The question ‘AIBU to think Child Maintenance is fair?’ has to be qualified by ‘To whom?”
Children?
Mothers?
Fathers?
Child maintenance doesn’t work well for anyone TBH – RPs rarely get it and when they do it appears to be of little value (CSA figures show average pay is £34 per week). NRPs who pay it end up suffering also, particularly if they have second families.
However, if we’re looking at the lesser of two evils, 304,000 NRPs (mainly men) suffering financial hardship is more palatable than further adding to the 940,000 children currently living in poverty.
If we allow NRPs to ‘financially abort’ their responsibilities, there will be an increase in child poverty.
Is that fair? Not in my opinion. Children have no control over their circumstances or whether or not they were born. I’d rather see children’s rights protected than the rights of adults not to have their lives upended for a child they did not want.
And that’s even before you consider the gender implications.
Even now, in 2018 when women have more equality than at any other time in history and despite the fact we have full legislative equality, we still have a gender pay gap, 80% of chores in the home are still carried out by women, women are overwhelmingly the primary carers in families, and more mothers than fathers go part time or give up paid work. In short, the ideology that all things domestic, especially child care, are women’s responsibilities first and men ‘help’.
This is, of course, exactly why more single parents are women than men. It is generally women who SAH or go PT to accommodate children. Few families really practice 50/50 parenting (partly because our maternity/paternity laws don’t facilitate it well). So when a couple separates it is standard practice that the child(ren) goes to the parent who does most care 0 and in cases where residency is contested, family courts tend to favour the status quo to unsettle the children least (hence the popularity of the EOW arrangement).
It’s also the reason so many single parents live in poverty. Women are generally more likely to be in poverty compared to men, but the gap is small (2%) before children enter the picture and widens significantly after. By the time a child is 12, women (on average) earn a third less than men for example. Within the relationship women have sacrificed economic parity for the greater good of the family and if the relationship then breaks down and they find themselves a single parent, they (and the child) suffer further because of it. That isn’t to say that the arrangement was wrong in the first place (there are plenty of good reasons for such a set up and when it works it can work exceptionally well), just that not enough protection is afforded to the mother and the child in the event of family breakdown. It generally works the same when the genders are reversed, although they rarely are.
To allow fathers to ‘financially abort’ an unwanted child basically states that children are women’s responsibility because they conceive and so should have a greater responsibility over contraception. This is such a regressive step for female equality it beggars belief.
It removes sexual agency from women.
It encourages a social norm where women are anchored in the domestic sphere and hinders their full involvement in the workplace, so reducing their economic agency.
It allows abusive men to behave with impunity.
It damages decent men by relegating them to second-class-level parents.
And perhaps more importantly than any of those, it allows children to suffer for the poor choices/actions of adults.