.

Could a “good enough” mother ever lose custody? Could she lose custody to a relatively uninvolved or abusive father? Could this happen more than once? Could this happen often?

In my book Women and Madness, I allowed each of my sixty interviewees to establish what would ultimately be a collective portrait of the mental health profession. I employed this approach with custodially challenged mothers.

However, I also interviewed fifty-five fathers who battled for, won, or gave up custody. These independent interviews confirmed many of my conclusions about the range of paternal custodial motives.

The study you are about to read is a study of “good enough” mothers. Unbidden and silent, the mother Medea accompanied me to each interview.

Reprinted with permission from "Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody," Revised and Updated Second Edition by Phyllis Chesler. Text copyright 2011 Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press. Published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press (distributed by IPG). Available in stores and online.

'Teen Mom' Throws New Light on Adoption

2011-08-04T09:41:00.001-04:00

I've been watching quite a bit of TV lately (as my three-year old grandchild now lives in my home, as well as my 16-year old grandchild) and the MTV program "Teen Mom" has really begun to interest me. One of the most fascinating mothers on it is a young woman who freely gave her child up for adoption and just as I mentioned below, "...Many studies, at least in the past, showed younger, single women who gave their children up for adoption to be more stable and higher educated then those who kept the child..."

In Teen Mom, even the few mothers who eventually married their 'baby daddy' seem to be unraveling around the edges.

Anyway, that old statistic about single mother giving up their children for adoption does appear to be a statistic that has stood the test of time...

Thursday, January 03, 2008
Important Distinction Made Between Father and Sperm Donors

I actually like this ruling as I felt it makes a clear legal distinction between a ‘father’ and a ‘sperm donor’.

It’s an important distinction to make and not just for financial considerations, as custody of a child today rewards a custodial parent with a wide array of tax and other financial benefits. Not least of which is a large percentage of the non-custodial parent’s income and assets for the next 21 years. But more importantly when the courts began overlooking the distinction between what woman contribute towards creating life versus what men contribute, it put a recreational sperm donor’s relatively minor contribution on the same level as the mother/child bond. When, in actuality, a recreational sperm donor risks, invests, quite simply contributes absolutely nothing toward the entire process other then the quik drop sperm deposit. Many times not even knowing (or caring about) the name of the woman they dropped their deposit off with and whether or not they are fit to bear or care for a child they could be creating with said deposit.

Recreational sperm donors are not even legally required to buy a pregnant woman so much as a hot dog or a vitamin throughout the period of her pregnancy ensure the health or viability of the child. Nor are they required to provide any medical coverage or shelter leaving that to the woman herself or worse yet, the innocent tax-payers of the state to bear the burden they helped created.

No actual physical bond is forged between them and the subsequent child. Many of them find out they might be a ‘father’ when the Post Office drops a letter off in their mailbox informing them of this fact. But yet these same recreational sperm donors can show up at the hospital seconds after the birth of a child (or months or years later) claiming to be a ‘father’ and if they manage to get custody of some poor kid (which happens very frequently today if they chose to litigate, thanks to gender-neutral custody policies) they are immediately eligible for a whole array of financial benefits.

It’s ridiculous.

Anyway this is just one state that made this sensible ruling, Pennsylvania, but I don’t see it being overturned, as it was their own Supreme Court so there is no higher court in the state. Also, I didn’t notice the article mentioning any friend of the court brief from Pennsylvania Social Services department, so I’m assuming both parties were self-supporting and the child was not a potential burden to the state tax-payers. Thus the state has no interest in the outcome and I doubt if any individual is going to spend the kind of money it takes to appeal this to the US Supreme Court. So if history repeats itself and I believe it will, this ruling will probably become like the Pennsylvania decision of a few years ago absolving parents (read: men) of having to pay college tuition for their children over 18 and that ruling was never overturned either; although Pennsylvania is the ONLY state in the union with that little caveat.

But it’s not about the money, men keep telling me, it’s about the children.

Sure…

Anyway, I think we ultimately need to look to craft a similar solution at the federal level with some obvious safeguards for society, since we can’t allow women to become burdens having children they can’t support themselves, and if they were inseminated by recreational sperm donors, not leaving any recourse for the state to get reimbursed for benefits required. The state needs to be allowed leeway to go after recreational sperm donors’ to reimburse their tax-payers if state-funded benefits are required to support a child.

However I personally would like to see some form of this decision extended under a blanket federal policy, where no unmarried person was allowed to petition any court for either child support or custody/visitation, etc. This would have to include grandparents as well. Those are rights you negotiate with the other person, not try to force through the courts. The state would still retain the right to petition courts for child support or other child related issues and they could represent fathers if they wish or even grandparents in their petitions especially in the rare cases of abuse or neglect when another guardian is needed.

Of course whatever private negotiations, agreements, arrangements regarding the raising of their children that people wish to voluntarily enter into could and should be allowed. As long as their children are happy, healthy and safe, the state should not intervene nor allow others, no matter the DNA match, to intervene either.

As thousands of years of evolution have demonstrated, mothers have borne and raised the young of every past generation and considering the conditions imposed upon us by (let’s face it) men, we’d done a damn fine job of it. We don’t need to have the rights of mothers or children (and yes, generally they are one and the same, as most mothers are the persons best suited to make decisions in the best interest of their own children) be usurped by men using the courts as a Trojan horse in this regard.

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Jan03/0,4670,SpermDonor,00.html

Sperm Donor Wins Case Over Child Support
Thursday, January 03, 2008
By MARK SCOLFORO, Associated Press Writer

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a woman who promised a sperm donor he would not have to pay child support cannot renege on the deal.The 3-2 decision overturns lower court rulings under which Joel L. McKiernan had been paying up to $1,500 a month to support twin boys born in August 1994 to Ivonne V. Ferguson, his former girlfriend and co-worker.

"Where a would-be donor cannot trust that he is safe from a future support action, he will be considerably less likely to provide his sperm to a friend or acquaintance who asks, significantly limiting a would-be mother's reproductive prerogatives," Justice Max Baer wrote in the majority opinion issued last week.

Arthur Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said the decision runs counter to the pattern established by similar cases, where the interests of the progeny have generally been given great weight. "It sounds like the Pennsylvania court is trying to push a little harder into the brave new world of sperm, egg and embryo donation as it's evolving," Caplan said.

posted by NYMOM | Thursday, January 03, 2008

4 Comments:

Blogger Val said...

My head is spinning -- what part of "former girlfriend" makes this difficult to understand??!!??

Perhaps she assured him he would not be "liable" until the cold hard reality of single motherhood (X2) took hold...

Still, what a jerk!
6:02 PM

Blogger NYMOM said...

Exactly...the only reliable way to ensure you are not on the hook for child support would be an anonymous sperm donation but even that is coming under attack now, claiming it's bad for children not to do who their anonymous donor is.

Like a kid really cares about that????

It's men who are concerned about that, not kids. Kids could probably care less. Actually they instituted some program in New Zealand or something where kids, when they reach 18 years old, could find out who who their anonymous donors were and not even ONE KID signed up for it. NOT ONE...which goes to show what I've been saying right along. They could care less.

Who cares about some jerkoff who sprouted off in a dixie cup 18 years ago. Probably got $50.00 or less for it...and could have spawned dozens of kids before they changed the law limiting how many times they could contribute.

It's ridiculous to try to compare these idiots with mothers who chose to carry a baby to term and then give up their children for adoption...one is trying to give her child a better life, the other is trying to make a quick and dirty $50.

Many studies, at least in the past, showed younger, single women who gave their children up for adoption to be more stable and higher educated then those who kept the child.

But maybe that has changed too, who knows.

But yeah the guy was a moron.
2:46 PM

Blogger PolishKnight said...

Ice cream and crime

As a woman trying to downplay the correlation between single mother homes and criminal offspring put it, statistics may not always be as they seem (except when they are.)

In this case, NYMOM claims (unsupported/uncited) that none of the children of sperm donors in NZ have yet to make an inquiry. Well, duh. It takes at least 18 years after the law is passed for it to take effect. Children born a few years ago wouldn't benefit since the law wouldn't apply to them due to confidentiality agreements with the previous donor still being legally in effect.

It's interesting that you ask "who cares about some jerkoff who sprouted off in a dixie cup 18 years ago." Well, apparently the mother did since she PAID for his sperm and BORE a child of his! These aren't just "jerkoffs". They're good looking and often well educated jerkoffs who didn't want to have a child with these women. She's paying him and you have to respect that.

Yes, the women gestate the children for 9 months when they "choose to" and adopt them out but they also often "choose to" smoke crack cocaine, cigarettes, and booze during that time too. Oh, other than when they get an abortion.

I wonder if that has something to do with disabled children. Nah. Just a correlation made up by us dishonest MRA's...
5:07 PM

Blogger NYMOM said...

Again, waiting months to comment on an article puts the burden on me to have to look it up to address your questions.

Sorry, but you can look it up yourself...and sperm donation has been around for decades now, it's not a new technology. The groups using it might have shifted, as it used to be couples where the husband was infertile. Now it's single women mostly, both gay and straight who are using it.

That's all that's changed.

So there were plenty of 18 years old and older folks around who demonstrated NO INTEREST whatsoever in contacting their sperm donor. NONE.

What the article was trying to do was compare mothers who gave up children for adoption and sperm donors and there's just no comparison...It was the usual jealous misfits like yourself trying to compare your position with a mother's and even the kids you spawned weren't buying it.
7:35 PM

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Happy 2011...

2011-01-06T09:38:00.000-05:00

I've been so remiss with publishing on this blog that I'm ashamed of myself but with a new year beginning I am pledging to do better...

Anyway I chose the 'lazy' way to start the year off by publishing an old post from 2005 since someone recently made a comment on it and when I okayed the comment to post I re-read the post and thought it was still relevant.

So here it is for your reading enjoyment...

******************************************************************************

Sunday, January 09, 2005
Custody Wars to Evade Child Support: The Beginning of Their End...

Well it's been a while since this decision and the statistics are not in yet, but I think it ultimately will be seen as the Waterloo of our society's attempts to collect child support from stubborn fathers; and, thus, the beginning of the end of the custody wars to evade child support that have been raging across our country for the last few decades...

With one swift blow, Tennessee made the issue moot. Predictable as always, the region that has been on the wrong side of every social issue this country has ever been faced with, from slavery to unions, once again come down on the wrong side of the child support issue...

Allowing men to base their child support for first children on how many subsequent children they will spawn is like allowing someone to decide how much their minimum credit card payment will be based upon HOW much they purchased...AFTER telling them that the more they spend, the less that payment will be...

Well quess what folks...After hearing that, you'd be a darn fool not to run that card up to the limit and then some now, wouldn't you? Heck buy a whole freakin department store, maybe you can get a minumun payment of $10.00 a month to pay it all off whenever...WTF...

Frankly at this point, I say GOOD...as I and I suspect many others (including the FBI, who has been forced to set up a website and assign agents to address all of the many issues instigated by these custody wars to avoid child support) were getting darn sick of the whole thing...darn sick of it...

I can just imagine the glee of the fathers in Tennessee as they slowly became aware of the significance of this decision, not to mention the glee of the fathers' rights movement nationally as this retarded view of financial planning for your children spreads to all the other states...

Oh well...

Maybe things can get back to normal now as men continue with their history of evading responsibility for their children and women continue with ours of scrabbling around for resources to raise our children with...since the stingy male cheapskates of our society have been doing everything in their power to find a loophole like this (and let's face it you can drive a truck through this one) ever since the laws mandating higher child support guidelines were passed...

The court ruled in a case in which a Memphis father faced an 80% increase in his child support, and the father argued that the expense of raising two children in his current marriage should be considered in figuring how much he should pay to support a third child from a previous relationship. Current child support guidelines prohibit financial considerations for children from second families, except under extreme circumstances. The court found that these guidelines "violate the equal protection guarantees of the federal and state constitutions."

Now comes the spin...

It's all about the children, as it not constitutional to allow children of the same father to be treated unequally...

No...it's all about not taking on more responsibility then you can afford and then becoming a slacker because you bit off more then you can chew...that's what it's about.

Sigh...

posted by NYMOM | Sunday, January 09, 2005
17 Comments:

Blogger Masculiste said...

I thought I'd be a sport and squeeze in a comment over here. You're so jam packed with commenters and all. You're like a female Bill O'Rielly (did I spell O'Rielly right?)

I just can't believe your arrogance and stubborness. You're actually going on PUBLIC record to proclaim that the whole reason for the father's rights movement as a whole, is to avoid paying child support, or to significantly reduce it to almost nill. I hope I'm clear that this is your message. Because I truly hope you continue on spreading this message far and wide.

It's not that I don't like you. That's not it. And I rather enjoy these lengthy debates. That is, for just 'debating's sake.' I think you like to debate too.

But I am disturbed by your point of view. As I'm sure you are by mine. But I'm even more disturbed that there are more like you.

It makes it hard to have a normal relationship with when you're fighting all the time. Power struggles and love = oil and water.

And I'd like to think it's possible for me to have a family again. I think men are entitled to have families. Families of creation. Kids. Maybe even a few nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles sprinkled in there. But I know if the world followed your logic, I wouldn't be permitted or entitled to even that.

And then a commenter at Gonzo's wrote something interesting. He said something like...

...The more you 'rail to the heaven's this kind of stuff as pure commentary, the more the ranks of men and fathers rights groups swell.

You cannot produce one...I repeat ONE piece of evidence to establish that this is a growing trend among fathers, or even a going concern that it COULD develope into a trend.

With all the new leglislation being introduced as bills regarding NCP's rights and children's rights to both parents across the country, not one bill asks for any reduction in child support over-all. It only asks for fairness, equity and a consideration for TODAY'S WORLD in factoring child support. No legitmate dads rights site has ever been produced info on how to "beat the system" and get out of child support. This is all just pure commentary on your part. Your just railing against men. And fathers in particular.

Every DAD on this planet has accepted his (some would say fate...I would call it destiny) that it's his obligation to financially support his kids. There isn't a society that I'm aware of on this entire globe that does not contain some provision for child support, if they be a society that grants divorce. Even the worst of men who have children recognize that if divorced, they have to pay support. There IS no escape from it. Men KNOW this. We are resigned to it.

And ultimately when a man figures out the best way to do that, he just wants to do THAT. And not have to be ridden like a sled dog when he falls on hard times. He wants his ex to let him just be the best dad he can be, without having to measure up to his ex's impossible demands. He wants to get on his life WITH HIS KIDS as much as he can. That's all either of them can do.

Your way talks about a whole new world order. An entire trashing of a current society and a replacement society that recognizes females as a superior. I remember the things you wrote over at Trish's. You want the world to conform to a "maternal" order. You want a woman's world. I don't ever expect to change your mind. But I DO surf the net just like you.

And since you happen to be in my neighborhood, (Father's Rights) and you have a propensity to say outlandish things that both annoy and amuse me, and demand response, at times I will respond.

I am not following you, I am not monitoring you and I really don't know or care who you are other than the picture you publically paint, and I will thank you to refrain from attempting to give the impression that that is the case.

I DO know that I disagree with you. And on future occassions I will continue to disagree with you. I hope we can maintain a modicum of civility in the future and refrain from making 'personal' comments in the future. Remember? My daughter?
6:42 PM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Yes, you should remember that you have a daughter and the policy changes I hope for will eventually benefit her...

AND you make many snide remarks to me on other blogs which is why I respond to you as I do...You cannot expect to ask me to respond civilly to you and then when I go to other blogs you spent all your time sniping at me...

Believe it or not I have nothing against loving fathers being involved with their children; however, as I'm sure you noticed we are NOT talking about loving fathers who are driving many of the 'custody wars' here...look at the random comments of the men on the parent site of one we frequent and you'll see what I mean. These are not loving fathers.

For the most part, we are talking about men who are emotionally abusive to say the least by even instigating a custody action....as I told you already I consider it the definition of emotional abuse for a man to start one of these actions unless abuse or neglect of his children is involved.

I do NOT agree with you that men always paid support for children...especially never-married men which makes up about 30% of our births now. This is something relatively new and we are seeing the ramifications of it now...dangerous for women and children to allow these men contact when they have no connection whatsoever to either mother or child...

Married men usually paid something in the event of divorce, but it was up to a Judge's discretion what he paid...there were no support guidelines invoked by federal policy...that is new also.

AND I agree that support guidelines are too high. I think it's not the support itself but the add-ons that states attached to it...such as prorated percentage of childcare and uncovered medical...this is the problem I believe. But address that then...this business of fighting for custody to avoid paying high child support is bs and it does go on...It does...

I believe the things I post, I get no personal benefit by any of this...

I actually get many threats from people because of my views, generally men, but some women.

Like I have said many times, if men continue, women will have even fewer children then they do now, fewer...as why should they go through everything we do to bring forth the next generation and then put up with this crap after the fact...so you better start thinking about that if you ever expect to be a grandfather.

My views do NOT stop any man from being a father. They put in perspective the relative contribution of each one to the overall relationship...and maybe it's a good thing that men go into these relationships understanding the power inbalances that exist...

Men have more power vis-a-vis the financial sphere in most relationships because they make more money...plus they have more power via their larger size and physical strength against their wives and even more flexibility regarding extramarital relationships as they are judged less harshly when they cheat...if women have more vis-a-vis children with backup of law enforcement so what...

Shouldn't she have SOMETHING...

Anyway, I will try to moderate my comments to you but expect the same respect...as I am nice to people who are nice to me...

Good night...
2:59 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

BTW, I am NOT a feminist...or a marxist feminist...or a marxist-socialist feminist...as I frequently have said feminists are the mothers of the fathers' rights movement in more ways then one.
3:04 AM
Blogger Masculiste said...

"Men have more power vis-a-vis the financial sphere in most relationships because they make more money...plus they have more power via their larger size and physical strength against their wives and even more flexibility regarding extramarital relationships as they are judged less harshly when they cheat...if women have more vis-a-vis children with backup of law enforcement so what...

Shouldn't she have SOMETHING..."

This kind of logic is an example of what I find so disturbing about your point of view on this.

You've equated children to currency or the status of power or control. More money means a better life for the kids. Even if they live with dad they still never have to lose their mom. Not like the way it is now. Greater physical size and strength is nothing considering that spousal and child abuse is wrong...period.

And men are NO more looked upon with less distain by other men for having affairs, than women are looked upon by other women for doing the same thing. If you were just to go by day-time TV alone, the airwaves are rife with reality shows involving women who cheat on their men and then just laugh in their face, physically and emotionally attack their men right on national television or worse, proclaim that the men in their children's lives are their biological fathers only to have a DNA test reveal otherwise. When the woman is busted, she smirks and says, "AND what?"

And you can't tell me that these are isolated incidents. This is televised everyday, day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out. Which is why I post the stories that I do. It's news not commentary. I don't NEED to have an opinion on the frequency of these types of events because there in the news each and everyday. Women lie, cheat, steal, physically or domestically abuse their spouses, molest and abuse children (sometimes their own) and sometimes kill. NOT ALL WOMEN, but enough to be concerned. And now the new one seems to be USING kids for power or money in divorce court. And you're traveling down the 'primrose path' if you seriously believe that this happens so little it's not worth acknowledgement.

Children are not chips and the law is not a game of poker.

And I'm afraid you are again mistaken. When we talk about fathers rights, no we are not talking about abusive men. YOU are talking about abusive men. Because you think that constantly changing the topic will offset the argument.

The fathers rights issue is about good, hardworking dads like me who have our children taken from us for no reason other than what you site. Power.

That's wrong NYMOM.
9:08 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Children cannot be divided by like a CD collection so someone must be given custody and that person is whom the children will be spending MOST of their growing-up years...Unfortunately it is simply NOT enough incentive for women to have children if there is a possibility that they will lose them; so in the overall best interest of everyone, mothers need to continue getting custody of children...

Sorry...

As I assure you if MOST young women became aware of this change in public policy regarding custody, our birth rates would drop even more and we're heading into extinction already...Most women still believe that mothers ONLY lose custody if they are unfit...Most women are NOT aware of the changes that have taken place over the last decade or so and how easy it is for mothers to lose custody of their children today...

Actually the engine of growth for the African-American community, the single teenage mother, has already stopped reproducing probably due to this change in policy (usually changes in public policy move more rapidly through the everyday lives of poorer communities then the rest of us, so the word is probably already out). Thus, in about a decade or two we will be seeing a corresponding drop in the overall African-American population reflective of this...

Just sorry...

Take it up with mother nature if you have issues with this. That's the way the 'system' was set up...Mothers bear and raise the young of every species, including our own...Mothers invest more in their young and that larger investment usually translates into better care and nuturing of said young so it's a positive 'good' for everyone involved...

Just because it's fashionable and 'sexy' for men to strut around now exhibiting children like a new piece of jewelry or the latest fashion accessory doesn't mean it's good for our society to throw out the window a system that has been working since man first crawled out of the primal mist...

Because you know what, once you convince women that's kids are NOT that big a deal, that just any old person can raise them, that there's no special bond between mother and child, it could be pretty hard to unconvince them of just the opposite a few decades from now when the whole thing falls apart...

As my main worry is not that you're WRONG, but that you're RIGHT and what is the damn incentive for women to go through all the inconvenience, disfigurement, pain and sheer bloody mess of the whole 'baby making' thing in that case...With a 1001 reasons to say no, what the incentive for any woman to say yes to being a mother if a man who invests NOTHING in the process, absolutely nothing, can pop up 5 seconds after birth and have exactly the same rights as her to the child she just bore? What is the incentive?

I mean in a free society people can make choices and you and other fathers rights advocates seem to be talking out of both sides of your mouth on this issue...

On the one hand, you all seem to be saying that the whole mother/child bond is totally bogus, meaningless bs and that any old person can bond with a child after birth and raise child just as well as mother can...then when I say well what's the incentive for women to have children then, you all inevitably start sprouting off about the whole maternal instinct thing...women will still want to chance it due to some latent maternal instinct that exists within each woman supposedly driving them to want children...

Well isn't that a slightly inconsistent position here? I mean if you are telling me that there are no inherent differences here between mom and dad vis-a-vis children then why in the heck should I believe in some vague mysterious and sacred, maternal instinct that operates before the fact of birth, but then afterwards just stops operating and we all fall under the cold, hard logic of science again...

I mean either these things exist or they don't...they don't just exist when it's convenient for men to make a selfish case for their own best interest with and then vanish as soon as they are no longer useful...

Why should women go along with that?

Give me even ONE good reason...even one that makes sense...Just one...and your initial reasoning that, well even if dad gets custody mothers can still be a a part of childrens' lives is probably NOT going to cut it...as you are telling me basically that the person putting forth MOST of the effort will be reaping the lesser reward and, you know what, REAL life doesn't work out this way...it just doesn't...
3:14 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

"More money means a better life for the kids. Even if they live with dad they still never have to lose their mom. Not like the way it is now."

I hate to give you the cold hard facts Michael but if you think that you are going to find a woman to marry you and have children based upon that scenario you just outlined above, you are dreaming...the ONLY way that would work is if you lied to her about your beliefs...the ONLY way...

It never fails to amaze me of how the most seemingly intelligent men will just say and probably believe the silliest things sometimes.

I'd advise you to begin seeking a single-parent adoption rather then wait to meet someone else to have more kids with...because you are NEVER going to find a woman to go along with that...unless you are as rich as Michael Jackson and can pay somebody a million dollars and a house like he did...and frankly, now that we know so much more now about how mental illness and lesser personality disorders are hereditary in nature, I'd be afraid, if I were you, to have kids with a woman who WOULD do this...As she's probaly mentally unbalanced and any children with 50% of her genes will grow up to be like that too...in other words you'll be spawning a bunch of future nuts...

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news...
3:30 AM
Blogger Masculiste said...

"On the one hand, you all seem to be saying that the whole mother/child bond is totally bogus, meaningless bs and that any old person can bond with a child after birth and raise child just as well as mother can..."

Don't invert what you do. Fathers rights groups are saying no such thing. When are you going to back up anything that you assert here in blog world? Why do you insist on making these outrageous, incindiary remarks and then pose to the reader that they just look it up for themselves.

You're the one saying that a fathers bond to their child is meaningless. You've been saying this for as long as I've been reading you. The whole psychological community agrees that children need their fathers, but you're response is, "Blame evolution." And you want to be taken seriously?

You talk about respect? You constantly insult, slander and defame dads. You sling the HIGHEST insult (because it's no way in hell true, and you KNOW this) by accusing dads of wearing their children like jewelry??? How low did you have to go to think that one up. And again, more inverting.

You're using evolution and children to espouse a financial entitlement to all women whether they have kids or not, because it might encourage them to do so??? Again, I remember what you wrote back at Trish's.

You talk about the children not being divided like a CD set like that's some profound logic. But that's another way of saying that the kids are like property isn't it?. And the truth is, when you take one parent or another out of the picture, you DIVIDE them by definition.

