If you do a google you can see where states have suspended a trucker's CDL.

How can a driver earn a living if he is not allowed to drive.

Then there are the "deadbeat" dads going to jail because they were unemployed. So how can they pay up while in jail?

This is less about recouping child support, and more about punishing men.

We abolished debtor's prison ages ago. This is the NEW Debtor's Prison.

Even if it didn't use this self-defeating tactic, the child support system is unfair and needs to be abolished because it separates authority from responsibility. The expense of raising a child happens only if the woman makes two choices after conception that are both exclusively hers (not to abort, and not to give it up for adoption), but the guy bears the costs -- even if she promised that she wouldn't make those choices, or that she was on birth control and wasn't. That's just not right.

The law needs to go back to what it said a century ago -- if the woman wants a child and needs a man to support it, she must simply refuse to have sex before marriage (or use birth control). That way this kind of slavery-by-deception as a means of receiving (NOT "earning") a living will go away, and 30% of all children in our country will no longer be out-of-wedlock welfare kids who have no future.

Amy, I don't agree with taking away a DL or a way to make a living from a guy who owes child support (whether "fallen behind" or just negligent).

But Good Lord, some of the men who read this blog sure love to play victim politics. As far as I can see, if you made a kid and you're not paying for it, I am -- along with other taxpayers. If an evil woman somehow mesmerized you into giving her a case of the babies, sorry. Hasn't happened to me yet, but I'm scrupulous about birth control.

Thanks, Kevin.

Reminders to all:

1. Out-of-wedlock children deserve support just as much as in-wedlock children.

2. Any man could lie and say she tricked him when she didn't.

3. Birth control can FAIL - even when two methods are used at once. All the more reason for men to go online and convince their doctors - and other authorities - that yes, they ARE willing to buy and use new and better male birth control methods. Or are they? If not, refusing to support better male BC and complaining about having to support their own children sounds a lot like having their cake and eating it too.

4. We should NOT be demanding to go back to the days when even MARRIED men could abandon their families and not get pursued by the law for child support. (Back then, men who did that were often not condemned by society, since it was commonly assumed that the only men who did that were somehow "driven to it" by their wives.) If unmarried men were allowed to abandon unwanted children, why wouldn't married men eventually be allowed?

5. Prevention is better than cure. Especially if you're a man who cares about the right of fathers to be involved in their children's lives and taken seriously in general - that is, society will never take that right seriously so long as some men keep loudly demanding for the right to abandon their children.

6. Vasalgel is likely to be far less of a physical or emotional misery than abortion or childbirth/adoption, so, IMO, it's not much of a demand to ask men to use it once it becomes available in the U.S. in 2015.

7. At Bratfree, yummynotmummy recently said:

"I'd like to see some mechanism by which men can get out of an oops situation, in theory, but in practice, how do you prove it was a real oops situation? I meet plenty of duhdies at work who get their wives upduffed, then get turned off by them and start shagging a secretary or whatever. A paper abortion could be used by that kind of a------ to get out of responsibility for a life they wilfully created, but then they changed their mind because they found a younger, slimmer, non-moomy model. They would get to self replicate (og job done) but then have none of the responsibility for it, leaving the women with the c--- work, and skip off into the sunset with new thing, by claiming they were oopsed. While I agree with the principle that nobody should have to raise a child whose existence they did not consent to, I'm pretty sure it would be abused."

BTW, those who claim feminists don't want men to be able to prevent unwanted fatherhood never seem able to name one such person. Whereas Carl Djerassi, inventor of the Pill, recently wrote for Wired: "In several hundred lectures on advances in female contraception, I have frequently encountered aggrieved feminist critics asking: 'Why is there no Pill for men instead of the Pill for women?' "

"They would get to self replicate (og job done) but then have none of the responsibility for it, leaving the women with the c--- work, and skip off into the sunset with new thing, by claiming they were oopsed. "

Lenona, from now on I'm calling you out every time you say it here. Fact: No woman in the Western hemisphere need bear a child if she doesn't want to. Men's options, on the other hand, are: (1) run the risk, and (2) celibacy. And even celibacy won't get them out of the state arbitrarily designating them as fathers anyway, just because male sexuality icky creepy perverted.

To Dave:

You love to ignore the simplest presentations of facts, don't you?

Namely: You apparently completely ignored the roadblocks to American women AND men seeking contraception - or abortion - mentioned in Russell Shorto's famous cover story for the New York Times Magazine that I provided a link to in the thread "Paglia On Choices For Women And Honesty About Their Options." Here it is again:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07contraception.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(If you'd like a shorter, simpler version with excerpts only, here's what sex columnist Dan Savage said about Shorto's piece):

http colon // slog dot thestranger dot com /2006/05/ straight _ rights _ upda

(Or just Google on one of Savage's first phrases in that update: "I’ve been running around with my hair on fire for a year now. I’ve been writing 'Straight Rights Updates' in Savage Love in a desperate attempt to convince heterosexuals that religious and social conservatives aren’t just interested in oppressing gay people.")

What exactly is WRONG with anything that Shorto wrote? Where is your proof?

Do you really want to ignore how conservatives are making it harder and harder for women AND men to avoid unwanted pregnancies until the day when you (or someone you know) go to get the Vasalgel operation only to be told "I won't do that" or "I'm not allowed to do that or even tell you who will"? Or the day that pharmacists won't hand out the male Pill.....

Not to mention that the Western Hemisphere includes countries like El Salvador, where, according to Sam Harris:

"......abortion is now illegal under all circumstances. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. The moment a woman shows up at a hospital with a perforated uterus, indicating that she has had a back-alley abortion, she is shackled to her hospital bed and her body is treated as a crime scene. Forensic doctors soon arrive to examine her womb and cervix. There are women now serving prison sentences thirty years long for terminating their pregnancies. Imagine this, in a country that also stigmatizes the use of contraception as a sin against God."

And in other Western countries, the abortion laws may not be QUITE as harsh, but getting foolproof contraception can be very difficult.

Finally: Men have every right to expect women to help them in fighting the institution of paternity fraud. However, contraception-wise, there is no excuse for men to act weak and helpless, as though they can't possibly campaign or fund-raise to GET any other options besides condoms and vasectomies. (Why DON'T men over 50, especially celebs, get vasectomies anyway, unless they don't expect to get involved with any woman under 50? I knew a man in his 40s who got one and he didn't even have a girlfriend at the time - but he did later.) Don't expect women to fight for something that men don't seem to want that much - as I mentioned in the other thread, profit is supreme to Big Pharma.

One more thing: Better male birth control wouldn't just help prevent unwanted children; it would also help prevent unwanted abortions, unwanted adoptions, and even paternity fraud. With all that in mind, what are men waiting for??

If a man's only post-birth right is to sue for custody and then demand child support, well, no man has to go through the DIRECT ordeal of abortion or childbirth/adoption either. Seems like a pretty fair trade. Besides, if Shorto's article is any indication, men would have a better chance at banning abortion than they would at abandoning their kids, so those who opt for the latter movement are wasting their energy - but again, Vasalgel, etc, would make all those fights moot.