And I've told you I'm not writing a family law act for you to concoct soap opera scenarios to 'test' against.
No, you don't get to shed it. You had a discussion and you knew the child might not be yours and you agreed to raise it.
But the point is, the state wasn't party to that discussion and
shouldn't need to be (unless you want to live in a total police state). It is none of the state's business who my girl friend slept with in the weeks around the conception, or how much I knew about it. The only concern for the state is that I claimed fatherhood and no-one else did. For all
they need to know, I had fuller knowledge than the mother (say, she estimates based on the date when it happened that there's an 80% chance that I'm the father but I know or strongly suspect that I'm infertile, which I never told her about and which of course changes the odds - in that case, does
she get to bail out as she never consented to carrying the other guy's child to term and raise them, only I did?).
Of course, in the case of a dispute, the question whether my decision was an informed one (or hers, for that matter) may become relevant, but a DNA test doesn't answer that question and thus doesn't count as evidence that it wasn't.
Why should the state make the automatic assumption, absent any evidence either way, that I didn't know what they didn't know?
- Who is going to carry the burden of evidence if one side claims our little talk didn't happen?
I'm not really sure why you speak about 'one side' claiming it didn't happen. Presumably the scenario is that you want to get out of the commitment you made, so it would only be you claiming the talk didn't happen, right? So, in a he said/she said scenario, it'll be whoever the judge finds more credible.
You are avoiding the question. For all
I know, that's exactly what went on in the OP case: We only heard his side of the story as the mother didn't go to the media with her side, and the court documents are presumably not open to the public as opening them would violate a minor's privacy rights. For all
I know, the mother and her lawyers claimed that he knew at the time of the pregnancy that there's a chance he's not the father, and produced eyewitnesses who remember talking with him about it at the time.
In this scenario, since it is the mother who stands to lose if she claims you took responsibility but she can't prove it, she should get that claim in writing, for evidence purposes.
So to be clear, are you saying that the burden of evidence in such a kind of dispute should always be on the mother's side? No matter how long ago it happened and how inplausible it is that he just found out? No matter even whether they were officially in an open relationship or in a supposedly monogamous one? No matter that none of that is actually the state's business to know?
And if you don't want to sign it, it is probably a good sign that it really does matter to you that this child is your genetic offspring, so you shouldn't sign it and you shouldn't make the commitment.
- If the state finds out that a ten-year-old isn't the child of their legal father, why should the default assumption be that he, the father, didn't know or at least suspect either? Most guys I know have a better idea of their partners' lives than the state does.
Like the Finnish man in the OP?
Maybe he didn't know (we don't actually have her side of the story, so we can't be sure). What we do know is that, even according to his version of the story, he waited half a year after allegedly finding out before filing for annulment - the court may have found that story implausible, or they they may have interpreted the law as suggesting that continuing the status quo for that long constitutes evidence of post-hoc consent. I'm sure there are men who didn't know, whether or not he is one of them. I know there are also men who did know. Do you have actual figures demonstrating which case is more common? Or is it just that one case is more worthy of legal protection than the other because it involves men as the potential victims?
- Does the state get to prosecute me for perjury because I didn't voice my doubts about the biological fatherhood when I formally acknowledged my fatherhood?
When did you formally acknowledge your fatherhood? Are you talking about signing a birth certificate?
- Why do you think potentially harming that kind of families is an acceptable cost for saving this guy's interests?
Harming what kind of family? A father who knows that a child might not be his, but five or ten years later he wants to get out of the commitment? The family has already been harmed and not by the law, but by the infidelity of a wife, and the failing commitment of a man who overestimated his willingness to raise someone else's offspring.
You don't know that. They might have been in an open relationship, or he might have been cheating too with the only substantial difference being that he can't get pregnant from it. At any rate, a law that guarantees good outcomes for people who always make the right choices but miserably fails to produce the best in bad situations people maneuver themselves into is not fit for the real world. You understand that much?
- Do I need to remind you that I personally know two couples with a story like the above, while you had to dig up a once-in-a-decade case from ten time zones away, on the other hemisphere, to make your point?
No, you don't need to remind me, because I remember your anecdote.
My anecdote of what I know to have happened to actual blood-and-flesh people I know (some of them my own blood and flesh) beats your anecdotal case you dug out somehow, of a scenario that's rare enough to make international news, some 15000km from home, hands down.
If you want to stop arguing about anecdotes and talk about data instead, maybe it's time you produce some?
In a world where people never lie in court and/or judges are omniscient and can reliably tell what couples talked about in their bedrooms ten years ago, your ideas might work. To think that that describes the real world is scarily naive, though. In the real world, there is always incomplete knowledge, and the goal of any legislation that's actually going to work most of the time has to be to set up default assumptions and thresholds to minimize the number of cases where incomplete knowledge leads to unjust decisions. If you think you have reasons to believe that what you have in mind does a better job at that than the current Finnish law, that's cool for you, but you haven't shown us those reasons, or fleshed out your proposal in sufficient detail that we might take a stab at working them out ourselves.
And in your world, as is demonstrated above, you have no problem whatsoever about the bio father not being informed he is a bio father.
Can you point me to where such a thing has been demonstrated outside that little head of yours?
Your scenario is completely silent on the violation of his right to know he is a parent.
Who is "he" in this sentence? The guy she had an affair with? For all you know she did tell him.
You think that with a new set of laws, people will continue to act as if they were ruled by the old set of laws, that nobody would change their behaviour or be aware of the consequences of it.
If people always and unambiguously acted within the law, we wouldn't need courts. Yes, I expect there will be legal grey areas and/or cases where absent supernatural abilities by judges, courts will make decisions based on incomplete evidence that are ultimately unjust. Proposing a law without showing awareness of this
fact and without even making an attempt to estimate the harm that could be done by the law and setting it in relation to the harm that is prevented is naive, dishonest, or lazy (possibly more than one descriptor applies).
You think the problem of evidence is solved by legislation simply determining the truth of a scenario instead of a court looking at the individual facts.
I never spoke of not having a court looking at the individual facts (do I have to remind you that you did, though, at one point?). This is about why you think a court will always be able to determine those facts without a shred of doubt, years after the fact, and about what assumptions it can or cannot make when it fails to do so.