A kid needs BOTH PARENTS. And a good parent knows how to encourage and accomodate the situation...period. It doesn't matter if they're divorcing ammicably or not. THAT'S putting the kids first. THAT'S looking out for the best interests of a child.

And women don't have to lose their children in the event that they live with dad because he may be more financially solvent. (I know you couldn't possibly imagine that happening to you, but hey, I couldn't imagine it happening to me either. Until it did). If dads WERE doing to moms what we have happening to us, those men would be no better as well. It's wrong to alienate children, no matter who's doing the alienating. And your way alienates kids from their dads. But of course, you chalk that up to evolution. Just for the record. I don't believe in evolution. I believe in a Supreme Creator.

If you want to take a look at history, consider this...children have been a part of the brutal history of the world as well as evolution from the dawn of time. They grew up in caves, hovels, and even holes in the ground. They've survived floods, famine, pestilance, religious wars, world wars, civil wars, cold wars, the ships that sailed to America, the great trek out west, poverty, the great depression, the industrial age, the technological age, the junk bond age, the hedonist age...hell, you name the time and kids were there.

They are not porceline teacups or jewelry. They are strong, intelligent, have geat understanding, empathy and courage. And if they can survive all that...they can certainly adapt to having two parents. It's the parents who have to learn to get along. The kids already know what SOME women seem to have forgotten. Kids may not say so, but they KNOW the truth. And they NEVER forget.

I could go on and on here in debunking more of your philosophy be it would be redundant. Your prose is pure commentary.

All these things you accuse dads of with no proof whatsoever (and Trish's silly reference to a book being sold by a lawyer as a mean's to resist "unreasonable" debt due to "excessive" support does NOT qualify)these references to evolution as way of offsetting what experts have been saying for decades, the constant barrage of nonsense at two or three posts at a time...this all comes from YOUR hatred of men and dads in particular. This is what reads from your prose. This is all commentary from you. You've made this up in your mind and no experts are going to tell you different. But how does that put children's best interests first?

Fathers rights groups have been introducing new fathers rights and joint custody presumption legislation to houses all across the country, as I have said several times now. Mass. just tallied an 85% approval rating for just that. I have a copy of PA's new bill to be introduced this month. There is simply no provision in ANY of these bills to eliminate or reduce child support.
9:21 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

"And women don't have to lose their children in the event that they live with dad because he may be more financially solvent. (I know you couldn't possibly imagine that happening to you, but hey, I couldn't imagine it happening to me either. Until it did)."

Well you know what Michael...you just keep doing what you're doing and I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and let history be the judge of who was right....because I don't believe any woman is going to bear children knowing there is a possibility that someday she'll lose custody of them...it's not going to happen...

AND the same way that this Joint Custody being introduced into states has cut the divorce rate, it's eventually going to cut the marriage and child-bearing rate of women as well...because, guess what, these sneaky trick only work ONCE...

It's like what that guy was saying about Amy Richards aborting those two fetuses but you chose NOT to understand...that her thinking on this issue spanned generations...being passed along from woman to woman and all the generations of those women being abandoned and betrayed by the men in their lives led right up to Amy Richards sitting in the doctor's office having two fetuses aborted because SHE alone, could only handle one child...and couldn't trust the man in her life enough to chance having three...

This is the scenario that we will be looking at in our future...more ill will towards men based upon more irresponsible behavior...as it is NOT reponsible for fathers to seek custody of children from mothers, unless abuse or neglect is involved...actually it an age old continuation of emotional abuse of women by men...

Like I said, let's just see where it all ends...
10:36 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

I read the parts of what I wrote that you posted on your blog and, of course, standing alone the excerpts meant nothing...generally most people post an excerpt that summarizes the MOST of the ideas or thesis of an article within it, you managed to post the excerpts summarizing the least...

Oh well...

I am confident that as time goes by you and other Fathers' Rights advocates like you will come to be looked upon badly...I have no doubt of it. This whole decades long episode will be noted as more abuse by men against women and children. You'll be painted as selfish, concerned only with money and determined to undermine womens' rights by holding their children hostage...

The thing most held against all of you will NOT be how you treated your children and their mothers so selfishly however, BUT how you managed to destroy our court system in this country with your continuing attempts to undermine what used to be considered one of the finest systems in the world...Your selfishness has caused our family courts to become corrupt and venal, not concerned with the best interests of the children they are supposed to be serving but instead focused on piling on top of the politically correct bandwagon in separating mothers from their children to perpetuate some weird social engineering experiment...

You'll be seen as responsible for these ceaseless parental abductions which bog down law enforcement trying to track down mothers who have every right to their children, but are now subject to having to get permission to even 'visit' them...and for the general disrespect that many now hold all family court orders in as flouting them has become as routine as jaywalking...

Even the chaos that family courts have descended into dragging the reputations of many of the Judges and other court professionals down with them will be your legacy as well...

You are NOT going to be seen as Martin Luther King or Gandhi as you continually try to paint yourselves but just the opposite...more like the men who eventually killed King and Gandhi so determined were they to keep control of a corrupt system...

You are not going to be seen as those loving fathers you keep trying to paint yourselves as in the media either, instead you are going to be seen as monsters, who for selfish gain destroyed the lives of their children and attempted to roll back the civil and legal rights of their mothers...the only group of women in the world who have gained some rights for the first freakin time in history and instead of being happy for us, you sat around plotting on how you could screw it all up for us again...

That's going to be your legacy: selfish, irresponsible, and stingy...

And just to let you know that all those women helping you are going to be seen in the same way...but worse...as too addled-brained to know any better, similar to the way those women suicide bombers help men install fundamentalist regimes that eventually kill them and other women...like that...

Not as these great pioneers as they like to paint themselves...

Okay...
12:23 AM
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am a mother of two, and I find nymom's comments VERY disturbing. Custody shouldn't always go to the mom. When the child is older, and especially if the child is male, I believe he would benefit MORE from the father. The problem is that most mothers become selfish and don't want to give up that child support. They aren't looking out for the childs interest, they are basing there decisions on emotions and money. I also believe that when a man has other children then the child support should be reviewed again based on that. This is no different than if he was married to the woman and they had more children. At that point financial resources would be reduced towards the first child in order to accomodate the second child in the family. That's common sense. What if we told women who are receiving child support, that they should not have any more children because they can't afford to take care of the ones they have, without child support? That's not fair on either side. A father shouldn't have to prove that a mother is unfit, to get custody of his children. He may be in a better position to take care of the kids, than the mother. Child support is out of control. It's almost as though the mother wants to be "paid" for having a child, as if its her reward. I am married and have a stepson, and my husband pays child support, and it doesn't bother me one bit. I don't believe it actually goes to support the child as much as it goes to pay for her lifestyle, but thats not my business. It's his responsibility, so he pays. His son now wants to live with his father full-time, and as he is 13 he should have the right to choose, and then the mother should pay child support. What's right is right. Nymom, you sound angry. You rant and rave, but all anyone hears is, "I want money!" I will pray that God gives you peace.
7:50 AM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Well remember one thing, the tax payers assume a vast burden as well when you allow men to reduce their child support according to how many subsequent children they have. Since every child is entitled to the same standard of living in this country and most entitlements are based upon income, a cut in child support would translate into lesser income to that child. Your thinking would cause taxpayers to have to pick up the tab as hundreds of thousands of children would suddenly become eligible for free school lunches, free medical care, and god only knows how many other entitlements.

It's simply irresponsible to take on more financial burdens if you are having problems meeting the ones you currently face. PERIOD.

Actually I do agree with you that older children should have a say in which parent they wish to live with; but don't be disappointed if he changes his mind after a year or so and wishes to return home. I read somewhere a long time ago that these type of latter custody switches rarely work out, not to mention that you'll have created life long enemy in his mother. It it really worth it?
8:06 AM
Blogger Brandon said...

Your argument against using future children of the fatther ass a factor in the child support calculation is fundamentally flawed because it is one-sided and unfair. The mother is free to reduce the anmount of available income she provides the first child by simply having more children. Obviously, if the mother has more children she will spend less on the first child because she has to spread the same amoutn of resources over several children. So then why does this not apply to the father as well? if the father has more children then he should be able to spread his resources evenly for all of his children, which will rersult in less resources for the first child. Your logic is sexually biased. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, period. Stop saying you want equal rights as women and then expect to be spoon fed. Get out and get a damn job and help support your children instead of being bab machines that expect the man to pay for everything. Pathetic. Your position promotes women having the children of multiple fathers who have not had children yet. Keep that income support income coming in girls, you know how to work the system. You can move on with your life but the fathers can't? There is no equality in the divorce/child custody arena. It is really sad.
12:11 PM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Unfortunately Brandon evolution or nature is one-sided and men invest little in bringing forth life. Thus for the person who invests the least to be able to spawn kids all over the place and lower child support depending upon how many he ultimately spawns is a recipe for future financial disaster.

Sorry.
4:13 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I raised my son for 7 years while his mom worked ywo jobs, went to school, and ran the bars all night getting drunk and screwing around. Whe she decided to move out, I sued for custody. In court, she argued I had to prove paternity, and even said the paternity test I had was questionable, so I had to get another one. In the mean time, she stole my son from me, and fled to her parents house, where a year later she still lives, with my son, while our case is pending. The only reason the mother wants custody is to hurt me, and make money. She leaves my son behind with her parents or others whenever she has him so she can screw around with men. And I only get to see him every other weekend, and one day a week, but not overnight, because I am a man. So I say screw you for your opinion, because as a father I raised my son for sexevn years without his mom's help at all, and she still was able to walk out of court with more parenting time than I have. So screw you and screw mothers who have possession of their kids by default, without ever having to prove they are a better parent, just because they are women.

If you love your kids, you work at making yourself financially and emotionally able to care for them yourself. Thta's me. I don't want a dime from my son's worthless mother. I just want to see my son that I raised alone for 7 years more than 2 nights every two weeks. This country is sick, and our economy and society is in shambles because of kids being raised by the wrong parents.
8:54 PM
Blogger NYMOM said...

"The only reason the mother wants custody is to hurt me and make money..."

Well that's exactly what I'm talking about and why we have to fix the child support system...you, yourself, admit getting custody of a child involves 'making money'...

Although why a woman who worked 'two jobs' all the time needs money is beyond me.

BTW: What do you do for a living...
1:28 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The desire to destroy man and his "primary bond" with his children is all too apparent from the communistic views these women who profess to know whats right for your family. That includes making the man pay over and over while the women is rewarded for her inability to run her own life without "government assistance". There should be a time limit, if the woman can not be on her own two feet in less then a year or lets say 3 months the man has the right to full custody. Sounds fair in a world where the man is to be destroyed first all in the name of children. Horrible what communism does to a country.
10:12 PM
Blogger Eric said...

All you women should come to Hawaii. I'm a man. I pay $1600 every month. I was left with $300 every two weeks to live on. I am now homeless. I had to quit work because of anxiety attacks due to the stress, and could not get by an that income anyway. My ex does not work. Her boyfreind does not work. They just had a baby conceived before we were divorced. Now she gets welfare. The welfare office is coming after me for whatever they gave her. They take it out of my tax return if I have one. They will put a lein on any family property my name may be associated with. They will cancel my drivers licence. they will ruin my credit report. I obviously have no money to pay them.
2:50 AM

Post a Comment

Typical Schizophrenia Ruling from Family Court Judge

2010-07-21T13:40:00.003-04:00

Well here we go again...another Judge giving a totally inconsistent custody ruling that makes absolutely no sense. Worse it sets the stage for another trip back to court in Texas when the mother finally gets there...if she can ever get together the means to relocate from California to Texas.

This Judges gives the mother and father Joint Custody (they both live in California) but then rules the father can move to Texas to follow his second wife. Probably setting the stage for him to start harassing his second wife now (and her newly adoptive child). His second wife is an actress. Obviously California is the place for her to live; but she's probably moving to Texas to get rid of this idiot and now the court lets him follow her.

Just great, now he can alternate between aggravating his 6 year old child's mother with a moveaway, while at the same time step up harassment of his second wife and her newly adopted son...

A double-header.

One of his excuses for moving to follow his second wife to Texas was: so his children can continue to maintain their 'close' relationship with their stepmother. Meanwhile she was the one who moved out and filed for divorce taking none of those kids with her. The youngest was 6 years old, she claimed she was like a mother to that child at the custody hearing to help her then husband get formal custody. Yet she had no problem dumping the child at a moment's notice when she wanted a divorce.

Hold the pail while I puke.

BTW, if she was so interested in her stepchildren, she could have filed a custody petition at the same time she filed for the divorce.

Yes, Virgina a step parent does have standing to file for custody.

Yet this second wife dba stepmother chose to just abandon the whole family (husband and stepkids) and just get a quickie divorce from her then husband.

So it's pretty clear she has little interest in any of those kids.

She has an adopted child now and like I said, probably moved to Texas so she could raise that kid in peace w/o this a-hole harassing her everytime she turns around as what single mother/actress moves from California to Texas w/o a good reason?

We really need to start changing the laws here that let Judges continue making these sorts of inconsistent rulings. Now the mother of this six year old probably has no money to appeal, she just got out of jail on tax evasion charges. Anyway we need to set up a system whereby Judges who gives these sorts of inconsistent custody rulings eventually get their employment terminated.

A new version of the 'Three Strikes and You're Out' rule in California.

BTW, I want to see if the authorities are as strict about enforcing a mother's visitation who was in jail for tax evasion, (probably her ex helped turn her into the IRS) as they were about enforcing the visitation of that rapist in Arizona.

Jesse James may take daughter to Texas
By Eunice Oh, PEOPLE.com
July 21, 2010 9:49 a.m. EDT
People
A court ruled Tuesday that Jesse James may take his 6-year-old daughter to Texas to a home near Sandra Bullock.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* James and Lindemulder faced off in a week-long trial over his move to Austin
* Lindemulder accused him of moving to simply try to win Bullock back
* James testified that Lindemulder still has unresolved personal issues

(PEOPLE.com) -- Jesse James scored a victory in his custody battle with ex-wife Janine Lindemulder when a court ruled Tuesday he may take their 6-year-old daughter to Texas to a home near his other ex, Sandra Bullock.

Lindemulder, a former porn star who lives in California, wailed when the Orange County, California, judge announced the decision. "I'll move! I'll move!" she cried. "I can't get attached and let her go!"

James, 41, and Lindemulder, also 41, faced off in a week-long trial over his move to Austin, which he testified was for business purposes. He was quoted in an online interview that another reason was so his three children can maintain a close relationship with stepmom Bullock.

Lindemulder accused him of moving to simply try to win Bullock back at the expense of Lindemulder's relationship with Sunny. Bullock had helped raise Sunny during the actress's marriage to James and has said she is still close to the child.

The judge said that James and Lindemulder will have joint custody but James can take Sunny to Texas at the start of her new school calendar, which should be around mid-August. Until then, Sunny will be with her mom.

The motorcycle mogul testified Lindemulder, a recovering addict, still has unresolved personal issues and feared that if she "hit rock bottom" it would involve Sunny. Lindemulder says she has been sober for several years and wants to improve trust and communication with her ex.

See full article at PEOPLE.com.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/celebrity.news.gossip/07/21/jesse.james.texas.ppl/index.html?hpt=Sbin

2010-07-11T10:45:00.003-04:00

Once again it has come to my attention how gay women and their children are being used as a modern day "Trojan Horse" in order to extinguish the natural rights of all mothers. Women have to be wary whenever courts attempt to usurp the natural rights of any mothers to make the decisions in the best interest of the children they alone bear.

As I often said it's the difference between a mother deciding to relinquish her parental rights to another person in a legal adoption vs losing her parental rights due to an abduction (court sanctioned or otherwise).

It is always in the best interest of men to try to litigate and use the courts to give themselves artificial rights and privileges which they are no more entitled to then the man in the moon. Women are the persons who bear life, while the male contribution is negligible. Thus men have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by a change in the historic venue where these decisions were originally made which took into account human biology. natural law and common sense.

Men gain when mothers and children are forced into the legal venue of the courts to decide their fate. Men gain, while women, children and society loses. As I believe that these custody wars men have incited is the reason for the drastic drop in the birth rates of the western world.

Denigrating the mother/child bond and the obvious physical link established by women with the children they bear benefits each man individually, but society loses overall when our birth rates drop due to these ongoing custody battles, which could involve any woman and her child now at any time, any time.

There is no logic, rhyme or reason to them.

Previously a woman was relatively safe with her children as long as she was a fit mother and could provide her child with a reasonable standard of living. As long as the child wasn't an heir or heiress to any sizable estate, no one except the child's mother had any interest in obtaining custody. So by default most mothers were allowed to raise their own children.

Today this is no guarantee that you will be allowed to raise your children since at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all some recreational sperm donor or one of his relatives can decide it would be cheaper to raise a child themselves then to pay child support or they might need a little companion in their lives; and, boom, you are thrust into the middle of a custody hearing.

It's that simple.

Allowing courts to usurp a mother's right to make these decisions regarding our children's best interests plays into the hands of men and has the potential to undermine all the rights women won over the last few decades while men are enabled to hold our children hostage to manipulate our behavior. Of course the courts should and must step in due to a mother's abuse or neglect; but the average mother should never be allowed to be dragged into a custody battle unless abuse or neglect are an issue and these events are rare in spite of the media's attempt to paint every single mother as an abusive, unfit, drug-using, guttersnipe.

The article below shows where we are heading and how the path is being paved (which will ultimately benefit men, not women) by using lesbian relationships to overturn settled case law on custody. Furthermore many states are passing laws that anonymous sperm donors can no longer be used for women, either gay or straight, to facilitate single or lesbian motherhood. So lesbians, in the future, will be forced into using identifiable sperm donors and open at any time to a custody fight by said sperm donors. So these are short-term victories for a small group of women, whereas all of the precedents being set will be with us and impacting all mothers for decades to come.

The primary underpinnings of both of these rulings was an attack on the biological connection every mother has with her children and a devaluing of the natural mother and child bond.

One note: each partner had the right to adopt the child who was the subject of the court rulings and neither was allowed to adopt by the natural mother. Sorry, but for whatever reason those mothers decided not to facilitate adoptions of their children by their partners they were within their rights. Just as every stepfather is not permitted to adopt a stepchild, whatever the reason. These mothers made the decision that it was not in their child's best interest to be adopted by their partners and that should have been the end of it. No court had the right to overrule that decision. Final note: one of these relationships only lasted four months...

So once again, we have Judges overturning established case law and making new laws for a small group of women which will have enormous impact on all mothers...

http://gaycitynews.com/articles/2010/05/05/gay_city_news/news/doc4be1b1b73bdd0015444619.txt
Narrow Rulings in Co-Parent Cases
New York's highest court opens door only slightly on question of legal standing
Published: Wednesday, May 5, 2010 1:49 PM CDT
BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest bench, issued opinions on May 4 in two cases involving the break-up of lesbian couples raising children together.

In both, the legal standing of co-parents was recognized, to different degrees, but the rulings were narrow and their ultimate impact uncertain.

Each of the two couples had a child through donor insemination, and in neither case did the non-biological mother adopt the child.

In Debra H. v. Janice R., the court unanimously ruled that because the couple entered into a Vermont civil union shortly before their child was born, both women would be recognized as legal parents in New York for purposes of determining custody and visitation rights.

In H.M. v. E.T., a sharply divided court ruled that the Family Court has jurisdiction to consider H.M.’s lawsuit to compel E.T. to provide financial support for their child, even though, under New York law, her ex-partner would not be considered a parent of the child.

Both cases presented the court with a vehicle to reconsider its notorious 1991 ruling in Alison D. v. Virginia M. In that case, the court ruled that a biological mother’s same-sex partner was a “legal stranger” to the child whom they had been raising together, so the partner could not bring a lawsuit seeking custody or visitation.

Courts in some other states have adopted tests weighing a number of factors in determining whether to treat co-parents as legal parents, but the New York Court of Appeals held in Alison D. that it was bound by the state’s domestic relations law to limit legal standing to biological or adoptive parents.

In the Debra H. case, though the ruling was unanimous, the seven judges issued several opinions reflecting different legal perspectives. Judge Susan Read devoted most of her opinion to explaining why the four-member majority did not overrule Alison D. She argued that it was up to the Legislature whether to overturn the high court’s earlier decision.

The ruling was heavily foreshadowed by the judges’ questioning during oral argument, which came back again and again to the need they perceived for a bright-line rule that could be applied in simple fashion to determine parental status without the need for detailed factual inquiries. Under the bright-line approach, parental rights are easily ascertained based on biological or adoptive ties or, as in the Debra H. case, by relying on the law of another state that governs the co-parent’s legal status.

Read’s opinion rejected any multi-factor approach that requires a court to hear witnesses, listen to testimony, and exercise subjective judgment, which she argued would leave parental status indeterminate until a judicial proceeding is concluded.

“While Debra H. and various amici in this case complain that Alison D. is formulaic, or too rigid, or out of step with the times,” Read wrote, “we remain convinced that the predictability of parental identity fostered by Alison D. benefits children and the adults in their lives.”

The approach advocated by Debra H., the judge wrote, was “a complicated and non-objective test for determining so-called functional or de facto parentage” that would result in court proceedings “likely often to be contentious, costly, and lengthy.” That prospect, she argued, “threatens to trap single biological and adoptive parents and their children in a limbo of doubt.”

Just four years after Alison D., Read noted, the state’s high court ruled that the adoption statute could be construed to allow a co-parent to adopt their partner’s children. For some period of time following birth, the child would have only one legal parent, but a second-parent adoption proceeding could be initiated quickly.

Judges Victoria Graffeo, Eugene Pigott, and Theodore Jones concurred in the majority opinion, with Graffeo writing a separate opinion echoing Read’s arguments.

Having refused to overrule Alison D., the court took up the issue of the couple’s Vermont civil union. Janice R. was eight months pregnant when the women went to Vermont to enter into a civil union, and they have never legally dissolved that union. Under Vermont law, a child born to one member in a civil union is considered the child of both partners.

The New York court used the “comity” doctrine to reach its result. New York’s rule of thumb in extending comity to legal relationships formed in other jurisdictions is to consider whether doing so would violate the state’s public policy.

“New York will accord comity to recognize parentage created by an adoption in a foreign nation,” wrote Read. “We see no reason to withhold equivalent recognition where someone is a parent under a sister state’s law.”

The court acknowledged that Janice had not agreed to let Debra adopt the child, but the availability of that option in this state convinced the court that recognizing Debra’s parental rights under Vermont law was not contrary to New York’s public policy. And the fact of a Vermont civil union “is as determinable as whether there has been a second-parent adoption” –– thus the court’s insistence that there be a bright line was satisfied.

While agreeing with the court’s ruling, Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote separately to argue that the Alison D. should be overturned as “outmoded and unworkable.” That ruling, she said, “has never been good legal precedent… fixing biology over all else as the key to determining parentage and thereby foreclosing any examination of a child’s best interests.”

She quoted liberally from then-Chief Judge Judith Kaye’s dissent in Alison D., which emphasized that multi-factor tests have proven workable. Ciparick’s opinion was joined by the high court’s current chief judge, Jonathan Lippman.

Judge Robert S. Smith wrote a separate opinion, speaking only for himself, joining the majority’s result but on a totally different ground. He argued that Alison D. should be overruled and replaced with a bright-line rule for lesbian couples, based on the common law principle that every child is born with two parents.

Smith argued that when lesbian couples plan for the birth of a child through artificial insemination whom they will raise together in a family, they should both be treated by the law as legal parents of the child. Applying this concept specifically to lesbian couples, he argued that such an approach would sidestep more complicated multi-factor analysis that encourages litigation.

Debra H., now acknowledged as one of their child’s legal parents as a matter of Vermont law recognized by New York, has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in their child’s best interest that she be awarded custody or at least visitation rights.

The Alison D. precedent, however, under which same-sex co-parents will generally have no legal relationship to their children unless they adopt them, remains intact.

In the other decision, H.M. v. E.T., the tables were turned, with the biological mother, H.M., suing her ex-partner, E.T., for child support. The couple had a relationship from 1989 through 1995, during which time H.M. became pregnant through artificial insemination and gave birth to a child that the couple planned to raise as a sibling to children E.T. had earlier given birth to. E.T.. performed the insemination procedure and cut the new child’s umbilical cord at birth.

Four months later, however, the couple broke up and H.M., a citizen of Canada, took the child to her parents’ home there. In 1997, after a failed reconciliation, she sued for support in Canadian court, but the case was transferred to Rockland County Family Court in New York to establish jurisdiction over E.T.

After conflicting Family Court rulings, the state’s Appellate division ruled that the Rockland court did not have jurisdiction in the case.

