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Dear Sir,

Never let it be said that I am un-sympathetic to anyone's plight. But where a person's problems are consistently self-inflicted, that sympathy vanishes.  

Sadly, single motherhood is an inevitable fact of life by virtue of death or divorce, and it is prevalent enough without it being deliberate. Thankfully, there are many very dedicated single mothers who do a marvellous job of raising their children (sometimes without child support) to become honest, productive members of society, but that's not who I have a problem with.

Deliberate single motherhood has now become the single most insidious vehicle of our social demise. As a young man I refused to be affected by the problem (almost was, though) and was in a position to observe the impact on my male contemporaries; not pretty. But in the last 30 years, it's reached epidemic proportions and I have discussed this with supposedly intelligent women and gotten the same reaction; they say 'it takes two'. That is true but the men of my generation knew full well the implications of having to pay child support.

Decent, intelligent women however, have a problem understanding the scope of the problem because they (by and large) do not contribute to it. Their first reaction is to defend mother/woman-hood, and that's basically a good thing, but recognizing a social malady perpetrated by some women is not female bashing. Deliberate single motherhood did not proliferate until the advent of the (birth-control) pill. All of a sudden, men were told that contraception need no longer be their responsibility and if he insisted on using a condom, no nookie. Trust me, I've been there. "I just hate those things," she would say. Women were then in total control of their fertility; in other words, motherhood became more voluntary than it already was! If anything went 'wrong', they'd say, "I forgot to take my pill," - the classic cop-out. In any event, the father was stuck with child maintenance and she had the baby she wanted. A bitter pill for the father to swallow at best, but worse because he, seemingly without fail, was summarily ejected from the relationship; usually just after the christening. Forgetting to take the pill once is a mistake. Two, three and four times, I don't think so.

Having children is perceived as being easy money. It's not true mind you, but try to tell that to literally thousands of single mothers who (try to) live off the child support. It's become (from their perspective) big business.

A father, who pays consistently into his child's mother's pocket, wants basically two things for his money. The first and most important of which is (as close as he can get to) 50 per cent visitation rights. The second being a 50 per cent involvement in the child's up-bringing.  In lieu of, and until these rights are enjoyed by the father, those funds should be held in escrow and not to be spent (usually by the mother on her new boy-friend/victim) on items not related directly to the child.

True, it might seem cumbersome and expensive, but be that the case or not, it'll be worth every penny to break the back of this obscene practice. Fatherhood should be as voluntary as motherhood!

C.K. Simons

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