Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born journalist, a blue checkmark on Twitter, and a “founding partner and Washington correspondent” of something called Puck News. She has been on numerous political talk shows, and her bylines include articles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Politico, and the Atlantic, just to name a few.
So, it was quite odd to see a tweet from her calling for child support laws when such laws have been in existence for decades.
On Thursday, Ioffe tweeted: “If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone?”
The first federal legislation regarding child support was put into law in 1950. A brief history of such laws will show that in 1965 and 1967, laws were added to ensure that states were “allowed to request addresses of absent parents from federal social security records and tax records” and “required to establish a single organizational unit to enforce child support and establish paternity.” In 1975, Congress established the Child Support Enforcement program through adding “Part D to Title IV of the Social Security Act.” This law created the “public bureaucracy to enforce child support obligations.”
Child support laws are not remotely obscure. Nor have they ever been easier to enforce, thanks to breakthroughs in genetic science. These laws are often referenced in media outlets and in popular culture. Most if not all states allow garnishment of noncustodial parents’ wages, if that’s necessary to make them pay. In some states, you can actually be arrested for failure to pay child support.
Ioffe graduated from Princeton. One must therefore marvel that she would pull out such a clumsy, ham-fisted, ignorant trope in the act of diverting attention from the barbarism of abortion.
If she possesses such a startling lack of knowledge on this topic, it warrants skepticism on the reliability of all her other claims.
But on the topic of child support, I feel pretty confident that pro-lifers are almost unanimously going to be supportive of strict enforcement and of any reforms that make it easier to force payment. Nobody likes a “deadbeat dad.”
Beyond that, rather than making deficiencies in the child support system into an excuse for terminating infants, let’s correct them. Abortion, after all, is a deadbeat dad’s best friend.