Judge Ciparick’s decision for the Court of Appeals focused narrowly on the jurisdiction issue. Confronted by a motion to dismiss a case, courts assume the truth of a plaintiff’s claim and determine whether such a claim would be legally valid. H.M. alleged that E.T. was a parent of their son, and that was enough for Ciparick, who noted that under state law, the Family Court has jurisdiction when one parent seeks to compel another to provide financial support for their child.

Judge Smith, concurring, submitted exactly the same opinion that he had filed in the Debra H. case, arguing that when a lesbian couple has a child through donor insemination, both partners should be considered parents of the resulting child for legal purposes.

Judge Jones dissented, joined by Judges Read and Graffeo, arguing that the Family Court could not have jurisdiction over a support case against “a woman with no biological or other legal connection to the child.” Jones objected to the usual practice of assuming that a plaintiff’s allegations are true, since the high court’s precedents meant that even if true, H.M.’s factual allegations did not make E.T. a legal parent.

The court, then, by a slim 4-3 vote, ruled that the Family Court has jurisdiction, but when the case is returned to Rockland County, H.M. will surely lose unless she can show that E.T. had adopted the child or demonstrate a legal relationship from another jurisdiction, such as a civil union or marriage, that would make both women legal parents. H.M. has made no such claim, so this is a rather odd victory for her.

These two narrowly focused rulings have left the legal terrain for same-sex couples in New York raising children together pretty much where it was before, with one notable exception. Now, the court recognizes the legal standing of a co-parent not only through a second-parent adoption, but also when a couple has entered into a civil union, marriage, or some other arrangement outside New York that confers parental rights on the second, non-biological partner prior to the child’s birth.

Significantly, the high court’s use of the comity doctrine in evaluating the Vermont civil union bodes well for any future case that reaches it in which the validity of same-sex marriage from other jurisdictions under New York law is tested. It should be noted, though, that the Court of Appeals limited its discussion here to comity in the context of parental rights, nothing broader. A more comprehensive application of the principle to civil unions and marriages from out of state remains an open question at New York’s highest court.

In the Debra H. case, Lambda Legal represented the plaintiff, with Susan Sommer arguing at the Court of Appeals. Jennifer Colyer of Fried Frank argued on behalf of the child’s interest, and Sherri L. Eisenpress of Manhattan’s Reiss Eisenpress LLC represented Janice R., the respondent. In the H.M. case, Peter J.W. Sherwin of the Proskauer law firm represented the plaintiff and David H. Tennant of Nixon Peabody represented the respondent. Both cases drew a variety of amicus briefs, reflecting the significance of the underlying issues for the development of LGBT family law in New York.

Another "unusual' Situation...

2010-07-04T18:57:00.003-04:00

One thing I want to say at the onset of writing this, is that this situation is not unusual at all. What's unusual is that the public is hearing about this happening, that's all. Mother are forced all the time to send their kids into prisons or other dangerous places to visit these so-called 'fathers'. Many of these men, btw, nothing more then recreational sperm donors who decide they want to claim the title of father once they are in jail, as it allows them access to more privileges and attention.

Even when they get paroled (and many of them won't hesitate to use the fact that they are 'fathers' to get early release), if they manage to wrestle custody of these kids from their mothers, it's estimated they can claim up to $10,000 in benefits from the state. From food stamps to subsidized rents it's all dependent upon custody of a child.

AND I can understand exactly why this woman didn't return to court as she probably would have been subject to more vicious verbal and emotional abuse from this Judge, who was the one who forced her into the original visitation arrangement...

Think Judge Judy folks, if you want to visualize what this woman might have been subject to. Judge Judy was a New York family court judge for over 20 years. Can you imagine what mothers went through who winded up in front of that Judge Judy in family court???

It's terrifying really...

I also understand why she didn't want to let the courts know where her son went to school as they might have easily decided to pick her son up from school and place him in foster care (or worse as they are many far-flung youth residential facilities scattered around NY state) and then made her son do the visitation from there. Maybe even transferred her son into foster care in Arizona to facilitate this since that is where they were originally from and where the father was in prison for 27 years for rape.

Actually there have been numerous newspaper stories of children forced into mental hospitals (again or worse) for not wanting to visit their fathers. I, personally, have never heard of a case where the court was this rigorous with enforcement of a mother's visitation rights. It's just the opposite. In New York state a few years ago, they terminated a mother's visitation because she was smoking (not in front of the child or around the child but the custodial father claimed the child could 'smell' the smoke) so they just terminated this mother's visitation for that...

Again I wanted to preface this article with this information so I could make it clear that this is NOT an unusual situation at all. Mothers are forced ALL THE TIME into sending their kids off to visitation with dangerous men or into dangerous situations and there is not a damn thing they can do about it...

It reminds me of that story I put up a few months back about a mother losing custody of her son and losing her house (after the son was with her for years)...she was actually homeless and couldn't even see him for Christmas as she had no home to bring him to...and she didn't even know her ex had filed court papers until they showed up to toss her out of the house and take her son. The attorney in that article who was being interviewed kept saying what an 'unusual' situation that was as well. Since courts NEVER do exparte custody decisions w/o the other party being informed. This only happens in rare instances where a child is in some sort of imminent danger or something...

Again complete and utter baloney.

Many mothers I communicated with lost their children in exactly this manner, not even knowing that court papers had been FILED by these characters until their children were picked up at school or daycare. They were informed after going to the police to try and get their children back that they had lost custody of them a week or so ago. That was their notification.

Actually that is how I got custody of my youngest daughter. My ex-husband went and filed for divorce and temporary custody of our child but he stipulated he wanted ME to get custody of our infant daughter. This was back in the day before high-child support orders incited the ongoing 'custody wars' raging through our family court system today...and my notification was when he came to my job and served me with the paperwork. So I could have easily lost custody of my infant (three months old at the time) and I never would have been informed that an action was being filed until it was over...

Of course, the usual suspects always say "Well it was only temporary custody" you could have hired an attorney and fought that; but unless you are an ax-murderer temporary custody generally morphs into permanent custody and just like that some a$$hole has taken your child from you and destroyed your life...

Once again, thanks to Dastardy Dads for this info.

This woman is on-point with many of these stories...

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2010

Mom who objected to visitation with convicted rapist dad released from solitary confinement (Brooklyn, New York)

According to Jaya Saxena at the Gothamist, the mother thrown into solitary confinement at Rikers has been released. The mother's big crime? She objected to sending her 9-year-old son to visit his father, a convicted serial rapist currently serving time at an Arizona prison. Gee, and I thought objecting to something like that was good mothering. Silly me.

I hope Brooklyn Family Court Judge Robin Sheares continues to catch hell from the public for her thoroughly unprofessional behavior and this outrageous miscarriage of justice.

http://gothamist.com/2010/06/29/unsusual_case_of_mother_rapist_fath.php

"Unusual" Case of Mom, Rapist Dad and Visitation Rights

After what Office of Court Administration spokesman David Bookstaver called a "highly unusual" incarceration, a Brooklyn mom has been freed from Rikers. She was originally thrown in on June 10th for refusing to let her 9-year-old son visit his father, a convicted rapist, in prison.

The father, 31, was convicted in 2003 of raping three women in Phoenix and is serving 27 years in an Arizona state prison. A court order mandated that his son, Seon Jones, have twice-a-year visits with his father, and mother Sukhwant Herb originally agreed to the visitation rights in September. However, she later changed her mind. She told the Daily News, "I don't want my son in that environment, seeing the prisoners in jumpers, and the slamming of gates, the noise. My son is 9, and it's horrible, horrific." Brooklyn Family Court Judge Robin Sheares had Herb arrested for the violation, and sent her to Rikers for 50 days.

Bookstaver, the court spokesman, says she was arrested because she missed five court appearances, and that she "was given numerous opportunities to answer simple questions to avoid incarceration." She reportedly could not provide proof of where her son was attending school. But Herb says Sheares was unrelenting, saying "I don't believe you" when she explained she wanted to move to Ohio with her children and fiance Dwayne Waithe. But now, after 18 days in solitary confinement, Sheares changed his mind and ordered her release.

After hearing of the sentencing, High Court officials were reportedly shocked at Sheares' decision to lock up Herb without a chance to post bail. Herb's lawyer, Dale Frederick, said, "No bail in a case like this is really shocking. My client has not been charged with a crime, has never been charged with a crime—and even felons get bail." The judge also made some questionable comments during the sentencing, saying, "Shame, shame, shame, you see how shameful she [Herb] is. She's gonna get arrested and her kids are not gonna know where she is." Sheares released Herb into her lawyer's custody yesterday. There is no word on how her son handled his mother's imprisonment.

By Jaya Saxena in News on June 29, 2010 3:02 PM

Interesting contrast in how this case was handled versus the Caylee Anthony case

2010-05-13T16:41:00.004-04:00

I don’t understand why this case didn’t get the coverage by the media that the Caylee Anthony murder case is getting? To be honest, I believe that the media is largely responsible for the pressure on the Florida courts to give her mother, Casey Anthony, the death penalty…I, of course, am against the death penalty for either man or woman but some crimes are so heinous I don’t see anyway justice can be served without the death penalty.

So I’m conflicted on this one.

The other issue for me is also that I hate giving those groups of fathers rights nuts and self-righteous gender neutral feminists the satisfaction of seeing a mother executed.

This is like a two-fer for that bunch.

The only thing they love more is if a mother loses custody of a newborn…

Again, another shout-out to Dastardly Dads for this article.

Monday, May 10, 2010
Dad pleads guilty to murder for mixing drugs in child's drink (Charlestown, Pennsylvania)

Dad IAN KOHN has pleaded guilty to 3rd-degree murder charges in the death of his 23-month-old son. Seems Daddy mixed methadone and Ambien with Gatorade, and put it in the child's bottle. Sick stuff. And don't tell me he just wanted to help the child sleep. That's ridiculous. Not a word here on the mother.

http://www.pottstownmercury.com/articles/2010/05/10/blotter/doc4be845274a1fc911764019.txt

Father pleads guilty to murder for mixing drugs in child's drink Published: Monday, May 10, 2010

By Michael P. Rellahan Special to The Mercury

WEST CHESTER – The Charlestown man who police said killed his 23-month-old son by mixing drugs in his baby bottle and feeding them to him with Gatorade pleaded guilty to third-degree murder charges Monday.

Ian Kohn, 29, was sentenced to a total of 20-to-40 years in state prison as part of a plea agreement between the prosecution and Kohn’s attorney.

Kohn’s son, Joseph Clayton Kohn, was pronounced dead at Paoli Hospital on March 17, 2009. An autopsy determined that he had extremely high levels of methadone and Ambien in his system at the time. Kohn later confessed to police he had been feeding the child those drugs to help him sleep.

Kohn asked forgiveness for his crime before sentencing by Judge Thomas Gavin.

“Joey was such and incredible little boy,” he said, reading from a statement he wrote beforehand. “I never thought death could happen to my little beautiful baby boy.”
Posted by silverside at 11:40 AM
Labels: child death, child murder, drugs/alcohol, murder, Pennsylvania
1 comments:

NYMOM said...
How is this different from the Casey Anthony case where she is facing the death penalty????
May 11, 2010 1:49 PM

Well another thank you to Dastardly Dads for this article highlighting a mother losing custody through a default ruling

2010-05-10T15:55:00.001-04:00

This is another example of a “spot-on” article from the blog Dastardly Dads and in spite of some unnamed divorce attorney’s claim that this sort of situation was “not common,” in fact, it happens all the time. Default custody rulings (without a mother being aware that an action has even been FILED) happen every day in courtrooms all across the US and obviously across the world.

Actually that’s how I got named custodial parent of my own infant over 25 years ago, (that shows how long this game has been going on). My now ex-husband (with no notification to me whatsoever) went down to the courthouse and filed for divorce. He also managed to get a temporary court order which named ME as temporary custodial parent of our baby.

I didn’t get so much as a phone call from the courts asking me what was going on.

The first I found out about it was when my husband turned up at my job to serve me the paperwork for the divorce and I noticed the form said “temporary custody of infant issue awarded to mother”…This, of course, was back in the days before high child support caused men to begin using all kinds of legal trickery to get custody of children away from their mothers.

So I and my baby got lucky.

Today I’m sure that default judgment would have stripped me of my baby (by naming my ex-husband as temporary custodial parent) and I would have had to scrap up a retainer and hire a lawyer to even get visitation. Who knows if and when I would have seen my child again? These default judgments are the equivalent of a judicially sanctioned kidnapping, as a mother has no recourse whatsoever to overturn it until the next scheduled court hearing. Which, by the way, can take weeks or months to arrange. Clearly once custody is ‘temporarily’ awarded it is now in the interest of everyone else involved (including your own attorney who gets paid by the hour) to delay a hearing on it indefinitely.

Now I don’t know the details of this particular case. Perhaps the custody decision made by the courts was the correct one, only the principals know for certain. But what I do know is that these default custody decisions (even temporary ones) should be made a violation of a mother and child’s human rights. As a child can be damaged psychologically (I won’t mention the emotional damage to a mother, as I know they don’t give a damn about those poor women) that can take place when men, trying to negotiate a better financial deal for themselves, are allowed to take our children hostage.

BTW, this can happen to single mothers as well, it’s not just married woman who can face this situation. You can have a recreational sperm donor, who has been out of your life for years, suddenly take it into his head that he wants ‘custody’ and he can get one of these default custody judgments as well. The first you hear of it can be when he shows up with the police to take your child or even has them removed from daycare or school without your knowledge.

Our own FBI statistics on abducted children show that men are more likely to abduct children BEFORE a custody order is established and that these abductions instigated by men end sooner then abductions by women (not that I recognize any law that makes it a crime for a mother to have her own children living with her without a court order. I consider these laws to be a violation of not just natural law, but a violation of the human rights of women and children as well). Anyway, I believe these abductions by men come to an end sooner because many of them result in default temporary custody orders (which usually morph into permanent custody orders at some point) and thus, the abduction is wiped from the official record.

This article is not about a fluke but highlights a steadily growing trend that mothers, especially of young children, need to be made aware of and protect themselves and their children against…Reading between the lines of the story: "Despite his lucrative business in the medical field, I did not want money other than help with our son's maintenance. All I wanted was my child and to close that chapter in my life," she says. I am guessing that it’s the common situation of disinterested father morphing into concerned father as soon as the possibility of a child support order rears its head. He appeared fine with their son living with his mother for years it sounds like (from the article) and then the possibility of ‘child maintenance’ suddenly changed his mind.

Typical.

Anyway, thanks to Dastardly Dads at http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/05/court-decision-turns-woman-into-gypsy.html for this story.

Court decision turns woman into 'gypsy', as abusive father takes custody of her son (Malta)

These days, stories like this are heard all over the world, as abusive fathers become increasingly adept at stripping protective mothers of their children. The corruption and secrecy accompanying the family court proceedings also goes hand in hand with all this. This story is from the little island nation of Malta.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100510/local/court-decision-turns-woman-into-gypsy

Monday, 10th May 2010

Court decision turns woman into 'gypsy'
Woman spends lonely Mother's Day
Claudia Calleja

Lara* could not spend Mother's Day with her son yesterday because the court granted her child's temporary care and custody to the father who had walked out of their lives some years ago.

"I feel as though the court stripped me of my motherhood by allowing my child to live with his father and his lover. A part of me also feels betrayed by my son for accepting to be with him after I did so much for the child, including living in a violent marriage for years to keep our family together," she says, battling to hold back tears.

Lara explains how, throughout their marriage, she filed several police reports after her husband beat her. Policemen often turned up at her door, following her desperate phone calls, but she never followed up the reports in court because she ended up forgiving him.

"I wanted to protect my young son and wanted our family together," she says. As the boy started growing up, Lara realized she could not take the abuse any longer and the road to separation began. The introduction of domestic violence legislation helped her pluck up the courage she needed to say "stop".

According to court documents, the Family Court heard how, some years ago, Lara's husband left the matrimonial house and showed little interest in their son. Eventually, after producing her police reports against her husband in court, she got a temporary court ruling giving her care and custody of her son and allowing her to stay in the matrimonial home.

As mediation proceedings dragged on for years, the couple moved to separation proceedings.

"Despite his lucrative business in the medical field, I did not want money other than help with our son's maintenance. All I wanted was my child and to close that chapter in my life," she says. All seemed to be going well until the father started showing interest in the child again and demanding to spend more time with him. The boy's attitude towards his mother started changing as he spent more time with his father.

Then, a few weeks ago, court officials knocked at Lara's door to inform her she would have to leave the matrimonial house following a temporary judgment handed down in the separation proceedings. Her husband had filed an application asking for the house and custody of their son. Both requests were temporarily granted.

Lara has now appealed the court decision and is protesting about the fact she was not informed about the father's application. She is claiming the court gave its ruling without listening to her after the application was filed.

A separation lawyer explained that it was not common for this to happen adding that one had to keep in mind that the court may have decided on previously submitted documents and evidence.

"Suddenly, I ended up without a roof over my head and my son was taken away... I can only see him for a few hours on the weekend... Right now I'm so hurt and traumatized by the court decision that I'm unable to see my son. I have no place where I can take him because I'm living like a gypsy... But I know how easily my husband can manipulate people, so am not surprised that he managed to also manipulate my own flesh and blood against me," she says.

*Names and personal details have been changed to protect identities.

Visitation of men more important then safety of children while in their care

2010-04-05T15:17:00.005-04:00

I came across this article while I was reading something else and thought I would post it on my blog since the comments were so interesting.

Now, I don’t generally post this sort of article on my blog since I understand that statistics show mothers abuse and/or neglect kids more then fathers. Although I do believe that this is because, until fairly recently, men ignored their children most of the time. However, now that high child support awards are being rigorously enforced and visitation can cut down on the amount of those awards, men have finally started paying attention again. Thus, mothers being over-represented in the abuse statistics will eventually be balanced out as more men get visitation (who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in these kids, many are just basically accidental and/or recreational sperm donors).

Anyway, overtime we will start seeing male abuse/neglect numbers increase as they start spending more unsupervised time around children.

But that’s another debate for another day.

The really interesting thing about the article was the recognition of the people commenting that, without a doubt, some judge would swiftly reinstate this father(s) visitation and put these children right back at risk again. Probably within 30 days or so someone commented.

AND this is all due to political correctness trying to enforce gender neutral norming, the jealousy of men and their continuing attempts to undermine the mother/child bond, and lastly, the growing strength of various mens/fathers rights advocates putting the interest of men ahead of the interest of all others…

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/23054396/detail.html?hpt=T2

Cops: Men Left Kids During 2-Day Binge

Kids Told Police They Were Hungry
POSTED: Monday, April 5, 2010

UPDATED: 1:50 pm EDT April 5,2010

JACKSON, Mich. -- Two Hillsdale County men who left two hungry children in a vehicle during a two-day drinking and partying binge face child abandonment charges, according to authorities.

Jackson County Sheriff's deputies arrested the children's 28-year-old father and 27-year-old uncle about 12:30 a.m. Sunday inside of a bowling alley in Summit Township. Deputies said the men were intoxicated when they were arrested.

Deputies were called to the Summit Lanes Bowling Alley to check on a report of abandoned children in a vehicle. When deputies arrived, they found the 4- and 6-year-old children were found locked inside a vehicle in the parking lot. The children told deputies they had not eaten in two days while their father and uncle drove around drinking and partying.

Police said the children were living in "unsanitary conditions" and that there were beer bottles inside of the vehicle.

Both men face child abandonment charges. They are expected to be arraigned Monday afternoon.

A Department of Human Services investigation is ongoing.

Jackson County Lt. Brad Piros said the children have been returned their mother.
"This was actually part of his visitation. He actually had the children for the weekend," said Piros.

Copyright 2010 by ClickOnDetroit.com.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Comments
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Guest 11 minutes ago
Where was the mother?

JoyceShane 14 minutes ago
Were was the mother?

katie2982 8 minutes ago
Father had visitation for the weekend- so the mother was not in contact with the children for that weekend. It clearly says so in the article.

pct84 16 minutes ago
He'll get his kids back in a month or so. He'll probably kill them while driving drunk and we'll all be saying, "Why did the judge give visitation back!". It's like a broken record in this coutry. What's easiest for the Judge is whats best for the kids.

soulardguys 16 minutes ago
Should have brought the baby sitter with them.

laurieda 33 minutes ago
This guy is the definiton of a LOSER DAD. Him and the Uncle should both have any visiting rights taken away for many years. At least until the kids are old enough to get the keys back and drive away and leave the 2 losers where they are partying.

laurieda 34 minutes ago
What a couple of animals these 2 guys are. The father should never get to see those kids again. I live in Canada and unfortunately here, the guy would probably have his kids back for weekends in about a month.

Shout-out to Dastardy Dads website for hitting the nail on the head with this post

2010-03-10T07:28:00.002-05:00

This is an interesting post from the "Dastardly Dads" website.

I agree 1000% with everything she saids. Many mothers lose custody of their children for being 'unstable'.

To be honest this is the biggest factor, I believe, in the growing number of mothers losing custody of their children. States save money by doing this as public benefits are based on the income of the recipient. No or low income and public benefits are at the maximum.

So there is a lot of incentive for states to support mothers who are 'unstable' lose custody of their children. Actually many mothers ONLY have custody by 'default' because no one with standing has challenged their custodial rights in court.

This case is a sad example of what mothers and children have to look forward to in the future...

FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2010
Homeless custodial dad retains custody (Orlando, Florida)
UPDATE: Note that this homeless dad has "sole custody." Why? You tell me.
http://www.wesh.com/news/22749296/detail.html

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. I DO NOT favor abducting children by force. It almost always leads to disaster, and seldom takes the best interest of the child into account.

But this is a very curious case. Despite all the confusing rhetoric to the contrary, this custodial UNNAMED DAD is HOMELESS. By any federal definition of the word. Drifting from "place to place" may not be living on the streets, but it is still homeless.

So how the heck did this father get custody to start with? Why are the Florida authorities letting him retain custody? They say the child has been "safely reunited" with Dad. Really? So he can continue drifting from one place to another? The child obviously has no room of his own. No place for friends to visit. No stability. Is this child even in school?

Interesting how low the bar is set for an apparently custodial dad in the State of Florida. If the child isn't (obviously) malnourished and is (apparently) is in "good spirits," then all is well.

Mom, who is out of state, figures that having two male friends of hers just "take the boy" apparently made more sense than trying to go to court in Florida. That's a very frightening idea, but based on what many, many Florida mothers tell me, this is the "new normal." As a protective mother, you will get little to no traction by going through the Florida court system.

And if mothers are really so"favored" by the courts, then why did this desperate mother resort to this sort of tactic? Maybe because it's becoming increasingly evident that the pendulum, in reality, has swung the other way. Note than Mom may be facing charges. Because she was upset that her 8-year-old son was living on the streets. This is what we have come to, folks.

http://wdbo.com/localnews/2010/03/police-mom-had-friends-take-bo.html

Police: Mom Had Friends Take Boy From Father
Posted: 7:43 am EST March 5,2010
Updated: 10:51 am EST March 5,2010

ORLANDO, Fla. -- An 8-year-old boy was safely reunited with his father Friday morning and two men are facing felony charges after, Orlando police said, they took the boy away from his father without permission.

Investigators said the child's mother, who lives in Seattle, Washington, heard that her son and estranged husband were living on the streets in poor conditions. They said that is when she called two friends who live in Orlando and convinced them to go get her son.

Police told Eyewitness News the father and his son were staying at a Motel 6 on International Drive in Orlando where the two men intimidated the father into turning over the boy.

Police arrested 21-year-old Christopher Stokes and 23-year-old Richard Douglas (read affidavits). Both were charged with the felony of interfering with child custody.

Eyewitness News asked a police spokesperson if the boy was being neglected or living on the street as the child's mother claimed.

"No, not at all," said Lt. Randy Groetch, Orlando Police Department. "They might not be living in their own home. From what I understand they were living with friends and relatives, maybe going from place to place. They always had a roof over their heads. The child seemed to be in somewhat good spirits for what actually happened and we don't see any physical malnutrition or anything. He seems to be fine."

Meanwhile, police continued to speak with the boy's mother in Seattle. They said it is likely she could also face charges in the case. Her name has not been released.
Posted by silverside at 8:22 AM
Labels: child abduction/kidnapping, child custody, custodial dad, custodial father, custody/visitation, Florida, Washington

1 comments:
NYMOM said...
One word: ridiculous...

A woman going from place to place would have lost her child in a heartbeat (even to grandparents) in many states...

Actually many non-custodial mothers that I know have lost custody for exactly that reason being deemed unstable because they had no place to live.

Actually this is the cause of many women being afraid to leave abusive relationships since if they try to leave they'll lose their children unless they already have a home and a job to support that home...
March 7, 2010 11:36 AM

New rules...

