actually there are very few issues, including abortion, that are solely women's or men's. Intelligent feminists like former NOW president Karen DeCrow realize this. The fact is that we are all in this life together. Almost invariably, what affects women affects men. So, for example, individually and in the aggregate, if men do more paid work, women will tend to do more of the unpaid domestic chores, and vice versa. Abortion rights impact men in a variety of fairly obvious ways. The absence of abortion rights would too. The idea that any of these is strictly a women's or a men's issue is silly. They may affect us differently, but they still affect us.

Also, feminists for years have claimed to favor sexual equality. You can't support sexual equality and ignore anti-male discrimination in family law, misandry in popular culture, anti-male DV laws and practices, etc. A fair number of feminists realize this and their writing offers a sharp contrast to the nonsense purveyed by Broadsheet, Amanda Marcotte and oh so many others.

It really is OK to pay attention to men and to when we get the short end of the stick and to work towards true sexual equality. You should try it sometime.

But I want to make it clear that the opportunity to prove or disprove paternity by DNA testing is something I absolutely support. As it stands, men do not have this opportunity in a great many cases, which I think we can all agree is an insane way to approach fathers' rights and duties. This bill is not the way to accomplish providing that opportunity because it will never become law, and IMO shouldn't, but another bill which gave men that opportunity would be a good one.

As to paternity fraud, I still can't see that you oppose the practices I outlined in my post. Do you?

No, you're not correct about parents allowing each other to opt out. In fact, very recently a court specifically ruled that such an agreement was void as against public policy. (Unfortunately I can't remember the jurisdiction.) The reason is that the state wants the man's money and is not going to allow the couple to prevent that. If a single mother receives welfare payments, the state goes to the father or whoever she says the father is, for reimbursement even if it's many years after the fact. That's a requirement of federal law and no state is free to ignore it. Oh, and if he pays, he gets parental rights too.

In the case of adoption, where one parent signs off and another signs on, of course a parent may give up parental rights. That happens about 75,000 times a year in stranger-adoption (i.e. not stepparent) cases. But no one can just sign an agreement with a spouse or anyone else opting out of their parental duties. If you want more information, try the Office of Child Support Enforcement. That's a federal agency which is in charge of getting money out of single fathers. In my law and writing careers, I've run into several fathers who had to pay welfare arrearages for children they'd never even heard of for the reason cited in my previous post to you. As to data, I don't have figures, but for every mother on welfare, and there are plenty, there is a state office tasked with finding and getting money from a putative father. How successful they are, I have no idea.

Thanks for the information in your previous post. I didn't know about the difference between child support and income support.

As to termination of parental rights, states terminate fathers' rights without notice all the time for the purpose of adoption. Most states do it by the expedient of the Putative Father Index. Those are indexes maintained by the state health dept or BVS. Basically, every time a single man has sex, he's supposed to file a form with the state telling who his partner was and other pertinent details. If he fails to do this, a child is conceived and the mother places the child for adoption, he is not entitled to notice of the proceedings and his rights are terminated in his absence. Somehow this is considered to constitute due process of law, although I'm not sure how. The irony of course is that, in their zeal to terminate fathers' rights, states ignore the fact that the father may be qualified, and want to care for the child himself. States therefore place for adoption a child who doesn't need adopting and deny qualified parents to a child who does need to be adopted.