In early November, I read an article on a gentleman in Australia who won a difficult court case. After winning he is now entitled to having $60,000 in child support payments re-paid by the biological mother who originally claimed he was the father of her child. This was after many years of paying child support for two children a paternity test had already determined were not biologically his.
Just like the issue surrounding requiring paternity testing at birth. This issue brings up many conflicts from all sides of the situation. Again, we face three different set of people’s rights and whose is the most important. We have the “father’s” rights, the mother’s rights, and the child’s rights. When a solution is determined by looking at one groups rights others are always going to be impacted.
There are many people concerned about the child in these cases. The money owed to the “father” in each case is apparently returned to him by garnishing the mother’s wages. To many this could only impact the child negatively. I imagine that many people have the same thought I do, “What if the mother really believed that he was the father?”
Men’s rights groups have the obvious response to these concerns, which is that these men are entitled to justice. Does justice always have to be determined in a dollar amount? Yes, a dollar amount is how this started and maybe that is why it is how it is the counter judgment is determined. I don’t know.
Just like with the mandatory paternity testing I know there is no right answer here. I don’t know if I feel that one side’s argument is more legitimate then another’s. I realize more and more that the laws written in these cases seem to only be written from one group’s perspective. I find myself concerned about this process of lawmaking.
Anyone have thoughts here? Is there something I don’t see that makes this type of law more universal?

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