2010-02-14T13:17:00.002-05:00

I just wanted to let people know that I don't have the time I would like for this blog, so I will be erasing comments faster now. It's either that or I'll have to just shut comments down...

I'm not going to waste time arguing with people, as I did in the past.

So any disruptive comments just thrown out there to generate controversy, will be immediately erased.

Of course real questions and genuine discussion will still be welcome.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Women who wish to become mothers need to plan their lives/careers differently

2010-02-13T08:27:00.005-05:00

This article came to my attention and it's a good example of what I often talk about here: that women are different from men and that they need to plan their lives differently if they wish to become mothers. Since I believe most women do wish to become mothers, this article is relevant to most women no matter their profession...

Enjoy!!!

The Chronicle Review

February 7, 2010
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics

Jon Krause, for The Chronicle Review

By Susan D'Agostino

When I decided to become a mathematician, I assumed that my greatest challenge would be intellectual. That was before the Christmas Eve my father made shrimp scampi in a Pyrex dish under the broiler. When he opened the oven and added cold lemon juice to the sizzling prawns, shards of glass flew 15 feet in every direction. Normally a fastidious cook, he had been distracted by my mother, who, at that moment, was telling my very young children—because none of the adults would listen—what she wanted for Christmas: for the family to acknowledge that it was time for her to die.

Nothing in my graduate program had trained me for this. I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Not that being an oncologist would have helped at that point. With Stage 4 kidney cancer, my mother had no more than months to live. I was not at all surprised when my father picked up the shrimp and ate it; it was an earnest, if dangerous, attempt to show the power of mind over matter.

The message was that none of this was happening: The shrimp was not infused with glass, and my mother was not dying. At the time, I might have added that, in spite of my decision to take time away from formal employment to care for my babies and mother, my intelligence and training still had currency in the world of academe.

The day of the exploding shrimp seems like ages ago. My children are now in grade school, my mother has passed away, and I am an assistant math professor at an institution that makes me extremely happy. Still, I can remember the confusion that resulted from following my heart rather than toeing the feminist line.

Discussing this topic does not come easy. Having earned my doctorate right on schedule—with a baby on my hip, no less—and landing an assistant professorship in the geographic region of my choice, I could easily portray myself as some sort of mathematical, feminist superhero. In particular, I could gloss over the fact that there was a period in which I took time away from academe to change a lot of diapers and serve as a nurse to my terminally ill mother.

But just as I tell my daughter that she has more options than "witch" or "princess" for Halloween, I want to exist somewhere between "nun for science" and "stay-at-home mom." I have tremendous gratitude for the feminists who blazed the path before me. However, I respectfully reject the notion that my desire to engage in these so-called female activities is a 1950s-era can of worms that is better left unopened.

I am compelled to write because when I was thinking about family planning and end-of-life issues, it was the rare woman in math who revealed any ambivalence about how personal choices affected her professional life. Were there women who, in the absence of maternity leave or affordable child care, dropped out of their math graduate programs upon the births of their children? Or women who delayed childbearing only to struggle later with age-related infertility? Or women who were racked with guilt when a parent died alone in a hospital bed because they could not afford the time away from research?

As a math graduate student, I attended many women-in-math conferences, but those were not the stories I heard. There was casual mention of finding a "work-life balance," but most of the discussion concerned achieving equity. And when it came to equity, the messages converged around a central theme: "Work more," "Hire a nanny," or, my favorite, "That's what hospice volunteers are for."

Something changed for me during my hiatus from academe. No, I did not, as some had either feared or predicted, lose my ambition. Yet I am no longer the woman who, as a graduate student, took pride in the fact that I returned to work just days after having given birth. Of course, with no formal maternity leave, I felt that I had little choice. Still, my former self happily spun my postpartum math research as proof that I was making it in the old boys' network. My present self, on the other hand, is no longer concerned with the old boys' network. Rather, my present self strives to live the life that I want, which includes both family and work.

During my time away from academe, I realized that the world is much bigger than those in academe would lead you to believe. I came to realize that if academe did not see my merits, then I could still find work that was both stimulating and satisfying outside of it. As my mother's early death poignantly illustrates, life is fleeting. Too fleeting, in fact, to have only one definition of success.

This change of heart has made all of the difference in my life. Like businesswomen who ultimately rejected oversized shoulder pads as a superficial, not to mention odd, attempt to mimic their male counterparts, I am no longer trying to be the archetypal male mathematician who has a wife to birth his babies and a sister to care for his dying mother.

Today I am a mathematician who willingly participates in the nurturing surrounding birth and death. The fact that I can state that proudly is not just good for me but is also good for math. Just as biodiversity is vital to an ecosystem, diversity of experience and perspective is crucial in academic research. Research involves asking questions, and the kinds of questions an individual is predisposed to ask are constrained by his or her gender, language, and cultural background.

The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock described the uniquely feminine and, at the time, revolutionary approach that motivated her research in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of her, A Feeling for the Organism. McClintock treated individual corn plants as if they were distinct children she had reared from birth. She used words like "patience" and "listening" as she gained an "intimate" knowledge of what distinguished one corn plant from another. In doing so, she cultivated what she referred to as a "feeling for the organism" that most people develop only with humans or pets.

And Dian Fossey's groundbreaking research methods were decidedly feminine, writes Sy Montgomery in Walking With the Great Apes, because of her intense focus on nurturing relationships with individual gorillas. Fossey broke the previously undisputed rule of maintaining a distance from her subjects, much to the benefit of science.

Who is to say that any marginalization I experienced as a woman or mother in math did not influence my decision to study nonlinear codes as opposed to the more mainstream linear codes? Only later did I learn of a connection between nonlinear codes and the hot topic of quantum error-correcting codes.

When the math community recognizes that some women not only pace their careers differently from the archetypal man but may want to allow room for some (dare I say it?) stereotypically female endeavors, the groundwork will be laid for equity. In the meantime, if you are a young woman establishing yourself as a mathematician while at the same time contemplating family planning or elder care, take heart. Being a woman attempting to combine birth, death, and mathematics is a great challenge—greater, I think, than doing math in a vacuum. However, there is nothing I would change about the path I have followed. And if I ever run into you at a conference, I will very likely tell you as much.

Susan D'Agostino is an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University

Another little warning for mothers of young children

2010-02-05T09:15:00.002-05:00

NYMOM, here's a kidnapping that happened during the Savoie kidnapping, but it was pretty much ignored. Here Jean Paul Lacombe is kidnapped by his dad for THE SECOND TIME:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDIxjHg65a4&feature=related

I just thought this comment was important enough to make a whole separate post out of it.

Women do not realize that many of these situations where a custody dispute leads to calling the police end in exactly this fashion. It all depends upon the response of the police officer in the field and/or the policy of the county you live in and/or if the officer on the scene knows it and/or wishes to enforce it...

I have had women tell me they lost their children through exactly the above situation. Infants especially are vulnerable to abduction in this scenario. AND since possession is often nine tenths of the law, it's nothing for an abducted infant's father to turn up in court the next day filing a petition for temporary custody. Which, as I said many times before, usually leads to permanent custody unless the father is an ax murderer or something.

Actually I had a woman, who I met on a blog, contact me at work one night (just before 5:00) telling me her ex just pulled a similar stunt on their four year old taking her from school and just bringing her to his house. He was refusing to pick up the telephone as well. She asked me if she should to the police that night or to court the next morning. I asked her if she had paperwork documenting her as the custodial parent, she said no. So I told her to go to family court on Monday, (that's how tricky this guy was he showed up at the school on a Friday, so she had to spend an entire weekend w/o even being able to talk to her child).

Anyway, she did go to the police that night and just as I had warned her they did nothing but sent her home. They did a safe-child checkup themselves later that night and called her and told her the child was fine at least. So she spent the whole weekend looking at this project for Halloween she had setup on her coffee table to do with her child that weekend...

Can you imagine.

This woman was a corporate lawyer herself by the way...and didn't know these things could happen.

Long story shorter she ran into her ex on the courthouse steps Monday morning with her daughter in his possession.

HE WAS FILING FOR TEMPORARY CUSTODY FOR HIMSELF...

So mothers, particularly of very young children, have to be aware of this possibility. If they have not filed their paperwork to name themselves as custodial or at least joint custodial clearly outlining the visitation (so you can show a police officer that the other party is in violation, if he hasn't returned the child by such and such a time according to the court papers) there is NOTHING to stop the other party from going down to court and getting themselves temporary custody...

I don't care how long that child has lived with you or how much your ex might have ignored the child previously. Without that legal document stating you are custodial parent, the past means nothing. The police officer won't even listen to you.

I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of this...

Okay.

Doing Good Versus Looking Good (Another oldie but goodie)

2010-01-30T19:03:00.006-05:00

I found this in my archives Richard and it's a good example of what I was talking about in our previous discussion.

Also it surprised me how many other issues I had forgotten about that are touched upon in my remarks...it should lead to many interesting comments...

Doing Good Versus Looking Good

This was an interesting article about the genesis of young girls acting out like brain dead, boy-crazy idiots from about the age of 10 or so (and continuing right through well into their adult years as evidenced by Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson, ALL of the women on Sex in the City and many others whose names escape me right now).

On how most of the media (as well as many of the adults these young girls come in contact with) instill the insidious idea that the ONLY time girls are doing anything worthwhile is when they are either chasing after a boy or having a boy chase after them.

This starts early as the article notes and has the effect of young girls wasting ALL of the time they should be putting into their education and future career for instance; instead focusing on what they should wear that can attract some boy’s attention to them, how they should ‘play dumb’ as that works to attract boys, when is the right time to lose your virginity and even pitching the outmoded idea that every boy who wants to have sex with a girl is in love with her.

How can you say, “leading to a lot of early sex, disappointment and low self-esteem” in their young lives.

The author was located in Australia but this could be found throughout the western world. Even Disney, which is supposed to be a family entertainment channel has many childrens’ series where the ONLY apparent thing girls focus on in school or home is boys.

How to meet one they like (usually the captain of some sports team), how to dress to be in the right crowd of girls (again, the entire goal being to meet boys). How to get that after school job: again, the central goal usually to raise money for more shopping, of course, the reoccurring theme to get the attention of a boy.

Many of the main story lines focus on parties, who gets invited versus who doesn’t.

Again the whole reason for the party is ALWAYS to meet boys. The most significant thing that ever appears to happen to the girls is not whether or not they get into the school of their choice to get a science scholarship or something that mundane, but who tried out for the cheerleaders squad and either made it or didn’t. But never any discussion about any educational goals or focus on ANYTHING other then how to meet boys.

Well is it any wonder that girls grow up with the idea that the ONLY thing of substance they will EVER accomplish will be meeting Mr. Right with everything else being secondary until Mr. Right comes along. Well, Shades of Sex in the City where even the most professionally successful women is doing nothing (at least in that series) but marking time until they meet the man of their dreams.

Well you want to know where that attitude starts, read below.

Frankly I even find that attitude throughout the blogosphere.

Where most of the womens' blogs (even the supposedly more serious ones) function as little more then places for women to post snarky remarks, along with their picture, the main function obviously being to attract the attention and approval of men.

Meanwhile the mens' site are taking care of serious business.

Someone posted a survey a while back that stated MOST bloggers were blogging in order to meet someone. Or as they delicately put it to get laid.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think a male blogger or commenter on one of the mens' sites would turn down a decent opportunity to get laid if it was presented by a young woman, but yet I don't see their sites as allowing any untoward focus on women to distract them from their stated mission.

That's why personally I'm in favor of the two-lane highway concept that Congress has been debating for the internet.

This way people who have serious blogs can pay the extra fees and get the public access; while the ones who are using the free blog service as an enhanced dating mechanism can instead join one of those internet dating services.

AND we won't be bogged down with hundreds of women cluttering up the blogosphere when their main purpose is just to meet a guy.

Sorry there are better and more efficient ways to do that.

Why should serious women bloggers lose what is a newly forming and potentially wide reaching forum for us to get our ideas out to the public, so that some of you can keep your dance card filled.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/09/1092022399315.html?oneclick=true

The Age

What is your daughter reading?August 10, 2004

The emphasis in Australian magazines aimed at teenage girls is on sex, writes Christopher Bantick.

For many parents, seeing their daughter curled up with Dolly or some other teenage magazine seems innocent enough. But perhaps parents should take a look inside these glossies to see what is on offer.

The emphasis in most magazines directed at teenage girls is on sex. Articles in the August editions of the four market leaders - Cosmopolitan, Girlfriend, Dolly and Cleo - advise how to do it, get it and have more of it.

Magazines for girls are aimed at the 12 to 18-year-olds. But the readership is often far younger. Children on the cusp of adolescence regularly read up, not down. Parenting expert Michael Grose has described this shrinking childhood as "adolescent creep".

Dolly declares that its core readership is 16-year-olds; Girlfriend's is 13 to 14-year-olds. Cleo and Cosmopolitan aim for the 16 to 20-year-olds. But the readership of such magazines by those between 10 and 14-years-old is growing - something that the American Psychological Association has warned is dangerous.

In February, the APA attacked American advertisers for pitching to and exploiting the under-14 market, saying these readers "inherently lack the cognitive capability to effectively recognise and defend against commercial persuasion".

A casual thumb through the August editions of Australia's top four girl glossies is revealing.

Girlfriend advises in a response to a correspondent who is asking about a boyfriend insistent on having sex: "I am sure he really does care for you. It's pity you don't believe him coz maybe he really does love you. Negotiating sex is so much easier with your clothes on."

A casual thumb through the August editions of Australia's top four girl glossies is revealing.

Dolly, in a lead story titled "Losing Your Virginity" offers 11 helpful ideas based on real-life accounts. These range from "It's Totally Nerve-Racking" to "It's Messy" and "You Might Bleed".

Both Cleo and Cosmopolitan are in an altogether different league. Both have sealed sections. Cleo this month teases: "Bizarro sex habits that will freak you out"; Cosmo, not to be outdone, offers: "Cosmo's Sex-Fantasy Decoder", where girls can explore their fantasies of being a "Sex Slave" or perhaps a "Naughty Nymph-O".

But besides the heavy emphasis on sex - and problematic sex at that - teenage girls' magazines capitalise on adolescent insecurity. Cosmo offers, "Your Erotic Thoughts Explained" and tips on "Surviving a Sex Drought". Dolly examines, "Bad Boys: Good Fun or Heartbreak?" Girlfriend asks, "Do You Really Want a Boyfriend?" Meanwhile Cleo explores "Ex Sex. Would you? Should you? Will it work?"

Still, as much as girl teenage magazines might be questioned in their emphasis on sex, they may still fulfil a need. In so far as sex education is taught at school, research has shown that this largely fails.

Teenage girl magazines are seen by their market as sources to trust. This is worrying. The information can lead girls to doubt themselves if they are not sexual beings at a young age.

A British study published last month found that teenage girls benefit from being taught about sex and contraception by their peers. The source of the information is largely through magazines. Thirty-five per cent of girls taught by their peers are less likely to have sex before 16, compared with 41 per cent if taught by their teachers.

Another British study, by the girl teenage magazine Sugar and published last month, found that 78 per cent of the 500 13 to 18-year-olds surveyed said that sex tutoring from teen magazines offered "information they were unable to get at school".

Apart from the heavy stress on sex in teenage girl magazines, there is also an unwavering reinforcement that self-esteem and identity is inexorably linked to having a boyfriend.

This dependence on male attitudes to women should be strongly challenged by magazine editors. But instead, they are complicit in presenting girls as dependent on boys for approval and success.

Cleo covergirl Jessica Simpson declares: "I've played dumb all my life. Guys love it." Cosmopolitan, in a section called "Man Manual", tells "What Guys Want in a Girlfriend". What they want includes: "Fill his car with petrol", "Be ready when he rings the bell" and, at the video store, "suggest you rent Bad Boys II instead of Chicago".

The problem with teenage girl magazines is that they give highly suspect information, they create misconceptions about sexuality, they reinforce stereotypes about male and female behavour and they show craven irresponsibility in their disregard for the emotional maturity of their readers.

Do you know what your daughters are reading?

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne writer.

posted by NYMOM | Saturday, June 17, 2006
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Interesting Follow-up to Marriage Statistics Post - Again the comments are more interesting then the actual post

2009-12-29T09:08:00.003-05:00

In response to Polish Knight's comment about St. Valentine I have re-published the following post. St. Valentine was from what was called the Eastern empire (Constantinople). He lived in a period long after what we know of as Rome had already collapsed (about 300 or so years later). Yet, even in ancient Rome soldiers, on active duty, were not permitted to marry BUT after serving were expected to do so. That's probably why one of the punishments Augustus Caesar proposed was that former soldiers would be sent to the far provinces in Germany to serve if they refused marriage.

Additionally, I also wanted to head off the usual 'marriage strike' posts which I predict someone will begin shortly.

I have said this many times but it bears repeating: there is no marriage strike being organized by men, as men have never wanted to marry in any time, in any place. Thus men not wishing to marry is historically very normal behavior for them. Rather it is women whose behavior is changing if the marriage rates are actually falling in our society.

As hard as it is for men to believe, women are actually the ones making these changes if we are to believe this statistic.

*************************************************************************************

There has been certain accusations bandied about lately concerning exactly who and what is responsible for the demise of marriage. We have heard blame being affixed to Marxists, feminists, Marxist-feminist, single mothers, mothers, alimony, paternity fraud, welfare, Maggie Gallagher and numerous other culprits all attempting to fix the finger of blame on some persons, other then the ones actually responsible.

This is an important point, as many would like to blame single mothers, in particular, as another excuse to continue their campaign against mothers and their children.

Thus, let us rewind the videotape and view the historic evidence BEFORE we continue.

News Release. Date 58 BC

Information courtesy of: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/suet-augustus-rolfe.html

For those who don’t know this is 58 years before the birth of Christ.

Repeat 58 years BEFORE the birth of Christ.

He [Augustus Caesar] revised existing laws and enacted some new ones, for example, on extravagance, on adultery and chastity, on bribery, and on the encouragement of marriage among the various classes of citizens. Having made somewhat more stringent changes in the last of these than in the others, he was unable to carry it out because of an open revolt against its provisions, (Translation: Men were in open revolt attempting to have Emperor repeal the new laws which were passed to force them to begat their children within lawful marriages. Previously men spent all their time on slave girls begetting illegitimate children, which, of course, said children promptly became a burden on Rome. This was 58 years before Christ was born.) until he had abolished or mitigated a part of the penalties, besides increasing the rewards and allowing a three years' exemption from the obligation to marry after the death of a husband or wife. When the knights even then persistently called for its repeal at a public show, (Translation: Men started a riot actually in an attempt to force Augustus to repeal the taxes, fines and other threats he used against them to force them into procreating within lawful marriages) he sent for the children of Germanicus and exhibited them, some in his own lap and some in their father's, intimating by his gestures and expression that they should not refuse to follow that young man's example. (Translation: Augustus attempted to use Roman war hero and his children to encourage other young men to enter into lawful marriages and begat children within them; as opposed to their practice of having children all over the place and dumping them off on the Roman state to care for. We have no evidence that it worked.) And on finding that the spirit of the law was being evaded by betrothal with immature girls and by frequent changes of wives, he shortened the duration of betrothals and set a limit on divorce. (Translation: Men began doing everything possible to subvert the intent of the law, thus Augustus finally had to set even stricter limits on their behavior in his continuing attempts to force them into building their families within lawful marriages. Again we have no evidence that it worked)

Fast Forward to today: February 12, 2005

2063 years LATER…

We now see that ONE MAN has finally appeared who claims to be able to decisively fix the blame for the ongoing “Marriage Strike” that men have been on for the last 2063 years.

It’s Maggie Gallagher’s fault.

See below for details.

Maggie Gallagher is in hot water over her $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services, money received while her editorials were singing the praises of the Bush Administration’s marriage initiative. Sounding slightly clueless, Gallagher explained, “Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it? I don’t know. You tell me.”

But Gallagher’s problems go beyond this ethical faux pas. While I support traditional marriage, there’s a fundamental problem with Maggie Gallagher’s approach.

Here’s Maggie’s rendition of “How Do I Love Thee?”: “Let me count the ways. I love thee while scrubbing your dishes and washing your floors… and while you claim your freedom, your leisure, your paycheck, and my paycheck as your own.”

Do I detect something other than dewy-eyed glances in that Valentine’s Day rant?

Gallagher has now toned down her rhetoric, but her fundamental worldview remains the same: Blame the man first -- and let the woman off easy.

There is no more important challenge in modern America than the strengthening of marriage, and I wish Mrs. Gallagher’s group well. But as long as their concerns are ignored and belittled, Gallagher’s approach is bound to further alienate the millions of disaffected men who feel they have no other choice than to remain on a Marriage Strike.

Information Courtesy of: http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/excerpts from article: Misandrist Marriage Movement, Author C. Roberts.

I hate to tell you this, but MEN are the ones responsible for the current plight western society finds itself in. Men, nobody else. Women have always wanted to be married, they still do. Actually getting pregnant out of wedlock has been the traditional negotiating tool that many women used in the past to force men into marriage.

Of course that is a useless tool now because never-married men (or recreational sperm donors which would be a more apt description of them) are now given, in practically every western country, the exact same rights to children as married men, whether or not they get married.

So what’s the incentive for marriage then?

Thus MEN in western society got exactly what they have always wanted, 2063 years after the fact, but then tell me, what else is new?

SCOTLAND will become the first part of the UK to allow men to marry their mothers-in-law, the Scottish Executive announced yesterday.

The amendment was included in the Executive’s Family Law Bill which will reduce the time needed to conclude a divorce, give unmarried fathers new rights over their children and give unmarried couples some of the same rights as married couples.

Other major changes will enshrine legal parental rights for unmarried fathers and introduce safeguards for cohabiting couples.

Also, the number of children born to unmarried couples is on course to overtake the number of children born to married parents in about three years.

Mr. Henry stressed: "Reform of family law to safeguard cohabiting couples is not intended to devalue the importance of marriage. But the changing shape of society is a reality and unfortunately relationships break down.

"Family law must be updated to ensure that it reflects the needs of all our people."

The legislation, which could be in force within a year if passed by the Scottish Parliament, aimed to improve the "safety net" of family law, he said.

And he added: "We believe these are sensitive safeguards to prevent children being used as pawns when family relationships break down."

Some of the Executive’s plans - like the formal change to divorce law - need legislation in the form of the Family Law Bill, but other proposals - like the preparation of a draft charter for grandparents to have a more formal role in bringing up children - do not. These will be introduced alongside the bill which is expected to pass through parliament by the end of the year.

Alan Finlayson, a former children’s reporter and sheriff, will draw up a "parenting agreement for Scotland" to help estranged couples resolve issues such as contact arrangements.

The Executive’s proposals received a mixed response from opposition politicians.

Kenny MacAskill, for the SNP, welcomed the bill. "Scottish society has changed and evolved and Scots law must reflect that. Parental rights for fathers need to be addressed, as does the role of grandparents," he said.

Information Courtesy of: http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/excerpts from article: Marriage to In-Laws Will no Longer be Outlawed, Author H. MacDonell.

Although championed as safeguarding cohabiting couples, in fact, this law gives more rights to irresponsible men and their enablers, paternal grandparents. It gives no rights to women that they don’t already have and, in fact, will take away rights from women in their role as mothers, since it will ensure that a man who invests NOTHING, absolutely nothing, in bringing a child into the world (unless he feels like it, as there is no law requiring him to do ANYTHING until after the birth of the child) will now be designated as a father with the exact same rights to custody as the child’s mother.

So this is a threat to mothers, NOT a safeguard for mothers, but an attack on them just as it has turned out to be in every other country where these sorts of laws have been passed. It has lead to child abductions by men, even of infants, in attempts to get custody, many to avoid child support and in the U.S. 30% of the pool of custodial fathers is composed of these recreational sperm donors, so it is no small threat either.

This half-a@@ed father can now, 1 second after the birth of said child, roll out of bed, throw on his pants and show up at hospital door with ALL the rights of a married father. All of them, no difference even though he has not done a single thing to get that child to that point leaving that burden to mother, her family and friends or everyone else in society. They are even talking about extending the maternity leave of women to include men, which will now mean that every time a woman has a baby, there will be a fight over who gets to use the leave to stay home and recover from the whole pregnancy and child-birth ordeal, while also bonding with your baby.

AND guess who will be winning that fight…

Men have been trying to wiggle out of marriage since marriage was first invented. Our records only go back as far as Rome to demonstrate this but if we had better records from older civilizations, I’m sure we would see the same thing. Giving men incentive to NOT marry such as allowing them the same legal rights to children as married men undercuts women and society in our attempts to get them to marry.

If society doesn’t feel up to forcing these irresponsible male chowder heads to be good citizens, fine, but that’s no excuse to keep putting the rights of mothers and children in second place to appease these irresponsible men as they continue their 2063 year Marriage Strike.

