Our thanks to William for this – a woman gloating in a national newspaper about having carried out paternity fraud. She has no reservations about having had a child without the prospect of that child having a loving and supportive father. Her narcissism shines through the piece. An extract:
But as I see it, the nuclear family is in sharp decline: we have gay couples having babies, transgender parents, ‘blended’ families with biological and stepchildren. The new generation is much more open-minded.
Others might accuse me of tricking Hannah’s dad into fatherhood before he was ready and call me some sort of ‘sperm stealer’, but it wasn’t as premeditated as that. We’d been seeing each other for seven weeks before that reckless night.
I didn’t really plan it – well not methodically, anyway – but I wasn’t about to complain when one thing led to another and we took a risk. In all honesty, I never imagined it would work first time.
I bet I’m not the only woman to have exploited a man’s gung-ho attitude to contraception in the hope of falling pregnant. It’s up to men to be more careful if they’re worried. Well above the age of consent and fully versed in the birds and the bees, they’re hardly helpless victims.
Could it be any clearer? Women shouldn’t be expected to display moral agency. If they deceive men into becoming fathers, it’s the men’s fault for trusting them, and the men must face the consequences.
Paternity fraud is a crime under The Fraud Act 2006, and it’s covered in our 2015 general election manifesto (pp. 52-54).
Every year large numbers of men – after being approached by the CSA for child maintenance – contest women’s claims that they’re the fathers of the children, and demand paternity tests. The CSA admitted in a response to our FOI request that 500+ men a year have been cleared in this way for many years. The Crown has never prosecuted women for the crime, despite the state knowing their names, addresses, and knowing they committed the crimes.
Paternity fraud is a common crime in the UK – as elsewhere – but we don’t know how common. It’s one of the reasons we’re calling for compulsory paternity testing at birth. To oblige a man to support a child he didn’t want to have, or to deceive him into believing a child is his, when (s)he isn’t, are egregious crimes by any standards. How would women react to demands that they support children they didn’t want for 20 years, and who may not even be their own?
As usual, women have rights, men have responsibilities.
