What safeguards are there against poverty for teenage dads?

[Bear Stearns]

back in the days of when america was great it would actually be pretty feasible for a teenager boy to raise a kid and get by so it wouldn't have been that much of an issue.

[GuessTheAltAccount]

While being subsidized by said child rape victim.

Instead of, oh, I don't know, putting said rapist behind bars where she belongs, preferably for life?

Well, any middle ground between "in jail for life" and "not in jail" is pointless, at least in the USA, given how much they prioritize deterrence over rehabilitation for prisoners.

If we're going to count it as rape, then yeah, the public's willingness to both count it as rape and make him owe child support anyway are pretty telling about either their hypocrisy or about how much absurdity the public accepts from a child support system they dare not criticize. Probably the latter. Which casts doubt on the public's judgment in offering no "she said she wouldn't keep the baby" exception anyway.

Although frankly, the legal system making no distinction between "unwilling" and "willing but underage" struck me as bizarre anyway. If she keeps having sex with willing-but-underage boys, should she not have at least something to lose by forcing herself on the genuinely unwilling? Such as, let's say, one who looked up the fact that, no, he is not immune from having to pay child support to her just because what she did was illegal, let alone because she said she wouldn't keep it? Maybe make punishment for forcing herself on someone incarceration, and if she limits herself to only the willing, make it only probation with an ankle bracelet for life?

But where did all this indignation at this sort of thing come from? They didn't express as much of it in response to Mary Kay Letourneau or Debra LaFave, so how are we to know they aren't faking it this time to virtue signal about how "gender neutral" they are? I've always been somewhere in between; I think having sex with those she's supposed to be teaching and mentoring instead shouldn't be normalized, but that it's not as heinous as the gender flip. And though I felt bad for my students at the time, I thought it made perfect sense that a school in China sent female employees, not male employees, classroom to classroom, to nag students over how much makeup they were wearing. Less incentive to say "what are you, a pedo" to those enforcing dress codes when it's not considered as serious an accusation against a woman.

. . .

I think, more than anything else, I just see myself as offsetting the biases of everyone else. Everyone sympathizes with teenage mothers, independently of whether she told him before sex she'd keep the baby, yet everyone judges the father for leaving, even if he could no more afford to stay than he could afford to leave. If the public wanted the father to stay, why didn't they make it affordable for him to stay, at least in the circumstance where she claimed she wouldn't keep the baby? Doesn't the same public say the anti-abortion crowd are "hypocrites" for not making it affordable for her to keep the baby in the first place?

[Diopolis]

Well child support isn't a thing that normally happens, rather it's usually a result of some kind of legal proceeding like a divorce or annulment. Further, child support payments are calculated in some way based on the party's ability to pay. So a teenager in full time education who had a child would probably never be ordered to pay child support in the first place, because there aren't divorce proceedings when you fuck someone at a party, and even if a court did find such a party liable for child support payments it would probably also have to conclude that they are not in any position to pay anything.

This.

In the United States, that is not true- child support is available to almost all mothers who can identify their child's father. It is capped at 1/2 of a man's earnings but the court can order a man to work in order to pay it. And by the way, due process for determining paternity is a joke.

[Delvian States]

This.

In the United States, that is not true- child support is available to almost all mothers who can identify their child's father. It is capped at 1/2 of a man's earnings but the court can order a man to work in order to pay it. And by the way, due process for determining paternity is a joke.

Most men who dismiss such worries do so only until it happens to them. Then they are irrevocably changed, often shattered by it. It takes a very long time to recover from such a blow. Until then, they think that such horror stories and anecdotes are exceptions instead of the rule.