Thus I have to say: Scotland just say no.

13 Comments:
Pseudo-Adrienne said...
Women have always wanted to be married, they still do.Not me. But yeah, a very significant portion of women still want to marry. Then again, why bother with the selection of guys that a lot women have?

The "marriage strike" declaration made by the MRAs is beyond stupid, because *they* act like *they* just recently invented such a thing.

And as someone who took two years of Latin and has a "fetish" for Greco-Roman History, yes, I know all about how Roman men turned six shades of pissed off when Augustus passed all of his "morality laws", especially in regards to fidelity. Men have historically avoided marriage (even though most men could get away with infidelity), so this "marriage strike" is nothing new.

So the MRAs need to get over themselves and STOP acting like they invented the "marriage strike".

And that's why MRAs should praise feminists because feminism eliminated the "societal requirement" to get married among both sexes, thus helped anti-marriage men even more. Feminism practically gave anti-marriage men a candy store. And do they thank feminism for that?...NO!...whatever.

Once again the MRAs owe another one of the fundamentals of their "sacraments" to feminism. What a bunch of infants. But a lot of those "sacraments" that men have cherished, have been around even long before Augustus.

And as for Augustus; nothing screams moral values like burying your daughter alive for breaking her chastity vows as a Vestal Virgin. What a tight-a$$
10:47 PM
NYMOM said...
"Women have always wanted to be married, they still do. Not me. But yeah, a very significant portion of women still want to marry."

Exactly...We have to accept that MOST women DO wish to be married.

"And that's why MRAs should praise feminists because feminism eliminated the "societal requirement" to get married among both sexes, thus helped anti-marriage men even more. Feminism practically gave anti-marriage men a candy store. And do they thank feminism for that?...NO!...whatever.

Exactly...Men all wanted to be like Hugh Hefner or those crazy Roman Knights, no responsibility, sex on demand with whatever willing women was available...and NOW they got it and they're STILL b*tching...

They keep acting like feminism killed marriage...no MEN killed marriage, feminism just helped women survive the transition period between depending upon marriage for their way of life and having to depend upon ourselves...

I mean I know most women STILL want to be married, but in the same token, we can NOW live successfully alone...that's probably what they're really mad at feminist for because so many women just up and went and made lives for themselves ANYWAY...since one of the things the article points out about Scotland (which is probably true in all western societies today but at a differing pace for all of them) is that at the rate single mothers are having children they will overtake married couples having children in about 3 years...

That's WHY they are changing the law in Scotland, I think, to allow never-marrried men MORE rights. Not because they are concerned about the children or the rights of cohabitating "couples" as they claim, but because they saw the writing on the wall for men...and they were rapidly heading into becoming a non-entity in Scottish society, at the rate they were going...like they are becoming in every western society if they don't change their ways...

I mean my feeling is that Scotland should have changed the law to make it clear to men that they obtain legal rights to children within a lawful marriage if they wished to protect male involvement with children... which is what many women want anyway...a legal marriage; not some jerkoff who does nothing to show commitment, good will, interest, or anything now, having the same rights as a child's mother under this new law...

Plus married men got shafted AGAIN with this change of law...I mean why the heck should men, who many don't want to be married ANYWAY, turn around and marry, IF never-married fathers can get the exact same legal rights as a married father FOR DOING NOTHIING...

I mean changing the law to give MEN more rights for LESS effort is certainly not going to do women and children any good...the only people that law helps is MEN...and enabler paternal grandparents...

It helps another generation of male chowder heads get the idea in their heads again that they can STILL have it all for little or no effort. AGAIN...

So this continued encouragement of men to NEVER grow up, to either be hanging out in the pub, the sports bar, the corner or yes, even in internet chat groups proclaiming their rights are being violated will continue...and get worse...at least in Scotland.
4:20 AM
Anonymous said...
"...I mean why the heck should men, who many don't want to be married ANYWAY, turn around and marry, IF never-married fathers can get the exact same legal rights as a married father FOR DOING NOTHIING..."

But NYMOM, for men who actually WANT to have children and parent them, there is still a great deal of incentive to marry. The visitation/child support/court wrangling rigamarole is hardly an attractive alternative. I don't know of anyone who would actually prefer to do it this way, assuming they want kids in the first place. I remember an unmarried friend of mine who found himself in an unexpected pregnancy situation once. Another lawyer friend of his, upon hearing the news, asked him: "Any chance that you can work it out with her? Believe me, it would be a lot cheaper and a lot less trouble to just marry her." And I think he was right.

But anyway, I think restoring the special legal status and protections of marriage (including those with regard to children) might indeed do more to revitalize marriage in the long run than any programs the government can come up with today, and help to ensure that every child is a wanted child. However, it would be an extremely hard sell to the voters, considering that in the short-term it would affect fully one-third of children being born and almost totally excuse their fathers from responsibility for them.
12:39 PM
Anonymous said...
Sorry, I tend to post in a hurry and continually forget to sign my name.

Anne
2:36 PM
Pseudo-Adrienne said...
But NYMOM, for men who actually WANT to have children and parent them, there is still a great deal of incentive to marryAnd what if the people don't even like each other? What if it was a one-night-stand or an on-again-off-again relationship that had more to do with sex, than any kind of emotional bonds, least of all "love"?

I've noticed that in a lot of these pregnancy situations outside of wedlock, the man and the woman were barely even together as a "couple", and the pairing had more to do about sex, then "love", or emotional bonds.

In many cases, these people are horrible for each other. The only thing that keeps them together is the sex. And if it is just about sex and the people don't even like each other why should they marry, and bring the children into what could be a chaotic, negative, and very dysfunctional environment?

There's nothing wrong with visitation because at least the two people don't have to be around each other all the time or even more than once a week. But a full blown marriage with people who probably only knew each other for three months, not really "into each other emotionally" (certainly not in love or even an official couple), and were really "friends with benefits"(in another words f**k-buddies)? And the guy is really only marrying to avoid child support, and really, didn't even want the kids to begin with?!

(Of course, women should know better than to hop into bed with moronic guys they've known for only a few minutes, days, or even weeks, and women should always use condoms with these guys, because who knows where these guys have been.)

I seriously doubt those people could successfully feign loving and respecting each other in front of the children.

Marriage, in all of its sappy, lovey-dovey image, should be about a mutual emotional, domestic, sexual committment (and of course "love") between two people. Not a selfish attempt by some guy to avoid child support payments, to pitifully make up for the fact that he can't put on a damn condom, and sticks it wherever.

And what if the guy has other children by other women?
3:59 PM
Anonymous said...
I understand what you're saying, Psuedo-Adrienne, but I was speaking generally--I wasn't really talking about cases where babies are already in the works. It seemed to me that what NYMOM was getting at was that current laws giving unmarried dads rights are going to lead men to decide to forgo marriage altogether, figuring that they can still be dads without it, and I was just pointing out that men who really WANT to be responsible parents don't tend to see it that way--they don't want the split family scenario or a visitation schedule or anything like that because even under the best of circumstances it's a pain in the a@@. What they want is to live with their children and parent them along with a loving and supportive partner. And that's exactly why I support restoring parental rights to the context of marriage and fully protecting them within that context. That way it is clear where everyone stands. A single man who wants children would know from the outset that he will have to choose a partner and assume all the responsibilities of marriage and make a home for those children, and a single woman who wants children will know from the outset whether she will be parenting with the help of a partner or going it alone, and weigh her options accordingly. I think it's been a great mistake to take long-established laws that were originally meant to govern and protect the family and bend them to accommodate people who have not created a family and do not intend to do so.

Anne
4:40 PM
NYMOM said...
"However, it would be an extremely hard sell to the voters, considering that in the short-term it would affect fully one-third of children being born and almost totally excuse their fathers from responsibility for them."

No because men if they wished to be involved with their children as you keep claiming they do, then they'll do the right thing and get married.

For those who don't, their involvement is NOT worth the judicial and law enforcement costs, not to mention the societal chaos created by trying to force them into a role they don't want. I mean we have practically created a form of 'bastardized' marriage for these men with women don't like and children they never wanted...and it's not good for women or children to do this...

I see it as an educational campaign to enlighten voters who care, mostly women probably, because much of what is going on is hidden from view by media outlets and people like you who keep painting fathers involvement as a positive good, when it's fact this is frequently not the case...
12:08 AM
NYMOM said...
"I've noticed that in a lot of these pregnancy situations outside of wedlock, the man and the woman were barely even together as a "couple", and the pairing had more to do about sex, then "love", or emotional bonds."

Exactly...so why would we think that these two people are going to be able to get along well enough to be able to raise a child together for 18+ years. We've almost created a sort of bastardized form of marriage for them and it's been a recipe for disaster, mostly for women and children...

"In many cases, these people are horrible for each other. The only thing that keeps them together is the sex. And if it is just about sex and the people don't even like each other why should they marry, and bring the children into what could be a chaotic, negative, and very dysfunctional environment?"

Exactly...but when you look at the average parenting plan put out there in many states now, you are going to be spending as much time interacting with that guy as IF YOU WERE MARRIED w/o any of the support systems to give you any control of the situation like having a good relationship with your in-laws (you don't have any) or being able to rely upon the police in your community to enforce your custodial status if a problem should arise (mothers can NOT automatically assume that they can count on that anymore, it's on a case-by-case or county-by-county basis)...

Plus you cannot not just automatically decide to leave the state to go to law school or for another job, that's out. You have to negotiate over which school district, doctor, church, daycare, et al your child will attend. If your child can spend Christmas with you (do you know how many women I know who haven't spent a Christmas with their own kids in YEARS)...

So basically you're making my case for me...you're right people this casually connected can NOT be forced into an 18-21 year commitment, they just can't...

"There's nothing wrong with visitation because at least the two people don't have to be around each other all the time or even more than once a week."

You are right there is nothing wrong with visitation AND if that is ALL that was involved I would never mind it...

I wouldn't have this blog today actually, I wouldn't have bothered...as who goes on a 'mission' over just visitation. I'd just be relaxing watching tv and happy that I raised my children well and can now just sit back contentedly and plan for my own retirement, but guess what, it's NOT just about a once a week visit...

It is about giving another person who did NOTHING to bring forth this child, NOTHING, the EXACT SAME LEGAL RIGHTS AS A MOTHER TO HER CHILD...and by doing this allowing that other person to use that legal status as a 'club' issued by the state to hold over every women's head who decides to have a child...

It has the potential to roll back every one of the rights you and most other women today take for granted, every single one...IF we allow it to continue...

That's what it's about.

It's not JUST visiting...it's much bigger then that...and as much as you've read on this blog, you should know that already...

All these posts I'm putting up here are news stories, I don't just make them up...about court rulings or public policies against women making it MORE likely that MORE mothers will lose their children, abductions where children are taken on a visit and never returned, about murders of children involved in these custody to evade child support schemes and even about the propaganda being used to make women THINK it's all just about men wanting to be good fathers and help us raise our children...

Visitation, actually, is the least of what I talk about here, the least...
12:52 AM
NYMOM said...
I'm actually a little miffed at the governor in my state Governor Pataki for recently talking about a proposal to forgive the child support debt of men who marry the mothers of their children...

I have no problem with a father and mother chosing on their own to marry but we shouldn't be rewarding a choice that appears to be more geared to making money off the backs of children then with a sincere committment to them...

This is a dangerous and short-sighted proposal that is probably the flip side of giving never-married fathers legal rights and almost JUST AS BAD...We should never make children "worth money" to people, never and Pataki knows this as our state does NOT even allow you to buy more then $5,000 in life insurance for children after a few well-publicized murders of children for life insurance proceeds...

This has the potential to make 'children' worth a heck of a lot more then $5,000...

Frankly children being worth money was the 'root cause' of the horrible Jerica Rhodes situation, as well as thousands of others that we don't even know about yet, where fathers took custody to avoid paying child support...

The profit in 'children' MUST be removed...
11:02 PM
Anonymous said...
"...and people like you who keep painting fathers involvement as a positive good, when it's fact this is frequently not the case..."

Hmmm...now where did I "paint" unwed fathers' involvement as a positive good? While it certainly CAN be, it's true that it's frequently not and I think it would be a greater good for children in the long run to restore the special status of marriage. That is what all of my comments in defense of fathers have been about--married fathers. Their rights and responsibilities, which they signed on for, must be scrupulously protected.

I'm sorry if your father was a disappointment, it's a tragedy when kids don't get to benefit from all a good dad can offer, but I would have suffered a great deal without my dad and so would he have without his, and many, many people feel the same. And, honestly, if you are going to try to "reeducate" the public on this issue (and you will have to convince just about the entire western world since unwed parenthood and changes in the law to accommodate it are increasing all over Europe and the UK, not just here), then it will really do no good to lie and try to "paint" fathers in general as irrelevant in their kids' lives. Too many people know this is not true, and such an attitude will hurt, not help, your cause, no matter how desirable your ultimate goal might be.

Anne
12:22 PM
NYMOM said...
"I'm sorry if your father was a disappointment, it's a tragedy when kids don't get to benefit from all a good dad can offer, but I would have suffered a great deal without my dad and so would he have without his, and many, many people feel the same. And, honestly, if you are going to try to "reeducate" the public on this issue (and you will have to convince just about the entire western world since unwed parenthood and changes in the law to accommodate it are increasing all over Europe and the UK, not just here), then it will really do no good to lie and try to "paint" fathers in general as irrelevant in their kids' lives. Too many people know this is not true, and such an attitude will hurt, not help, your cause, no matter how desirable your ultimate goal might be."

Well I'm sorry but sometimes social change cannot be stopped just because a LOT OF PEOPLE used to benefit from something that no longer exists in that form...

When the divorce rate was low and a 'family' was one legal entity where roles were clearly defined, then yes, fathers were great, they helped mothers raise children in a partnership and the whole thing worked...

Today that is simply not the case.

It won't be us deciding these things anyway, at least not me, as I already raised my children...it will be the next generation deciding these issues and from the looks of things they are picking unmarried single parenthood over and above married parenthood as the vehicle to raise their children within...and I don't think people are doing that because they had these wonderful loving fathers in their past that you keep talking about...as I think if so many people DID have that, wouldn't they be trying to recreate the same wonderful family structure they had as children...

You can close your eyes to that reality but there are a WHOLE lot of people like me out there whose fathers were nothing but a figment of Focus on the Family's imagination and YOURS...
11:35 PM
Anonymous said...
"I'm actually a little miffed at the governor in my state Governor Pataki for recently talking about a proposal to forgive the child support debt of men who marry the mothers of their children..."

Might I ask what the wisdom would be to continue to collect child support arrears from a man married to the children's mother?

The scenario: every month, the man's paycheck is garnished by CSE and a new check is cut and sent back to his house. Hmmm....

Basically, that debt would also be the mother's debt at that point.

Also, it would be unconstitutional under the 14th amendment I believe since married parents don't have to pay child support.
4:48 PM
NYMOM said...
"Might I ask what the wisdom would be to continue to collect child support arrears from a man married to the children's mother?

The scenario: every month, the man's paycheck is garnished by CSE and a new check is cut and sent back to his house. Hmmm...."

Well quite obviously it would be ridiculous...but I don't think that our governor should be encouraging men to marry women and take on the burden of fatherhood when they MIGHT not be all that interested in either the woman or the child...but more interested in wiping out a debt...

I mean New York doesn't allow you to buy a life insurance policy on a child worth over $5,000 because we had a murder a few years back (or an attempted one) of a child by its parent to get life insurance...so WHY would our governor encourage marriage to wipe out a child support debt that could be worth a LOT more then $5,000...

The bottom line is that our society has to figure out a way to make our children NOT WORTH ANY MONEY...since too many people appear to be making money on the backs of children and no good can ever come from it...

That was my point...not the logics of how to do it...but the vision to know that it needs to be done...

As this is a site to encourage discussion amongst 'like-minded' people to come up with strategies to amend the current situation...or did you miss the first page of my blog...
7:07 PM
Post a Comment

Times Could be a Changing

2009-12-28T09:03:00.002-05:00

Well if this statistic demonstrating a slow decline of marriage in this country turns out to be true (and who knows if it is as statistics are often 'played with' by various individuals and groups to make a point) I would say it demonstrates that WOMEN, who are the persons historically more invested in marriage, are finally fed up and moving onto new patterns of living...and frankly, I think this is a good thing.

Women used to have to get married in order to get any resources from men (who controlled every single resource on the planet and in many places still do). Their choices were either marriage or to live with their father and mother or some other married relative forever and this was not always desirable or practical. Not to mention they could never have any children of their own w/o marriage (and I believe most women do want children as politically incorrect as it might be to say it). Thus the evolution of the character known as the 'maiden aunt' of history who was always doting on other women's children, not being allowed to have any of her own or risk stoning, or burning at the stake, or having her baby murdered or some other horrible punishment (devised by men) for unmarried pregnancy...Anyway men used this desperate need of women to be married as a club against us (much as they now use custody of her children against mothers) to enforce their social control of women.

So any decrease in marriage I see as a sign that women have finally realized this and are seeking ways to end it w/o starting a war as men would do (ie., as in the custody wars men have incited) or some other such activity. Just quiet changes in our behavior having the desired impact like the wind or water slowly wearing down the mountain.

Last point: this probably also could explain the rising statistic of older women leading the way in choosing to become single mothers. All to the good! The fact that younger women, teenagers, used to be the main group of single women having children gave an opening to the usual suspects to frame their opposition to single motherhood as justified since they could claim single motherhood was a burden on society. I guarantee you that their panties are still in a bunch now, even if the women having children out of wedlock could afford to raise them w/o government assistance.

Why?

Because it's not about money, it's about men losing their last chance to control women, that's what it is...by holding our children hostage through the manipulation of the legal system.

The final thing that puzzles me is why a fairly well-educated man like Marc Rudov continues harping upon alimony as a 'benefit' women receive from marriage and subsequent divorce. The census shows that ONLY 15% of divorcees (either women or men, as yes Virginia men do get alimony) ever get awarded any alimony and of that 15% only one-half manage to actually collect it. So this continued fixation is a puzzlement. Most men probably have a better chance of getting struck by lightning then they do of paying alimony to a former wife.

Anyway that's by take on the whole situation.

http://thenononsenseman.mensnewsdaily.com/2006/10/31/riding-the-estrogen-express/

Riding the Estrogen Express
by Marc H. RudovOctober 31st, 2006

Contrary to its intent, the United States is methodically recasting itself as a singles-oriented nation. Notwithstanding the impassioned soapbox orations from politicians about marriage as the bedrock of society, their anti-male policies and laws are, in fact, killing the family and marriage.

In my article “Will Women Halt the Death of Marriage?” I wrote that, for men, marriage is a sucker’s deal. Before you fume at me, ladies, count the number of times you’ve seen a divorced mother writing child-support and alimony checks to her mansion-dwelling ex-husband from the card-table desk of her one-bedroom apartment. Enough said.

The American Community Survey, released in October 2006 by the US Census Bureau, found that, for the first time in US history, only 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent in 2000.

Yes, folks, instead of solidifying marriage and simplifying our lives, the vote whores on Capitol Hill and in state assemblies across our great country have been catalyzing a pandemic of out-of-wedlock births and spawning costly, socialistic infrastructures to deal with them. As usual, they’ve created another fine mess where one didn’t exist. In this case, the root cause is fear of women (translation: fear of not getting the female vote).

When installing new software, the subscriber must click “I agree” on the 10-page, eye-glazing user agreement, if he expects it to function. How many times does one actually read these documents? I almost never do, because, if so, I’d still be installing Windows 95. Interestingly, when installing new women into their lives, men have a history of exhibiting similar, reflexive behavior — blindly, deferentially, and sycophantically agreeing to known and unknown caveats, provisos, clauses, and conditions. Why? Habit, conditioning, resignation, socialization, and belief that no other options exist.

The typical man, traditionally, has been so deferential to — and fearful of — women that he automatically will allow one to commandeer the dating, engagement, wedding, marriage, and divorce phases of his life. Then, he will kick himself afterwards and cry into the beer of anyone sympathetic enough to listen. Surrendering these phases to her is akin to riding a runaway train — The Estrogen Express — to Disasterville. The only question is, Will he disembark in time to avert the inevitable?

When you think about it, the traditional way of dealing with a woman is to permit her to control your life. Men mistakenly believe they will have more peace that way. This moronic behavior, based on the false assumption that men must crawl through broken glass to get laid, leads to devastating consequences. It’s quite scary to realize how much control over their lives men have conceded to women, with lots of help from misandrist feminists and politicians.

But, it seems that the tide is now turning. Men are increasingly saying no to marriage and relationships, and the Census Bureau statistics prove it. Alas, the out-of-wedlock birthrate (see my article “Playing Abortion Chess”) also proves it. Men are finally realizing that they don’t have to get married and don’t want to get married. They are tired of playing a losing game against the house. To modern men, matrimony equals alimony — not safety, comfort, and love.

When I see a million women marching on the Mall in Washington, DC, demanding that our elected officials restore dignity to men and fathers and the family unit, I will become convinced that they truly believe in matrimony — not just alimony and child support. Until then, I’m not holding my breath.

About the Author

Marc H. Rudov is an internationally recognized author of 30+ articles and the book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet EarthTM (ISBN 0974501719).

Rudov’s book, articles, blog, and podcasts are available at TheNoNonsenseMan.com.

Copyright © 2006 by Marc H. Rudov. All rights reserved.

Another interesting abduction case...

2009-12-09T14:50:00.002-05:00

I found this story interesting especially since it highlights how child abduction is such a fast growing crime.

Also little warning to mothers of infants: if a mother doesn’t have legal custody of her children, one of these so-called parental abductions can result in a custody switch as the police do not always follow up if the abductor is a father, even a recreational sperm donor w/o his name on the child’s birth certificate. If he manages to get his name on the certificate in this interim period, he can race down to the courthouse with it and get himself named as the custodial parent.

One of the stats the FBI had released was that mothers keep their kids longer when they are abducted and I think the reason this happens is that men manipulate the system better and wind up becoming the custodial parent...so it's wiped off the record as an abduction...

Also once again we find some woman helping this jerk, his mother. Thank god she got jail time. Often these idiots get away with it…Imagine what kind of a life these girls would have had as they entered puberty living in a trailor in a place like Nicaragua. It remains me of these terrible people who are always abducting young girls to countries in the middle east. PS a horror!!!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/30/delaware.family.abductions/index.html

The untold tale of family abductions: 3 girls missing, an international hunt

By Stephanie Chen, CNN
December 9, 2009

Christine Belford was reunited with her three daughters, who were kidnapped by their father for 19 months.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
• More than 200,000 incidents of family abductions occur in the U.S. each year
• Christine Belford's three daughters were kidnapped by their father in 2007
• Authorities launched a search that spanned at least four countries and several states
• The children were found in Nicaragua, living in a trailer with their father and grandmother

RELATED TOPICS
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Missing Children
• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
• Delaware

(CNN) -- Christine Belford agreed to let her ex-husband take their three daughters to Disney World for a two-week vacation. In August 2007, the Delaware mother kissed her little blond girls goodbye.

Those two weeks were unsettling for Belford, then 34. The couple went through a bitter divorce in 2006 which resulted in joint custody of the children. Belford said when the girls were with their dad, they were always difficult to reach.

Two days into the trip, Belford connected by cell phone with her oldest daughter, Laura, then 5. Already homesick, chubby-faced Laura cried as her father checked them into a hotel room.

"I want to come home," Laura pleaded with her mother.

But Laura and her sisters wouldn't return to their Delaware home for 19 months.

Their father, David Matusiewicz, pleaded guilty to international parental kidnapping and bank fraud charges in September. He faces up to 30 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday. CNN attempted to reach Matusiewichz in jail through his attorney, Heriberto "Eddie" Medrano, in Houston, Texas, but Medrano did not return the calls.

Kidnapping victims like Laura and her sisters -- Leigh, then 4, and Karen, then 2 -- often don't make national headlines the way victims of alleged abductions by strangers do, such as Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart. But each year, most child abductions are perpetrated by someone the victim knows.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports more than 200,000 children are victims of family abductions in the United States each year. Of that figure, about 56,500 cases are reported to local law enforcement authorities and require investigation, studies show. In comparison, the U.S. Department of Justice reports an average of 115 stranger abductions a year.

Family abductions commonly involve children under 6, too young to comprehend that a crime is occurring, studies show.

Over the last few decades, high divorce rates have led to custody disputes and to kidnappings, experts say. Yet the public still perceives family abductions as a less serious crime because the victims are with a family member who is less likely to hurt them.

"The view is that this is not really a criminal problem," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. "[The view is] this is a civil problem and lawyers need to work it out."

There are 1,600 unsolved family abduction cases involving children who have been missing for more than six months, he said.

