Thanks for the Sperm, Now Pay Up!
You're Joel McKiernan. You're a guy. Your ex-girlfriend wants kids. You got sperm. She wants what you got. She promises you won't have to pay child support -- she'll raise the kids on her own dime. Being a nice guy, you say okay!
The next thing you know, a court socks you with an order to pay $1,500 a month in child support for the two kids, plus $66,000 in back support.
Because...no good deed goes unpunished.
And because, in the somewhat surreal world of family law, there's a school of thought that a mother cannot bargain away a child's right to support. As one judge put it:
The children point and say, "That is our father. He should support us." What are we to reply? "No! He made a contract to conceive you through a clinic, so your father need not support you." I find this unreasonable at best.
Lucky for Joel, that judge was in the minority -- barely. In a 3-2 decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the mom, Ivonne Ferguson, couldn't renege on the no-child-support deal she struck with Joel to get his sperm. They reasoned, reasonably, that:
Where a would-be donor cannot trust that he is safe from a future support action, he will be considerably less likely to provide his sperm to a friend or acquaintance who asks, significantly limiting a would-be mother's reproductive prerogatives.
In other words, had the dissenters carried the day, the children wouldn't be doing any pointing and saying, "Pay up, Dad." Because they wouldn't exist. Alive but poor(er) or nonexistent? Tough choice.
Sperm donor wins child support battle [MSNBC]
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