A puzzling escape

In 15 years on the police force, Cpl. Jeff Shriner of the New Castle, Delaware, Police Department said he found Matusiewicz's abduction of his children to be the most bizarre missing person case he'd encountered.

Normally, the perpetrator in a family abduction is located within hours or days. Sometimes, abductions occur because the parent is angry, Shriner said, but they usually change their minds within a few days.

But Matusiewicz "was a needle in a haystack and that needle was buried very deep," said Shriner, who was assigned as the lead detective on the case.

Shriner quickly determined the Disney World vacation never happened.
Sales records showed Matusiewicz's mother, Lenore, had purchased a 33-foot Winnebago mobile home weeks before the disappearance, according to court records. She also was missing.

That month, Matusiewicz had sold his optometry business to a partner, police said. He had also committed mortgage fraud by forging his wife's signature on a $249,000 loan from a bank in Delaware, police said.

The couple had met in 1993 when Belford worked as a receptionist at an eye doctor's office in Delaware. Matusiewicz worked as an optometrist there. They were married in October 2001.

The couple's union became problematic in 2003 when his parents moved in, Belford said. Matusiewicz was a loving father to his girls, but during the breakup, she said, the couple had problems.

Some parents say they take their children away to protect them from an abusive or unfit parent, said Liss Hart-Haviv, founding executive director of Take Root, a national organization that works with victims of family abduction. In other instances, Hart-Haviv said, parents may take children out of spite.

"The critical thing to remember," she said, "is there's not one face to family abduction. It's a multifaceted issue."

Abduction goes abroad

In most family abduction cases, studies show victims often remain within the country. But circumstances are changing. Easier access to foreign countries and a growing number of intercontinental marriages have made international hideouts more common, missing children experts said.

In October, Japanese authorities released an American man, Christopher Savoie, who was jailed for allegedly trying to take back his children from his estranged wife. His wife, Noriko Savoie, had fled with the children to Japan in August, authorities say. Japanese officials said the couple's U.S.-recognized divorce did not apply in Japan. Christopher Savoie, who was not charged, returned to the U.S. The children remained with their mother in Japan.

A multilateral treaty known as the Hague Convention was ratified in 1980. It provides member countries with rules on returning abducted children under the age of 16. Today, more than 80 countries have signed the treaty. But with countries that haven't, like Japan, determining what happens to the children is murky.

In Belford's case, local and federal agencies initially launched a search for the girls. They began in New Jersey, where Matusiewicz was raised. Then they combed through dozens of leads in Virginia and West Virginia. A tip led them to become suspicious the girls might be in Texas or Mexico.

By November 2007, authorities shifted their attention to Central America. They hunted for Matusiewicz in Panama and Costa Rica over the next year. Locating him was tricky, authorities say, because he relied on cash transactions and limited phone calls with his family in the United States.

"He was very smart and did a lot of things before leaving and during the time he was gone to cover his tracks," said Rick Long, chief deputy U.S. Marshal in Delaware, who helped with the search efforts.

It wasn't until March 2009 that a lead, on which authorities declined to elaborate, brought law enforcement officers to a town about 40 miles outside of the Managua, Nicaragua.

There, at the end of a 19-month search, authorities discovered the girls inside a messy Winnebago trailer, overfilled with items from their Delaware home, said a U.S. Marshal who arrived on the scene. Matusiewicz had less than $100.

Reunited at last

Christine Belford took the first flight she could to Nicaragua. Her girls were healthy, though disheveled. The eldest, Laura, now 7, told her mother about sleeping on the beach in Costa Rica. The once-plump girl had become thin. Her autistic daughter, Leigh, now 6, hadn't received treatment. When Leigh smiled, Belford noticed her teeth had rotted.

The most changed child was Karen, who left at age 2. She had transformed from a baby into a 4-year-old who could speak and run alongside her sisters.

Family abductions are less likely to result in death or sexual abuse than stranger abductions, but psychologists warn that the experience can still greatly impact a child's development. In three decades counseling family abduction victims, clinical psychologist Linda Gunsberg has seen children with trust, identity and attachment issues. The deceit and the abrupt changes in living conditions can cause a child to be confused, anxious and depressed.

"The younger girls say they miss Daddy," said Belford, now 37. "I tell them he's in time out right now." Laura, the oldest, is doing well in the second grade, but she continues to experience nightmares. During the time she was abducted, she was told her mother was dead, Belford said.

"She's in her angry phase," Belford said. "I tell her it's OK to love them and miss them because they are still your dad and grandma."

In September, the grandmother, Lenore Matusiewicz, 64, was sentenced to 1½ years in prison for her role in the abduction. She is being held in Baylor Women's Correctional Institution in Delaware.

"She is very sorry for her choice," said her attorney, Demetrio Duarte Jr., based at a Texas firm. "In life, it's not all black and all white. To be severed from mom wasn't the right thing to do. To be severed from grandma isn't the right thing to do. It's just tragic.

Well, this is no surprise...

2009-11-25T14:51:00.004-05:00

I love the way these idiots always try to compare themselves to the civil rights movement in this country...by using the names of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Those men were fighting for a group of people who had NO POWER historically or at the time of the movement...as opposed to these MRA idiots who've hoarded power since civilization began and are just mad now because they see it slipping away from them.

Gag me with a spoon already...

http://www.doublex.com/print/9316

Published on Double X (http://www.doublex.com)

"Men's Rights" Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective

They’re changing custody rights and domestic violence laws.

By: Kathryn Joyce

Posted: November 5, 2009 at 7:45 AM

At the end of October, National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, members of the men’s movement group RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting [2]) gathered on the steps of Congress to lobby against what they say are the suppressed truths about domestic violence: that false allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run court system fraudulently separates innocent fathers from children, that battered women’s shelters are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to feminists, that domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order brides seeking Green Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an unrecognized epidemic of violence at the hands of abusive wives.

“It’s now reached the point,” reads a statement from RADAR, “that domestic violence laws represent the largest roll-back in Americans’ civil rights since the Jim Crow era!”

RADAR’s rhetoric may seem overblown, but lately the group and its many partners have been racking up very real accomplishments. In 2008, the organization claimed to have blocked passage of four federal domestic-violence bills, among them an expansion of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to international scope and a grant to support lawyers in pro bono domestic-violence work. Members of this coalition have gotten themselves onto drafting committees for VAWA’s 2011 reauthorization. Local groups in West Virginia and California have also had important successes, criminalizing false claims of domestic violence in custody cases, and winning rulings that women-only shelters are discriminatory.

Groups like RADAR fall under the broader umbrella of the men’s rights movement, a loose coalition of anti-feminist groups. These men’s rights activists, or MRAs, have long been written off by domestic-violence advocates as a bombastic and fringe group of angry white men, and for good reason. Bernard Chapin, a popular men’s rights blogger, told me over e-mail that he will refer to me as “Feminist E,” since he never uses real names for feminists, who are wicked and who men “must verbally oppose … until our flesh oxidizes into dust.” In the United Kingdom, a father’s rights group scaled Buckingham Palace in superhero costumes. In Australia, they wore paramilitary uniforms and demonstrated outside the houses of female divorcees.

But lately they’ve become far more polished and savvy about advancing their views. In their early days of lobbying, “these guys would show up and have this looming body language that was very off-putting,” says Ben Atherton-Zeman, author of Voices of Men, a one-man play about domestic violence and sexual assault. “But that’s all changed. A lot of the leaders are still convicted batterers, but they’re well-organized, they speak in complete sentences, they sound much more reasonable: All we want is equal custody, for fathers not to be ignored.”

One of the respectable new faces of the movement is Glenn Sacks, a fathers' rights columnist and radio host with 50,000 e-mail followers, and a pragmatist in a world of angry dreamers. Sacks is a former feminist and abortion-clinic defender who disavows what he calls “the not-insubstantial lunatic fringe of the fathers’ rights movement.” He recently merged his successful media group with the shared-parenting organization Fathers and Families in a bid to build a mainstream fathers' rights organ on par with the National Organization for Women. Many of Sacks’ arguments—for a court assumption of shared parenting in the case of divorce, or against child-support rigidity in the midst of recession—can sound reasonable.

But do any of their arguments hold up? Many of the men for whom Sacks advocates are involved in extreme cases, says Joanie Dawson, a writer and domestic-violence advocate who has covered the fathers’ rights movement. The great majority of custody cases, in which shared parenting is a legitimate option, are settled or resolved privately. But of the 15 percent that go to family court—the cases that fathers’ rights groups target—at least half include alleged domestic abuse.

Unsurprisingly, this argument is missing from MRA discussions of custody inequality and recruitment ads, which cast all men as potentially innocent victims “just one 911 call away” from losing everything they have earned and loved. These rallying calls, and the divorce attorneys hawking men’s rights expertise on MRA sites, promising to “teach her a lesson,” serve as what Dawson sees as a powerful draw for men in the midst of painful divorces.

While MRA groups continue to expand their base of embittered fathers and ex-husbands, they’ve cleaned up their image to court more powerful allies. RADAR board member Ron Grignal, the former president of Fathers for Virginia and a former state delegate candidate, organizes the group’s Washington lobbying activities. In 2008, RADAR partnered with Eagle Forum for a conference at the Heritage Foundation about the threat that VAWA poses to the family. Grignal argues that state interpretations of VAWA are so broad they could cast couples’ money disputes as domestic violence, enabling unwarranted restraining orders that then win women’s divorce cases for them. Politicians, Grignal says, are increasingly on board with men’s rights movement concerns.

“On domestic violence, I’ve had both state and federal legislators tell me they know that this process is out of control,” says Grignal. “They’re afraid if they support [reforms] they’ll be tagged as ‘for domestic violence.’ But I’ve had Democrats on Capitol Hill tell me they agree with everything I say. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me that his brother can’t see his kids, and his wife threatened to throw herself down the stairs to ruin his political career.”

Some domestic-violence protections do seem to have unintended effects, such as mandatory-arrest policies that compel police to take someone into custody in response to any domestic-violence call—a policy that has been criticized by RADAR as well as by some domestic-violence advocates, who say it imposes an absurd equivalence between largely nonviolent family spats or insubstantial female violence and serious abuse. But groups like RADAR are criticizing the law for the wrong reasons. In fact, the effect of mandatory arrest in conflating women’s low-level violence with battery, seems very close to RADAR’s campaign for viewing women as equal domestic abusers.

One potent idea advanced by MRAs is the claim that men are equal victims of domestic violence. Mark Rosenthal, president and co-founder of RADAR, makes a very personal argument for the phenomenon. Rosenthal, who doesn’t call himself an MRA, grew up with a mother who he says terrorized the entire family and hit her husband frequently. The true impact of the violence, he says, was more than physical and eclipsed his petite mother’s ability to inflict serious injuries. Rosenthal wants to see an appreciation for women’s nonphysical abuse incorporated into domestic-violence policy. “It’s not about size,” he told an audience at a law enforcement domestic-violence training. “It’s not exclusively about physical attacks. However, it is about a pathological need to control others, and women are as prone to this as men.”

RADAR and other MRA groups base their battered men arguments largely on the research of a small group of social scientists who claim that domestic violence between couples is equally divided, just unequally reported. Most notable are the studies conducted by sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire, who has written extensively on female violence (and who Dawson saw distributing RADAR flyers at an APA conference). Straus’ research is starting to move public opinion. A Los Angeles conference this July dedicated to discussing male victims of domestic violence, “From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention,” received positive mainstream press for its “inclusive” efforts.

While some men certainly are victims of female domestic violence, advocates say the number is closer to 3 percent to 4 percent, rather than the 45 percent to 50 percent RADAR claims. Jack Straton, a Portland State University professor and member of Oregon’s Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, argues that Straus critically fails to distinguish between the intent and effect of violence, equating “a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs,” or a single act of female violence with years of male abuse; that Straus only interviewed one partner, when couples’ accounts of violence commonly diverge; and that he excludes from his study post-separation violence, which accounts for more than 75 percent of spouse-on-spouse violence, 93 percent of which is committed by men.

All in all, advocates say that cherry-picked studies from researchers like Straus, touted by the MRAs, amount to what Edward Gondolf, director of research for the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute, calls“bad science.” Statistics suggesting gender parity in abuse are taken out of necessary context, they say, ignoring distinctions between the equally divided “common couple violence” and the sort of escalated, continuing violence known as battery—which is 85 percent male-perpetrated—as well as the disparate injuries inflicted by men and women.

“The biggest concern, though, is not the wasted effort on a false issue,” writes Straton, but the encouragement given to batterers to consider themselves the victimized party. “Arming these men with warped statistics to fuel their already warped worldview is unethical, irresponsible, and quite simply lethal.”

In this, critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.

MRA critics say the organizational recapitulation of abusive tactics should be no surprise, considering the wealth of movement leaders with records or accusations of violence, abuse, harassment, or failure to pay child support. Some advocates call MRA groups “the abuser’s lobby,” because of members like Jason Hutch, the Buckingham Palace fathers’ rights “Batman,” who has been estranged from three mothers of his children and was taken to court for threatening one of his ex-wives.

Contrary to RADAR’s claims, domestic-violence advocates say that not only do abuse accusations not automatically win custody cases for women; there are a rising number of custody decisions awarded to abusive fathers, as judges see wives eager to protect their children as less cooperative regarding custody. More than half the time, studies have found, wives’ accusations of domestic violence are met with counter-accusations from husbands of “Parental Alienation Syndrome”—a medically unrecognized diagnosis that suggests mothers have poisoned their children into making false accusations against their fathers.

In one recent case, Genia Shockome, a Russian immigrant, was fighting for custody of her two children with her ex-husband, whom she charged had beaten her so severely that she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and who had told her she “had no right to leave” since he’d brought her to the United States. The judge in the case sided with her husband’s counter-claims of Parental Alienation Syndrome and awarded him full custody (and later sentenced Shockome to 30 days in jail while she was seven months pregnant). When her attorney, Barry Goldstein, co-author of the forthcoming book Domestic Violence, Abuse and Custody, criticized the judge in an online article, the judge retaliated with a complaint, and Goldstein was given a five-year suspension. Goldstein says the sanction represents a chilling pressure on attorneys, who may now fear penalties for criticizing a court’s gender bias that will interfere with their duties to their clients and that could result in women deciding not to leave abusers out of fear they won’t get a fair trial.

If cases such as Genia Shockome’s are the fodder of mainstream fathers’ rights advocates like Glenn Sacks—who ridiculed her claims and loss of custody as an uncredible “cause célèbre” for feminist family-law reformers—what Sacks calls the movement’s “lunatic fringe” is more vitriolic yet.

Within the ranks of the men’s rights movement, vigilante “resisters” are regularly nominated and lionized for acts of violence perceived to be in opposition to a feminist status quo [3]. In a few quarters of the movement, this even included George Sodini, the Pittsburgh man who opened fire on a gym full of exercising women this August, killing three and leaving behind an online diatribe journaling his sense of rejection by millions of desirable women.

Sodini’s diary was republished widely, including on the website of a popular men’s rights blogger, “Angry Harry,” who added his assessment of the case [4]. “MRAs should also take note of the fact that there are probably many millions of men across the western world who feel similar in many ways, and one can expect to see much more destruction emanating from them in the future,” he wrote. “One of the main reasons that I decided to post this diary on this website was because the western world must wake up to the fact that it cannot continue to treat men so appallingly and get away with it.” In a phone interview, Angry Harry said, “Of course there will be more Sodinis—there will be many more,” likening him to Marc Lépine, a Canadian man who killed or wounded 28, claiming feminists had ruined his life, or Nevada father Darren Mack, who murdered his estranged wife and attempted to kill the judge in their custody battle. (Also among this number is John Muhammad, the “D.C. Beltway Sniper,” whose involvement in a Washington father’s rights group and history of abuse is described in his ex-wife Mildred’s newly-released memoir, Scared Silent [5].) Perhaps, Angry Harry mused, that as the ranks of online MRAs grow, “the threat” of their violence “may be enough” to bring about the changes they desire.

Glenn Sacks dismissed Angry Harry as an "idiot" without real power in the movement, and yet he cautiously agrees that what Sacks calls "family court injustices" could lead to future violence.* “I want to be careful in wording this,” he says, “but the cataclysmic things I’m seeing done to men, it’s always my fear that one of these guys is going to do something terrible. I don’t want to say that like I condone it or that it’s OK, but it’s just the reality.” The movement seems eager to supply more martyrs. After Sacks wrote about a San Diego father who shot himself on the city’s courthouse steps over late child-support payments, numerous men wrote Sacks, telling him, “They’re taking everything from me, and I want to go out in a big way, and if I do, will you write about me?”

I asked RADAR’s Mark Rosenthal about the ties between groups like RADAR—claiming, however cynically, to have egalitarian motives—and the blunt anti-feminist positions of men’s movement allies like Chapin or Angry Harry. “I’d like to suggest that what you’ve just done is interview Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” he told me. “In any movement, there is going to be a reasonable voice and people who are so hurt, who are so injured by the injustices, that they can’t afford to step back and try to take their emotions under control. But no movement is going to get anywhere without extremists.”

It Still Puzzles me Why Deployed Parents Refuse to See the Logic of my Argument????

2009-11-25T13:31:00.003-05:00

Well as usual I went back to find the old post about the study I mentioned earlier and found another interesting post and discussion with some of the principals involved, so here it is...

I realize after finding this post that my blog is FIVE YEARS OLD this month...

I think of it as quite an accomplishment, all things considered.

I'll continue looking for that other study but keep in mind I have five years worth of posts to dig through...

But never fear I will find it...

BTW, hope everyone (including everyone I disagree with) has a lovely Thanksgiving.

Enjoy!!!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2004
AND They Wonder Why Women Do NOT want to Have Children Anymore...
This sort of ruling (which by the way goes on continuously) is clearly discriminatory against women...

I've been reading a lot lately about how women are having so few children that western societies are facing many serious problems in the future due to our current low reproductive ratio...WELL here's another good example of why women DO NOT wish to take the 'leap of faith' involved in having children...

First of all this father should NEVER have been given physical custody to begin with as it's clear that an active duty member of the military can be deployed AT ANY TIME...ANYTIME...and countless women in the military, countless, LOSE custody for this very reason CONSTANTLY... with Judges claiming that the military lifestyle is too unstable to support single parenting.

Actually threats of losing custody appears to NOW be commonly used as a weapon against women in the military as a way to drive single mothers out of the services...

Perhaps single mothers SHOULD NOT be in the service, but that's a different issue and should be openly discussed and addressed w/o dragging these bias issues into it...

However this nonsense of a DOUBLE standard for men who deploy should be addressed and STOPPED immediately as when men deploy, children should be sent immediately to go live with their non-custodial mothers and NOT be dumped off on grandparents and certainly NOT a female step-person EVER...JUST THE SAME AS COURT RULE WHEN CUSTODIAL MOTHERS IN THE MILITARY ARE DEPLOYED...THE SAME WAY...

Clearly this is NOTHING but an attempt by men in the military to avoid paying child support while they are deployed and certainly NOT in childrens' best interest...

It's simply outrageous that these Judges should be helping them get away with this, simply outrageous...

I couldn't fit the entire decision here but just enough to show the sheer outrageousness of the ruling; and another reason WHY women must begin to get involved in politics, particularly the election and/or appointments of Judges to Federal courts...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA

No. 4-468 / 03-2100

Filed November 15, 2004

IN RE THE MARRIAGE OF MICHAEL GRANTHAM and TAMMARA SUE GRANTHAM

Appeal from the Iowa District Court for ButlerCounty, Paul W. Riffel, Judge.

Michael Grantham appeals the judgment of the district court modifying the decree dissolving his marriage to Tammara Sue Grantham.

REVERSED AND REMANDED.

Heard by Sackett, C.J., and Vogel, Zimmer, Hecht, and Eisenhauer,

JJ.VOGEL, J.In this appeal, we consider the implication of the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act (SSCRA), 50 U.S.C. app. §§ 501-591, when a parent, enjoying physical care of his minor children under a decree of dissolution, is called to active military duty. We conclude the district court erred in not granting a stay of the modification proceedings pursuant to this Act and further erred in entering a temporary change of physical care on a petition to modify.

Additionally, upon our de novo review, we find no permanent and substantial change of circumstances warranting a change of physical care.

Therefore, we reverse and remand.

I. Background Facts and Proceedings

Michael Grantham’s and Tammara Sue Grantham’s marriage was dissolved on July 11, 2000. The stipulated decree provided for joint custody of their two minor children, then ages ten and six,

...with physical care to Michael...

In mid-August 2002, Tammara was informed by one of the children that Michael,

a National Guard member for over eighteen years,

had been called to active duty and that the children would be residing

with Michael’s mother, Irmgard Grantham. Michael was officially called to active duty on August 21, 2002, and reported to his unit’s armory on August 24. He returned home on a short leave on August 27. While home on leave, Michael reviewed his existing “Family Care Plan” with his lawyer and mother and executed the documents necessary to allow Irmgard, who had been a frequent care giver of the children, to care for the children in his absence[1].

A Family Care Plan is prepared as a part of a soldier’s regular duties and is meant to provide for the care of a soldier’s family.[2] A Family Care Plan is required by military regulation and reviewed when a soldier is called up for active duty.[3] An existing Family Care Plan may be changed; it is not set in stone.[4] A soldier is not deployable until a Family Care Plan is validated and approved, and only the soldier’s commander may approve a Family Care Plan.[5]

Also on August 27, 2002, Michael and his attorney met with Tammara and her attorney at her attorney’s office in Waverly, Iowa. Discussed at this meeting was the possibility of Tammara caring for the children in Michael’s absence instead of Irmgard. Tammara’s lawyer subsequently drafted a proposed stipulated agreement providing for this arrangement, which was provided to Michael later that day.

The following day, Michael returned to National Guard duty at Camp Dodge in Des Moines. After reviewing the proposed agreement with his JAG (Judge Advocate General’s Corps) officer, Michael decided not to enter into the agreement. On August 29, Michael was counseled by his commander on his responsibilities to the military and to his family and Michael filled out a new DA Form 5305-R (Family Care Plan) which provided that Irmgard would care for the children in his absence. Later that same day, Michael’s commander reviewed and approved the Plan.

On September 4, Tammara filed a petition seeking physical care of the children, temporary and permanent support, and suspension of her child support obligations. On the same day, Tammara obtained an ex parte order from the district court setting a hearing on her requests for temporary relief for September 20. Michael was served with the Petition on September 5 while at his unit’s armory in Estherville, Iowa. On September 7, Michael left with his unit for Fort Knox, Kentucky. On September 10, Michael filed a motion requesting a stay of the proceedings pursuant to the SSCRA. No hearing was set on Michael’s motion. On September 20, in his absence, a hearing on temporary placement and child support was held. Although not scheduled, the Court also took up the issue of Michael’s request for a stay at this hearing. Michael’s counsel made a professional statement indicating that Michael was not able to attend the hearing due to his military duties and offered to call his commander to verify this statement.

In a ruling filed October 3, the district court denied Michael’s request for a stay and set a scheduling conference for October 10. The district court based its decision on its finding that [t]he record herein fails to reflect that [Michael] made any showing for a stay other than to state in his unverified filing on September 10, 2002 that he had been placed on active duty and could not appear in court. The record does not reflect by affidavit or otherwise that the Petitioner made any effort to obtain a leave of absence to enable him to be present at the hearing or made any effort to participate telephonically in the scheduled hearing.

Additionally, the record reflects that the Petitioner

acted in bad faith in attempting to exercise his rights under the act by deceiving the Respondent into believing that he was making a good faith effort to reach an agreement when in fact he had no intention of doing so and was merely delaying matter until he had to report for active duty.

The October 10 scheduling conference was held without Michael present and reset the hearing on temporary matters for October 29. Michael, although he was represented by counsel, was unable to participate in the October 29 hearing because of his continuing military duties. At that hearing, Michael’s attorney again sought a stay under the SSCRA and in support thereof filed an affidavit and a letter from Michael’s commander stating that Michael could not attend the proceedings. Michael also moved to continue to a time when he could participate in the hearing. He further moved to dismiss on the grounds that there is no temporary custody remedy available in Iowa Code chapter 598 (2001) for modification proceedings.

On October 30, the district court entered an order denying these motions, temporarily placing the children with Tammara, terminating her support obligation, and requiring Michael to pay child support.

In so doing, the district court did not rule on the merits of Michael’s reapplication for a stay, instead stating that it would not “take issue with [the October 3] ruling” on this matter.Michael sought discretionary review from the Iowa Supreme Court and requested a temporary stay. A stay was granted on November 1. However, on November 8, the court denied discretionary review and vacated the stay. Although Michael was technically on active duty until September 2, 2003, he had returned home early in August 2003 and trial on the merits of the petition for modification was held shortly thereafter, on August 27.

In its subsequent ruling, filed on November 19, the district court granted the relief requested in Tammara’s petition changing physical care of the children to her and entering related orders of visitation and child support.

Michael appeals this ruling and each and every other order therein, contending: First, the district court erred in not staying the proceedings leading up to the November 19, 2003, judgment as required by the SSCRA. Second, the district court erred in entering a temporary change of physical care order on Tammara’s petition for modification. Third, no permanent change in circumstances existed justifying the district court’s change of physical care of the children to Tammara.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

posted by NYMOM | Friday, November 19, 2004
28 Comments:
Anonymous said...
I think there had to be a reason to have the children placed with the father in the first place and also I think that the mother used the activation of the father to her advantage to gain the children. While having the father at a disadvantage it was the best time for her to get what she wanted. If she would have done this any other time she would not have has any grounds to get the children in her placement.
She has stated in the court records that the father was a good father to the children and never denied her any of her visitations. Maybe this is all about her and not the children.
11:15 PM
NYMOM said...
"the mother used the activation of the father to gain the children..."

AND...

What's wrong with that?

I mean are you a mother? Would you want your children with you???

I mean you are saying this she wanted to 'gain' her children like there is something wrong with her wanting her children to be with her...whereas it's perfectly NORMAL for mothers to want their children with them...and the day they STOP wanting that, is when we need to worry because then we just go extinct...

Okay...

So quit talking such nonsense.
9:43 AM
Anonymous said...
Your are right and that is what the problem is.
She never wanted both of the childred in the first place and now she does. The courts thru out the letter that stated that The Children are better off with Mike and not with her. She wanted to be single again and play around and the children would be in her way. So the father had to take care of the children at there younger stage of their lives and now that they are old enough to take care of themselves in when she wants them. To me that is not a good mother and she still don't take them to places they need to go. She has others take the kids every where or hands them off to people because they will be in the way of what she wants to do
10:36 AM
NYMOM said...
Well if you know the people personally then I'll defer to your opinion in this case...HOWEVER, it doesn't change my mind about the basic premise here which is that when a custodial parent is deployed, unless there is a darn good reason, the children should THEN be sent to live with the non-custodial parent...

This decision ruled that being deployed, even for years, did NOT constitute a change in circumstancs which is ridiculous as it means that children could be dumped all over the place as the custodial parent deploys, but refuses to send the children back to live with the non-custodial parents...

Probably trying to avoid paying child support during deployment... and THIS is wrong and should NOT be encouraged by the courts...

This was a BAD ruling...
10:44 AM
JB Opheim said...
Apparently you know nothing about the Military or the soldiers and sailors releif act. I have been deployed with many soldiers who have their wages garnished so that that the child support is paid. I am one of those soldiers. getting deployed is not going to stop your child support and the ssra has nothing to do with protecting the soldier from paying his child support. The Military frowns on deadbeat parents and totally supports the rights of the children.Its not the point that there is something wrong with her wanting her children , but using his deployment as a crutch to get them back after they were obviously given to him for good reason is wrong. I pay my child support every month in good faith and spend plenty of time with them. It sounds to me that you feel Mothers are far more important in a childs life than the Father it that kind of thinking that is destoying our youth
5:01 PM
NYMOM said...
Well yes, I do happen to think that mothers are more significant vis-a-vis children and should be as they invest more in just giving them life...

Why should a father who invests NOTHING in bringing children forth be given the exact same standing as mother...it's just male jealousy and selfishness that is leading to this...

If it continues women won't be wanting to have children anymore and then what...Western civilization is already heading into extinction due to male selfishness...and you're a perfect example of it...
5:08 PM
NYMOM said...
BTW, this selfish man was dumping his children off on his mother anyway which the court papers stated he did very frequently...So why should a mother be w/o her children so he could dump them off with his mother again...

Why, to avoid paying child support obviously...it's simply disgraceful that you men in uniform are allowed to play these games with childrens' lives anyway...simply disgraceful...
5:10 PM
Anonymous said...
I think that you are getting this all twisted. It is the mother that dumps the kids off to who ever will watch them not the father. When the father has the kids he does not dump them off to anyone. If the father has things to do he does it with the kids.
and also the fathers in todays world are just as important in the kids life as the mother.
5:59 PM
NYMOM said...
No...you are getting it all twisted...

1. This is a site for mothers ONLY...get it...not for fathers deployed or otherwise...

Okay...

2. The court papers clearly stated that the father left the children with his mother ALL THE TIME...that was the basis for them saying deployment did NOT constitute a change in circumstances...a twisted interpretation if I ever heard one...

3. Did you even read the actual decision? Since I posted JUST a part of it here...so you need to go back and read the whole thing so you know what you are talking about...

4. NO...I do NOT agree that fathers are as important as mothers thus the creation of this blog...if you don't like it, start your own...

Okay...

Thanks.
6:09 PM
Anonymous said...
I do know what I am talking about and that is right you only have a small portion of the story and I have about 8,000 sheets of paper to that I have read. So I have the whole story.
and If this is for woman only then I would suggest taking this story off your web site
because this story is all about me and I want it off here is you are going to use that tone.
6:16 PM
NYMOM said...
No...

I'm not taking it off this website...

That ruling was public record and I'm leaving it right here so mothers can see exactly what goes on with fathers like this pulling all kinds of stunts to get out of paying child support probably...even the Judge who originally awarded the mother custody said the father acted in bad faith, pretending he was going to review her request for the children to be with her while he was deployed and then disappearing until he actually was deployed so he could then say no change in custody was allowed under that Soldiers and Sailors act you just quoted...

It was an extremely devious act of trickery which lucky the first Judge saw right through...

Unfortunately for this poor mother and her children however the higher court reversed the decision and allowed the deceitfulness of a father to be rewarded...

Again, simply disgracefull....

NOW GET OFF MY BLOG...
7:19 PM
Anonymous said...
so you are telling me that I did not pay? I suppose that is why she owes me money yet from the time I had the kids with me. Now that is not paying Child support.
and by the way if my name is public then your sight is too and I can be on here all I want
12:36 AM
NYMOM said...
Sorry, yes you can stay to discuss this further if you wish...

You just caught me on a bad day and this post was so old I wasn't ever expecting any responses to it after all this time, so you caught me by surprise.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I was so harsh...

Look, I really know neither one of you obviously but my central POINT was that the ruling by the Judge was NOT a good one for other parents in your situation... that was my point...whether or not she paid or you paid was not really an issue, so I shouldn't have brought it up...

You won your appeal so I assume the children are with your mother and your ex has visitation or did the first Judge find another reason during the remand to award the mother custody anyway????

Are you still deployed btw?

You see my basic problem with the ruling (over and above the fact that I consider myself to be an advocate for mothers and considered the ruling very anti-mother) is that it would make it virtually impossible for any non-custodial parent to have custody of their own kids if the custodial parent is deployed...even if the deployment lasted for years.

I mean the appeals court claimed that because you left the children frequently with your mother that no substantial change of circumstances would occur if you decided to let them live with your mother while you were being deployed...thus, what's to stop ANY court from using that logic for any deployment situation...and I can see where kids could be left with girlfriends, boyfriends, friendly neighbors, steppersons, etc., for very long periods of time under that ruling...and it would clearly be an erosion of parental rights by the states to allow that to happen...

The non-custodial parent in ANY deployment situation should AUTOMATICALLY be the default custodial parent unless extraordinary circumstances exist and that should be a burden that the deployed custodial parent should be forced to prove...not the other way around...

People need to think about these things when they take these cases to court and how a ruling like yours could impact future situations involving children and deployed parents. Why didn't you just offer your ex Joint Custody with your mother? That might have satisfed her and saved everyone a lot of trouble which this new ruling, if not overturned by a higher court and I assumed it wasn't, could cause people...
2:50 AM
Mike said...
Thanks for being more understanding,
I have had Joint Custody with her and before my deployment I had placement. After being Deployed the courts gave her placement and I have not had anything since and now I will not have placement again. Unless my kids elect to live with me. That is what my boy is talking about now.
The only reason I was willing to have my mother take the kids during my deployment was to make it easy on them and everyone. I had a gut feeling what she would do if I left the kids with the ex. After the court gave her the kid it all came true. I had a very hard time talking with the kids and seeing them on my time off. The kids had a calling card and when It ran out she wanted me to buy them new ones and everything else was at my expence and she was getting about $800 a month support for the kids and did not spend it on them. and I still have problems with her.
The thing that bugs me is that people like her can ly in court and get away with it and don't feel bad about it. I could not live with my self if I did that.
Now that the supreme court ruled like this, it just opened it up to other to do the same whether it is male or female.
I hope that it don't happen to others.
6:18 PM
NYMOM said...
"Now that the supreme court ruled like this, it just opened it up to other to do the same whether it is male or female.

I hope that it don't happen to others."

I don't understand however the ruling I posted overturned the first Judge's change of custody to her and placed the kids back with you...it claimed that you putting the kids with your mother while you deployed was NOT a significant change of circumstances that warranted a change in custody...

So did she appeal it and to what court...as wasn't your appeal the final state appeal allowed????
12:23 AM
Anonymous said...
She had the Iowa Supreme Court Review the Iowa Court of Appeals outcome and the Iowa Supreme Court reversed it and gave her the kids
4:55 PM
NYMOM said...
Okay now I understand...

I do feel that this was the correct decision and I think if you stop for a moment and think about it, you'd agree...however, I don't understand why you pay such high child support to her; $800 monthly on a soldier's wages is a LOT...

Can't you get that modified downward until you are back?

Also isn't this temporary custody ONLY...since as I understood the intial ruling was temporary custody with her until you got home and then it was open for review at that time...

Which is fair...

I mean even if you don't get primary placement back, doesn't your state have the designation of Joint Legal and Physical Custody where BOTH parents have the children for equal parenting time...

Frankly I don't know why you didn't go for this sort of compromise to begin with, where her and your mother SHARED Joint Physical...At that time she probably would have accepted that and then you could have just sent your mother money for the parenting times the children were with her and your ex would have paid the childrens' expenses during her parenting times...

So neither one of you would have been paying child support to the other...just supporting your kids via the parenting agreement when they were in the different households...

I think this could still be a possibility when you get back as few courts would punish a veteran for being deployed; by making him totally uncustodial once he was back home...

Think about it anyway...sometimes people are more reasonable then you think and everything does NOT have to go through the courts...sometimes you can negotiate...

Just because your ex was irresponsible when the children were young, doesn't mean that NO redemption is possible for her NOW...People change as they age and she might be a loving mother, and more responsible person NOW then she was at the time of your divorce...thus there remains the possibility that BOTH of you can work together when you get home to raise your children...

After all you want your children to see an example of adults working things out, not having to enter court to settle things ALL the time...remember 50% of first marriages end in divorce today so when your children get married (and hopefully they will) you'll want to have set an example for them that no matter what happens, adults can always discuss these issues and come to logical decisions...everything does NOT have to be court ordered for people to do the right thing does it?

Anyway, last point...although I disagreed with the President's decision to go to war in Iraq I support all military persons involved in this 100% and just want to personally thank you for taking on the burdens imposed by this war upon you...

I will continue to hope that you return safely home and that you are able to convince your ex that custody should be shared between you and her...as it would be unfair for you to be relegated to being a visitor in your child's life just because you were called to serve your country.

Anyway, good luck...stay safe...
9:33 PM
mike said...
I have been home since sept 2003 and that is when the courts gave her full physical custody and Nov.15 2004 the Iowa Appeals Court reverted and remended which was good for me and other soldiers like me, but the Iowa Supreme court sided with the District Courts which was not good for me.
My mother only was going to take care of the kids when I was gone for that year. I gave my mother full legal rights to all my income, so she could support the kids when I was gone and nothing change for the ex. I was like my mother was me for a year. The ex had all her rights for the kids just like I was home. She had every Wed. and every other weekend and 4 weeks when ever it worked out for her. Nothing would change but the house and who was in the house. It was supposed to be a disruptive as posible. Well as you can tell that did not work for her and that is when it all started. She went to court for this.
7:11 AM
NYMOM said...
Well I hate to say it but yes, I can see it...

Women don't have children to see them EOW weekend and on Wednesday and once women realize this is what could happen, they'll stop having children...it's that simple...Just as women have abortions rather then carry a child to term to give up for adoption...

It's the same principle...

We CANNOT continue doing this to women as few will have kids and then what happens?

Then we're heading into extinction.

Sorry, it's just the way it is...
9:14 AM
Anonymous said...
"Women don't have children to see them EOW weekend and on Wednesday and once women realize this is what could happen, they'll stop having children...it's that simple..."

Yes, it's that simple. And it's the same reason by which men will stop having children.

"Just as women have abortions rather then carry a child to term to give up for adoption..."

"Mine or nobody else's". Great justification for a murder.
9:03 PM
NYMOM said...
"Yes, it's that simple. And it's the same reason by which men will stop having children."

Men don't have children...or must I conduct a simple biology class for you too now...
11:44 PM
Anonymous said...
"Men don't have children...or must I conduct a simple biology class for you too now..."

Ok, then leave men alone and go and have children all by yourself.
9:14 AM
Anonymous said...
I am in the military presently and after reading this ruling of Mike losing sole conservatorship over his children after being activated to service his country, I am making plans to get out. I am sole conservator of my two boys and there is no way in hell I will leave custody to their father. I have been divorsed for 5 years and he has not paid a single cent of child support for his children. he doesnot even offer any help. He is always unemployeed. I feel that Mike had all rights to give his mother TEMP CUSTODY. I personally now his ex and she would either leave the kids with who ever. These kids at a very young age were seen several time running around town unsupervised. This was when she had them for the weekend. Then she would go out whoring around. Plus she hardly ever paid her portion (little) support she was suppose to pay. Now that she is living with a man that is abusive to the boy she wants custody and Mike to pay support. I think this is all wrong. It is suppose to be in the well being of the children. She disrupted the kids living environment, pulling them out of school where they have gone to for a long time and moved them to a schoool where they do not like. t is all wrong.
7:48 PM
mike said...
This is interesting for another to say stuff like that. Now the boy wants to live with me but the ex will not allow him to and all she does it drags this out so he can't play sports or live with me.
I would really like for you to contact my lawyer and tell him what you see. Maybe things will work out
1:22 PM
NYMOM said...
Well this is a totally different story as neglect or abuse should ALWAYS be grounds for losing custody.

Unfortunately that wasn't the original issue that this post was about and the father in this case, 'Mike' as you call him NEVER mentioned abuse. This was strictly a case about deployment and whether or not it constituted a change in circumstance which warranted a switch in custody to the other parent. I still say it does and so does the court.

AND no, I do not agree with you that the custodial parent has the right to decide that they can just hand their kids off to someone other then the other parent when they deploy. Sorry but that should NOT be allowed.

So in your case, if you do NOT wish to be deployed and have to hand your kids over to what you paint as an uncaring father, then yes, you should leave the military. Actually I'm surprised this did NOT occur to you before now; as why would you risk your children winding up in a situation where they would have to live with an uncaring person??? You should have taken EXTRA care with your occupation knowing their father didn't care about them to ensure they would never face the situation Mike's children are currently in.

What were you thinking???

I have to be honest I consider it somewhat irresponsible for PARENTS to be in the military; as you can be deployed at ANY time and these are the sorts of situations that your children face when this deployment business happens.

Actually you might not even be able to get out of the military right away now because we are at war. So you have placed your children at risk. Same with Mike. According to you his son is running unsupervised all over the place now because he didn't properly plan his life and factor in what COULD happen to his children in the event of deployment.

When you are responsible for children there are MANY things you can no longer do. Dangerous professions, jobs that require a lot of travel or staying out late and probably the military because of the threat of deployment at ANYTIME...ANYTIME...

This is why traditionally the best parent was probably the most boring parent, who was at home with no life or interests of their own, just hanging around the house, cooking, cleaning and planning their lives around their kids' schedule.

Sorry, but I find that people who have fantastically interesting and busy lives generally don't make very good mothers and that's what children ultimately NEED. That boring person, with nothing very interesting going on in her own life so she fixiates on her childrens' lives and makes their life better at the cost of her own.

Our children suffer when we get away from this model.

All I can say to you two now is good luck with straightening out your situations. Hopefully your children won't suffer too much until that happens. Sorry.
12:02 PM
Anonymous said...
You seem to forget that we are divorced and do not have the option to stay home and be a boring parent. Do not tell me that i am not a good parent because I am out in the real world by myself with 2 kids to support. I make good decision in the best interest of my children. You are completely out of line. You must have been that boring parent that stays home and sits infront of the TV while your kids are out running the neighborhood unsupervised. My life revolves around my children. If you asked them they will tell you that I attend every school event, feed them, cloth them, bath them, entertain them. And for me to do all this I do have to sacrafice a lot of time with them to have 3 jobs to support them. Once again I am doing this all on my own w/o support and family help. Yes the military is my decision but I made that decision before kids. It is a job just like any other, but we are fighting for YOUR freedom.
8:08 AM
Anonymous said...
First off let me say that I am a single father and parent to a 15 year old boy.

I have been in and out of Court for the last 12 years for various custody arrangements. Mother and I disagree on parenting styles.

As I read both Mothers rights and Fathers rights oriented material frequently and I find it curious that throughout history the legalities of custody are always pitting Mothers and Fathers. There are periods in history where Mothers get custody 9 out of 10 times and there are times when the opposite is true.

We as parents need to ask ourselves why the Courts cannot or will not allow both parents to have equal rights to their children as the standard.

Perhaps if Mothers and Fathers could agree instead of fighting over custody we would need less Courtrooms.
12:39 PM
NYMOM said...
EVERY period of history has given all mothers defacto custody of any and all young. How could it be otherwise???? We would have died out long ago as a people if this were not the case as men would probably have eaten any young produced by women like bears do...

Recently men have given themselves legal custody of children to control their estates and property but that's relatively recent in human history.

Anyway, we are not making the same contribution, taking the same risk, making the same investment in children, so why in the world would men think they should have the same rights as mothers do?

This is what I don't understand????

You've given yourself these rights through these phony legal concepts men have created to benefit themselves, but they have no basis in natural law.

You've rigged the jury in other words and only get away with this because women don't have the power to stop you. But if you were doing this to each other, there would have been war over it already as men kill each other every day over far less infringement on their rights, far less. You kill each other over who can plant an olive tree on a piece of land yet think it's okay to lay claim to some mother's baby??? You're lucky women have no power, just lucky...

As the system you have rigged is by no means, natural or fair.
8:21 PM
Post a Comment

More Creepy Gender Neutral Theories

2009-11-04T13:23:00.001-05:00

“The Making of a Modern Dad"
It takes a lot more than testosterone to make a father out of a man by PsychologyToday.com

"Part of a new generation of men who are redefining fatherhood and masculinity, Hudnut, who is 33, is unwilling to accept the role of absentee provider that his father's generation assumed. With mothers often being the breadwinners of the family, many young fathers are deciding that a man's place can also be in the home—part-time or even full-time.

According to census figures, one in four dads takes care of his preschooler during the time the mother is working. The number of children who are raised by a primary-care father is now more than 2 million and counting. By all measures, fathers, even those who work full-time, are more involved in their children's lives than ever before. According to the Families and Work Institute in New York City, fathers now provide three-fourths of the child care mothers do, up from one-half 30 years ago.

Is father nurture natural?

Many men and women wonder if all of this father care is really natural. According to popular perceptions, men are supposedly driven by their hormones (primarily testosterone) to compete for status, to seek out sex and even to be violent—conditions hardly conducive to raising kids. A recent article in Reader's Digest, "Why Men Act As They Do," is subtitled "It's the Testosterone, Stupid." Calling the hormone "a metaphor for masculinity," the article concludes, "...testosterone correlates with risk: physical, criminal, and personal." Don't men's testosterone-induced chest-beating and risk-taking limit their ability to cradle and comfort their children?

Two studies, which was recently published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, suggests that fathers have higher levels of estrogen the well-known female sex hormone -- than other men. The research shows that men go through significant hormonal changes alongside their pregnant partners changes most likely initiated by their partner's pregnancy and ones that even cause some men to experience pregnancylike symptoms such as nausea and weight gain. It seems increasingly clear that just as nature prepares women to be committed moms, it prepares men to be devoted dads.

"I have always suspected that fatherhood has biological effects in some, perhaps all, men," says biologist Sue Carter, distinguished professor at the University of Maryland. "Now here is the first hard evidence that men are biologically prepared for fatherhood."

The studies have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of families, of fatherhood and of masculinity itself. Being a devoted parent is not only important but also natural for men. Indeed, there is evidence that men are biologically involved in their children's lives from the beginning.

Is biology destiny for dads?

It's well known that hormonal changes caused by pregnancy encourage a mother to love and nurture her child. But it has long been assumed that a father's attachment to his child is the result of a more uncertain process, a purely optional emotional bonding that develops over time, often years. Male animals in some species undergo hormonal changes that prime them for parenting. But do human dads? The two studies, conducted at Memorial University and Queens University in Canada, suggest that human dads do.

In the original study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, psychologist Anne Storey and her colleagues took blood samples from 34 couples at different times during pregnancy and shortly after birth. The researchers chose to monitor three specific hormones because of their links to nurturing behavior in human mothers and in animal fathers.

Parke believes that the research suggests something even more radical: "Men are much more androgynous than we think. We have the capability to be aggressive and nurturing. The traditional view of men as predominantly aggressive really sells men short and denies their capability to experience the range of human emotions.

The research suggests that a man's hormones may play an important role in helping him experience this full range of emotions especially in becoming a loving and devoted dad. In fact, it offers the first evidence that to nurture is part of man's nature.
content by:

By Douglas Carlton Abrams

Last Reviewed: 24 May 2005

Psychology Today © Copyright 1991 – 2005”

People can read the article in its entirety following the link, as I just posted excerpts but it’s pretty clear where this is going.

One, it’s another of the continuing attempts to usurp women from the unique role that God, Evolution, nature etc., has designated as ours, which is as the mother of our children, the ONLY MOTHER. Allowing this re-definition of bonding to pass unchallenged can result in unrelated men or anybody really who is just hanging around a mother a lot during a pregnancy to suddenly claim they ‘bonded’ with a child and thus gain standing for a custody challenge as soon as child is born.

Even the clever wording in the article making no mention whatsoever of bonding vis-a-vis the mother carrying her child but only referring to 'hormonal changes' in the bloodstream has the potential to wreck havoc on the proper definition of bonding as a process that goes on inutero between mother and child ONLY. Like following the logic of this article, let's just give someone a shot and then just anybody can be your kid's mother.

Two, it has the potential to disenfranchise biological fathers as well who are not around during a child’s pregnancy, maybe don’t even know about it. So because they didn’t bond and maybe some other guy did, now’s he’s designated as the ‘bonded’ father. Actually biological fathers are at even more risk of losing legal rights through this nonsense, as they cannot even file for paternity UNTIL the child is is born. Meanwhile Mr. Bonding through Osmosis is there every day slowing absorbing a biological father’s legal rights.

It’s like something out of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really with the Borg or some such assimilating your kid before you even know you have one, actually before you do have one.

Hey everybody, I'm 3 of 5 in the family tree now.

Frankly, I find it positively creepy.

Three, allowing unrelated persons to gain legal standing for a custody challenge through this sort of psychobabble nonsense puts many children at risk. I’m sorry to say it but children have become very valuable commodities today, used by many people to gain all sorts of advantage from child support payments, a shot at citizenship or even tax benefits of one kind or another. Barring abuse or neglect, biological parents should be the only guardians, custodians, caretakers, whatever of children that can legally exist. Not some self-proclaimed, quasi-bonded individual entering out of left field. Based upon some new gender-neutralized feminist definition of bonding through osmosis that has suddenly taken place, I can see a whole new category of parent emerging from this.

Again, creepy as all getout.

Last, but not least, this is just more of the campaign by these gender-neutralized feminists to continue building the androgynous society that is so dear to their hearts.

Men and women who go on to support this nonsense risk having new definitions of legal parenthood passed that could ultimately mean a room mate or boyfriend having standing to go to court and seek custody based upon this new creepy definition of bonding, if it’s accepted by the courts.

Frankly, why wouldn’t it be as our courts have accepted every other nutty idea that has come down the pike to them so far.

I can accept a unrelated person who invests time in raising a child being designated a psychological parent. But we already have this legal definition that Judges can use to designate a person as a parent because they have spent the requisite time with a child (usually around two years or so). But this is a totally different animal they’ve dredged up now. Trying to designate someone as a parent even BEFORE they put the time in based upon the fact that they hung around the mother during her pregnancy?

Please.

This is total creepy nonsense.

As Nancy Reagan often said, let’s just say no.

Unexpected Follow-up to Old Post...

2009-10-08T13:02:00.002-04:00

I always like it when a principal involved in one of these cases makes an unexpected quest appearance on my blog to fill everyone in on the aftermath of these situations, particularly the so-called 'parental abduction' cases. Here's a good example.

Now I never said the recreational sperm donor in this case was a monster, an asshole maybe, but not a monster and there is a difference. BUT now I see I was completely wrong. In fact, this character is a dangerous man who should NEVER have been allowed any court-ordered contact...

Here's one result of the whole thing...

Fortunately this girl wasn't seriously injured by the flying ashtray.

I wish her good luck with her future...

Friday, December 24, 2004

Inappropriate Outcome for Various Reasons...

The outcome in this case was only partially correct.

Custody going to the girl's mother was correct...

However child support should NOT have been awarded to the mother...

Nor should visitation have been awarded to the sperm donor in this case.

First of all, marriage is the framework that all societies have set up to protect the rights of fathers and the rest of the surrounding community vis-a-vis children. Men who chose to procreate outside marriage take the risk that they will have no legal rights to any children created outside of that framework and that's the way it should be, as a two-second sperm donation in the back seat of a car or in a drunken encounter during a one-night stand should NOT entitle you to rights...

I'm sorry but a accidental sperm donor is NOT a father, nor should he be treated as one.

This mother fled nine years ago because our current public policy enables men, who have not followed through on their responsibilities as fathers to still get a chance to be what I call a 'half-a@@ed dad"...He doesn't marry the mother and/or make any real public or financial commitment to the woman taking all the risk of bearing his children, leaving that for the rest of us to pick up the tab for that, but as soon as the child is born he is suddenly allowed to emerge and accept laurel leaves as a 'father'...

This after doing nothing outside of a two-minute sperm donation...

It's ridiculous...

Men who do NOT marry the mothers of children should NOT be allowed any legal rights to these children. Of course, they should not be forced into paying child support either...I suggest that perhaps we should change the rules of engagement by denying any individual person the right to go to court for either visitation or child support UNLESS they are married...ONLY the STATE should be allowed the option of obtaining support from a never-married father.

This way fathers who insist on continuing to procreate with mothers and creating children neither can support can still be held financially responsible for said children as the STATE can go to court to get reimbursement for public benefits given to the child BUT never-married parents cannot do so...so there will be no financial incentive for the self-supporting single parent to have children out of wedlock unless they can support them alone, as they won't be able to sue a never-married parent for custody, child support, or visitation...

NOR will a never-married father be allowed to emotionally abuse the mothers of their children by holding these ongoing custody battles over their heads.

AT the same time, society (all the rest of us) will not have to pay for children of parents who cannot support them as the STATE, representing taxpayers can STILL go after reimbursement for public benefits.

Whatever private arrangements parents make between themselves is fine but neither will be allowed into court unless a marriage license is produced. As let's face it people. what is the incentive for men to get married if they can get the EXACT SAME LEGAL RIGHTS AS A MARRIED MAN TO CHILDREN SIMPLY BY GETTING THEIR NAME ON A PIECE OF PAPER...

Answer: NONE...

This public policy change will cut down on MUCH of this nonsense going on lately, most of which appears to be generated by these never-married couples situations where accidental or recreational sperm donors have been given the same rights as a child's mother.

This woman has stated that she 'abducted' her then 5 year old daughter (not that I recognize the concept even, that a mother could ever abduct her own child) because she was afraid that the she could NOT afford the cost of an expensive legal battle to retain custody of her daughter and this is NOT an idle fear. Most non-custodial mothers come from our most backward regions, the South and West and most of them are very low income women...so clearly her fear was very well justified.

In my opinion, ANY custody fight instigated by a man is a form of extreme emotional abuse...unless the child's mother is abusive or neglectful...

For eons mothers have been considered the obvious, best and most natural guardian for the young of every species, including our own, and I see no reason for a bunch of men trying to avoid paying child support and the social engineers who continue to support them to make any change in that arrangement...

NONE..

All interested parties should forward a letter to the prosecutor's office that handled this case congratulating them on getting it HALF-RIGHT anyway and stating our opinion on how the rest of the decison should have been handled.

The address is:

Prosecutor's Office
Don Hill Administration Building
20 South Street, 4th Floor
Newark, OH 43055

Thanks....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mom obtains custody, child support

Former missing girl wants to stay with mother

By LACHELLE SEYMOURAdvocate Reporter

NEWARK -- Sheri Lyn Taylor, a Johnstown woman who allegedly disappeared from her California home nine years ago with her daughter, retained residential custody of the girl Monday after six hours of negotiations.

Taylor will also receive child support from the girl's father, David Brancheau, who will have regular visitation rights.

Authorities allege Taylor left California with her daughter Vanesa Brancheau, in 1995, gave her the assumed name of Ariel Rose Taylor, and lived in Kansas City, Mo., Daytona Beach, Fla., and Pataskala before moving to Johnstown.

She claims she left California because she was afraid David could harm them.

The two were found living in Johnstown in July after a woman recognized Vanesa's picture from the Web site of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Taylor received temporary physical custody of her daughter, now 14, in September after a two-day hearing in front of Licking County Juvenile Judge Robert Hoover.

David Brancheau, of Auburn Hills, Mich., will pay $425 per month in child support, plus processing fees. He can visit with his daughter every fifth weekend of the year, and four to six weeks in the summer.

Brancheau says the final agreement rewards Taylor for keeping his child away from him.

"I feel I had 14 years of parental alienation I didn't cause, and I'm left holding the bag," he said.

He went along with the plan because Vanesa wanted to live with her mother, he said.

Vanesa will be covered under her mother's health insurance plans, but David Brancheau will be temporarily responsible for 67 percent of any uncovered extraordinary expenses for the girl.

Both parents will share travel necessary for extended visitations, like those during holidays or spring and summer break, and will pay attorney and court fees.

Taylor and Brancheau must also avoid making "disparaging" remarks about each other.

Although Taylor's custody issue appears to be over, she faces felony charges of forgery and interference with custody for actions allegedly taken during her nine-year run from her daughter's father.

Taylor allegedly used false documents for school enrollment in the Southwest Licking School District, sparking the forgery charge.

Last month, Taylor chose to be charged by a bill of information, which waived her rights to indictment and review by jury.

Taylor's attorney, John OBora, said he is happy with the outcome of the custody hearing, but declined to comment further citing Taylor's upcoming review for the diversion program.

Acceptance into that program would allow her to avoid jail time for the felony charges and would be similar to serving probation.

OBora believes his client would be a good candidate for diversion, but said she will likely enter a plea if she is not accepted.

Reporter Lachelle Seymour can be reached at (740) 328-8546 or lseymour@nncogannett.com

posted by NYMOM | Friday, December 24, 2004
6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I personally know the man and I am very happy that Vanessa is staying with her mom. Sheri did the right thing protecting her child. She did what any mother would do.
9:18 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am happy for Ms. Taylor and her daughter, but would like to point out that not all women in a situation like Ms. Taylor's are that lucky.
I left my husband after he physically and verbally abused me while I was 4 1/2 months pregnant with our child. We separated and he knew where I lived but I lived my life in fear that he may come and hurt me again and that he may cause me to lose the baby I was carrying. After being out of our lives for 3 1/2 years my ex went behind my back to file for custody (EVEN THOUGH HE HAD NEVER MET OUR CHILD OR EVER PARENTED BEFORE) and won!! The judge had ordered him full custody and that I pay him for back child support without him ever having raised our child.
10:53 PM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Believe it or not this is very TYPICAL today...

For instance, a lot of never-married mothers do not realize that if they do NOT establish legal custody through a court order that ANYTIME, ANYTIME even 5 or 10 years after the child's birth, the father can do just what you said...Go to court and get custody...When you find out is when the police are driving up to snatch your baby away, that can be the first you hear of it...

AND this could happen even if they are not on the birth certificate, by the way. Just to let other never-married mothers know if they read this...

This is something I found out recently from a young never-married mother(although I had heard it before from a man who worked in law enforcement, I just didn't beleive it). This young mother whose b/f was in Iraq...he returned two weeks after the birth so was not even named on the birth certificate because he wasn't here to sign any paternity papers...

Well, guess what, that didn't matter in the least, he just took the child for a 'day visit' to his family he claimed and then disappear with a few weeks old infant for two weeks...no permission, request of mother, telephone call, nothing...She called every agency and number in the state including her local police and guess what, even though she had the legal birth certificate w/o anyone's name on it but hers, no one PAID the slightly attention to her...NO ONE...

Luckily he decided to return the baby, otherwise it could have been a situation similar to yours...

Regarding married women like yourself, well from the time of conception the husband is considered the father in some states. FROM THE TIME OF CONCEPTION...

I assume you just never bothered filing with the courts for custody of your child and your ex-husband just wrote away for the birth certificate (which by rights, he is entitled to) since by law he is the legal father unless and until someone informed the courts differently.

Then he simply filed for custody himself...

My ex-husband did the same thing...he went down and filed for divorce and came to serve me the papers at work...He stipulated custody to ME however (as was very common in the days before high child support, actually I got NO child support and NEVER met any women who did, that's the way it was then)...

Today I would probably have been a non-custodial mother, tricked out of my child, just like you...

So, all your ex had to do was bring the birth certficate to court and file for custody himself...if you filed nothing previously, he would be awarded it...many, many men do this to unsuspecting mothers and get custody of children this way...

I have heard from dozens of mothers in your situation, dozens of them...and even the FBI said about 150,000 fathers a year abduct children, but the time they have the children abducted is shorter then when mothers have them, a few weeks for fathers versus 4 years for mothers...

Initially I thought this was because the fathers returned the children; NOW however I believe it's because they get custody through what someone called a judicially-sanctioned abduction (just what happened to you) and then are scratched off the FBI's list...so it no longer counts as an abduction...

As far as I'm concerned the legal system allowed your child to be abducted...pure and simple...

Well, I have been looking for someone to help me with this blog so if you have some time and are interested, let me know...I've closed most of my comments sections in May and June because of some harrassment from some mens/fathers rights advocates but will open them again in a while...

So let me know...

Good luck in your personal situaton...

Sorry I can't be more help...
2:20 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have followed this case closely. I can say that there is no excuse for a four year old girl to catch a sexually transmitted disease while in her mother's care. This is the sole reason that custody was pursued by the father not some personal vendetta against her mother. In the end it is viewed politically correct for a mother to be married to two men at the same time and still regain custody of the child. This is long ancient history but the court systems must change to work for the rights of both parents and to stop the injustices against fathers who wish to have custody of their children. There has never been any mention of the parental ailenation that took place and is not considered a crime but it is considered emotional abuse. This is just my take on this .
10:27 PM
Blogger NYMOM said...

Oh please.

I've never met the father who either had or tried to get custody who didn't claim some nonsense like this about the mother. This is baloney. Men pursue custody 99% of the time to get out of paying child support and/or in order to get the financial tax benefits/credits, etc., that flow to the custodial parent...this is the usual crap driven by greedy men masquerading as concerned fathers.
9:44 AM
Anonymous Vanesa "Ariel" Taylor said...

Hello, My name is "Ariel" Vanesa Taylor, and i have no way of proving it to you, however i will let you know that David Brancheau, my father, did not treat my mother or i the way a father or "boyfriend" should. When i first met David/my father, he did not really seem interested in me at all. In fact i will let you know a little story about him. On one of my "visits" with him, we went to chicago to meet his sister and her husband for thanksgiving. On the later half of the trip we had stayed in a hilton hotel. One night he got upset at me because i kept talking about my mother(i was only 14 at the age and was confused why she had been thrown in jail). He had taken one of the hotel clocks and thrown it at me and his then wife Danielle( Danielle and David are now divorced and they did have a kid(my stepbrother Daniel) Danielle now resides in Brazil with Daniel. Is this what you think a beginning father should be? Is that how men act? If so then i am happy i never had a father in the first place. I love my mother to death and i wouldn't replace her for the world. She gave up her youth for me. She gave up work for me. She even gave up her freedom to take care of me. I am now in college and i am taken care of by my loving family. I wouldn't trade them either. If anyone has anything else to say, well say it. However none of you really know the situation first hand, and i wish i could tell off some of the media for making David this great man, because he isn't. He is just some pissed off ex-boyfriend who wanted to get back at my mum, and he tried to hurt her by hurting me. I never knew how to hate til i met David Brancheau. I hope he knows that. I hate him, and maybe someday when i am older and no longer want to punch him in his face for not keeping me as his child (he disowned me) then maybe i may sit down over a coffee and talk with him. Until then, well, there really isn't much else to say.
8:25 PM

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Columbia Study for your reviews...

2009-07-29T16:58:00.002-04:00

I finally found this study, it took a while since it was posted all the way back in 2005...I guess time flies when you're blogging.

Anyway, I love the spin they put on it: men are deciding to have fewer children due to higher child support...like men are the ones who make these decisions. It reminds me of the joke about how men change a light bulb: they just stand there and wait for the world to turn around them and twist the bulb in...self-centered...

Well we finally have a study linking child support enforcement to a lowering of single mother birth rates.

“Researchers at the University of Washington and Columbia University said Friday that child support laws' power to reduce single parenthood is an unintended consequence of a policy designed to help children and cut public welfare costs.”

Often the unintended effects are bad, so it's refreshing to see that," said lead study author Robert Plotnick, a University of Washington professor of public affairs. "Women living in states that do a better job of enforcing child support are less likely to become an unwed mother."

The really GOOD NEWS is that this clearly demonstrates that women do NOT have children to get child support; as the states that collect the MOST child support have demonstrated a 20% DROP in single motherhood. So if women were having kids to collect support you would see just the opposite happen with a 20% increase in single mothers to match the child support collected.

So another urban myth shot down.

This could be more BAD NEWS for those who hate mothers and like to spread lies about us.

AND MORE BAD NEWS:

Additional research will now be required to ascertain if actual population NUMBERS in any particular community are being impacted OR if this study's results just means more mothers getting married now, so no drop in overall population for any community has occurred. Although somehow I suspect this drop in numbers of single mothers is mainly translating into lower population within the African-American community.

AND one must always suspect any public policy where this is the ultimate outcome.

Thus the search for truth continues.

Study Ties State Laws, Unwed Child Births

By REBECCA COOK, Associated Press Writer

Sat Jun 18, 2005, 1:52 PM ET SEATTLE - Tough child support laws may dissuade men from becoming unwed fathers, as states with the most stringent laws and strict enforcement have up to 20 percent fewer out-of-wedlock births, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Washington and Columbia University said Friday that child support laws' power to reduce single parenthood is an unintended consequence of a policy designed to help children and cut public welfare costs.

"Often the unintended effects are bad, so it's refreshing to see that," said lead study author Robert Plotnick, a University of Washington professor of public affairs. "Women living in states that do a better job of enforcing child support are less likely to become an unwed mother."

The percentage of unmarried births in the United States has increased from 10 percent in the 1960s to about a third of all births today. Because children of single parents run a higher risk of poverty, academic failure and other problems, lawmakers are always seeking policies that will discourage unwed births — usually focusing on the mothers.

Researchers said their study recognizes the father's responsibility. "Decisions about sexual intercourse and marriage involve two people," said study co-author Irwin Garfinkel, a Columbia University professor and one of the nation's top experts on child support. The study, which has not yet been published, looked at a nationwide sample of 5,195 women of childbearing age using data from 1980-1993.

It didn't show whether tougher child support laws prevented pregnancies or encouraged marriage. Plotnick said the data limited the researchers to observing a strong correlation between tough child support enforcement and fewer out-of-wedlock births. Whether that's caused by fewer unmarried people getting pregnant or more couples marrying when the woman is expecting, he could not say. But he said the findings warrant further study.

"It's been very hard to find conventional programs that reduce unwed childbearing that work," Plotnick said Friday. "If you found a program cutting nonmarried births by 20 percent, you'd be happy."

Researchers noted wide disparities in child support policies. For example, in 2002 — the most recent year for which data were available — only one state, New Jersey, collected at least 80 percent of owed child support.

According to Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, 31 states collected 41 percent to 60 percent of child support orders. The District of Columbia collected less than 20 percent of all child support owed.

So-called Progressive Rulings Undermine Mothers' and Childrens' Rights

2009-07-29T08:42:00.002-04:00

Virago, I was looking for some old posts of mine on how adoption of western legal systems in both Japan and Lebanon have been negatively impacting mothers and children in custody cases and I came across this...and I thought I'd re-post it...

I'm still searching for those other posts and the one on the Columbia University research...

But this one was interesting.

More of the On-going Manipulations of Men in their Never-Ending Attempts to be in Charge of Everything Again

Court hands sisters over to mother's lesbian lover

By Nick Britten
(Filed: 07/04/2006)

Two young sisters at the centre of a bitter custody battle were taken from their biological mother yesterday and sent to live with her former lesbian lover following a landmark court ruling.

The Court of Appeal ruled that although the natural mother had blood ties to the girls, that would no longer be deemed an advantage when both parties had brought the children up.

Because of their joint involvement they might both be considered the "natural parent", Lord Justice Thorpe said. The girls would be unable to distinguish between them on biological grounds.

The ruling marks a shift from the traditional view that the biological parent holds an advantage in custody battles.

The judge said: "We have moved into a world where norms that seemed safe 20 or more years ago no longer run. In the eyes of the child, the natural parent may be a non-biological parent who, by virtue of long settled care, has become the psychological parent."

The girls' natural mother, referred to as CG, had a seven-year relationship with her girlfriend, referred to as CW. She gave birth to the seven- and four-year-old sisters, known as A and B, via artificial insemination.

None of the parties can be identified to protect the girls' anonymity.

The court heard that the relationship broke down in 2002 and CG moved to a neighbouring house until she found a new lesbian partner in Leicester. They recently "married" in a civil partnership.

CW, 47, was denied access and any parental responsibility by a county court judge but this was overturned by the Court of Appeal last April and she was granted shared contact.

The judges said shared responsibility was "vital" for the girls' psychological health.

But as the children spent their summer holidays with CW, CG, a "headstrong and selfish" teacher, and her new partner secretly sold their house in Leicester and bought one in Cornwall, registering the children in a new school, a move the judges called "an appalling decision made in an afternoon". It was "a flagrant breach of the court's control of the arrangements for the children and an elaborate deception of CW".

When the family was tracked down, the High Court granted primary care of the children to the former partner, a decision ratified by the Court of Appeal yesterday.

Lord Justice Thorpe, dismissing the appeal, said that same-sex partners should have the same rights as estranged heterosexual couples, and that the child's views on which partner was the psychological parent should be considered.

Lady Justice Hallet said she dismissed the appeal but "with a degree of hesitation".

"I am very concerned at the prospect of removing these children from the primary care of their only identifiable biological parent who has been their primary carer for most of the young lives and in whose care they appear to be happy and thriving."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SJGG2NJVRAPTFQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2006/04/07/nlesbian07.xml

Well it’s nice to see that this woman Lady Justice Hallet, had doubts, YET went along with the ruling anyway. How many ways can we say useless in English?

Once again demonstrating to mothers that putting other women into positions of power is no guarantee of any mercy being shown either to us or our children. Since some of the most vicious custody rulings against mothers have been handed down by other women.

Anyway, people are acting so stunned about this ruling but it’s nothing new, at least not in the US anyway and generally whatever we do here eventually finds it way to UK and every other country in western civilization.

So it was just a question of time before this lastest gender neutralized feminist fad hit British shores as well.

American Judges have been tossing out the whole notion of the mother/child bond for the last decade or so now and awarding children to live-in boyfriends (Christopher Rhodes perfect example: live in boyfriend who wanted a baby to play with, probably like you pick out a cute puppy at the pet shop), step persons, grandparents, recreational sperm donors missing in action for years. Probably even nannies and/or school teachers, a friendly neighbor will be eligible for custody next. That will be the next logical step in the progression of this mother-envy from a group of jealous male misfits and gender-neutralized feminists determined to destroy the last vestige of the bond between mother and child.

This is just more of the continuing disrespect and envy of men for mothers’ more important role in the bringing forth of life . Men cannot stand not being the center of the universe in something, so this is more of their never-ending attempts to neutralize mothers, more of their attention getting techniques such as this fixation with clown fish, penguins, other nonsense to give themselves a bigger role then merited by their actual real-life contribution.

As I have said in past posts, men are using these lesbian cases to get precedent set which will eventually negatively impact all mothers, both gay and straight.

Lesbians don’t appear to understand that going to court and winning these short-term victories ultimately winds up empowering MEN over WOMEN, each time they win a case.

This will eventually result in mothers having LESS RIGHTS overall, all mothers, BOTH gay and straight. It’s just a question of time before every one of these rulings will backfire on ALL mothers, ALL OF THEM. AND then everyone will be sitting around saying “how did that happen”…Well we can look back to this ruling and a 101 other rulings throughout western civilization that initially appear to be favoring lesbians, but in fact are nothing but men setting the backdrop for a loss of rights, respect, etc., for ALL mothers.

As EACH AND EVERY TIME a Judge tosses aside the biological connection between parent and child (like an old pair of shoes) that’s another nail in all mothers’ coffins as we are the supreme definitive biological connection to children…in spite of the way everyone wishes to paint a mother and father as being exactly alike in every way. In their hearts, I believe men know this to be a lie and this explains why their courts continue throwing out the biological connection to children and painting it as nothing very important. What they should be saying it that it’s not important to men, as their biological connection to children is tenuous, slight; something they sell in Great Britain for 15 lbs., obviously not something very important to them. However, God, evolution and nature obviously decreed only ONE of us to be the bearer of life…and that’s women in her role as mother.

Mother, under natural law, should automatically be deemed the custodian of her children, except in the rare cases of abuse and neglect, however the courts of men will continue to try to defy natural law. Mostly for reasons of envy, jealousy and greediness for the financial gain that comes with having custody of children today.

Additionally, I am going to make a small prediction. In another ten years NO WOMEN will be able to get impregnanted through anonymous insemination. NONE. Actually last year Great Britian made it illegal for a woman to have a child using anonymous insemination and I guarantee that this law will spread. YET now they have the audacity to paint themselves as concerned about lesbian families? This family they just decimated would not have EXISTED today, if it was up to Great Britain. It could NOT have, it would be illegal. Eventually it will probably be deemed some sort of crime to not name a man on the birth certificate of ever child born.

Thus, the gains lesbians thought they were making regarding creating their own families will have disappeared.

YET what will remain behind is the premise that a Judge can decide that the mother/child bond, which has existed since humanity first crawled out of the primal mist, is no longer of very much importance and that the courts of men have the right to hand a mother’s child over to someone else.

That is going to be the lesbian legacy to mothers and children.

Sadly, they are being used by men to pave the way for this continuing war against mothers and children, yet they just don’t see it and continue aiding and abetting these demented, jealous nitwits.

Best of Luck Silverside with your new Blog....

2009-07-21T13:16:00.004-04:00

One of my old posters started her own blog called Dastardy Dads. It's a little gory but I thought I'd post a comment on it when I read this story...however, I couldn't so I put the comment on my blog instead.

Anyway, best of luck with your blog Silverside.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Custodial dad murders 3 children (Taif, Saudi Arabia)
UNNAMED DAD had custody of the children, as is the legal custom in Saudi Arabia. His wife had left him and returned to her father's home. She had wanted, somehow, to get the children back. But that won't happen now that Dad has stabbed two of the children to death, and beheaded the third.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=124700&d=20&m=7&y=2009&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom

Monday 20 July 2009 (27 Rajab 1430)

Soaked in blood, killer dad called cops
Arab News

TAIF: More details have come out in the cold-blooded murder of three children by their father in Al-Qumriyah district of this highland city in the Western Region. According to Sunday’s edition of the local daily Shams, the father is a former military police officer in his 50s who was crippled last year in a car accident that ended his career. His wife left him some time after the accident and went back to live with her family.

After murdering his three children, the man — whose name is not being made public — called police to inform them of his crime and waited at his home, drenched in blood, for the authorities to arrive and arrest him.

Shams described the crime in detail, presumably citing official reports. After his brothers left the house, the man began with his six-year-old daughter, Siham, stabbing her more than 10 times in the chest and abdomen. Five-year-old Raid came next; the father beheaded him. Then the man went after seven-month-old Lamis, stabbing the baby girl to death.

Some neighbors say the father committed the crime after receiving a telephone call from his wife who threatened that she would take the three children from him.
Posted by silverside at 8:10 AM
Labels: child death, custodial dad, murder

Response by NYMOM
I don't know if you are aware of it but under strict Islamic Law a child under the age of 7 or 9 years old is supposed to be in the custody of their mother and her family (in the event or divorce)...

So as usual men want to have it both ways...they want to claim they are strictly religious and go by Sharia law but then they also want to follow the western secular law code to give themselves custody when Sharia law and custom would deny it...

What else is new.

Actually Sharia law codes can be better for mothers of young children then our secular western ones.

Fancy that now!!!!!