Just a short while after the news that 30 per cent of young teenagers say they live with just one of their natural parents, we have some other news in the same vein: that one in five babies born last year was registered as being of an unknown father. The number is significant, more than double that of the previous year, which had already seen an increase over the year before.
It should be noted that this is not the number of babies born out of wedlock, to use an old-fashioned phrase. That number would be even greater. No, it is the number of babies born to women who choose not to name the father. There is no way that these women are unable to work out who the father of their baby is, unless they are common prostitutes who have sex with strangers several times a day. It isn’t that difficult to work out that they don’t name the father because there are negative consequences to doing so, and not just because there are benefits to be derived.
It is assumed that women don’t name the fathers of their babies because they want to receive social security cheques and other benefits as “abandoned” mothers. And, yes, it is true that there are large numbers of women who think like this, usually under the influence of their so-called partners, who obviously find it much more convenient to have the government shell out for what should be their dues. But women in this position are clearly not thinking straight, are in denial of their situation and have little idea as to their rights. They have been told what their rights are in respect of social security, but they don’t really have a clue what their rights are in respect of the man who fathered their child, always assuming, of course, that the man is going to be present in the child’s life, even if this fact is hidden from the authorities. The minute they put “unknown father” on the form, they reject on behalf of their child the right to maintenance and even the right to inheritance. They sign themselves and their child on for financial dependence on the state, rather than on the father. But they also do away with something far, far more serious and important: the child’s dignity.
Women with a baby on their hands find it hard to conceive of a future in which that baby becomes a child, then a teenager, then an adult. They cannot see far enough ahead to the day when they will have to confront an angry 18-year-old with an “unknown father” birth certificate in his hand, accusing his mother of being such a whore that she can’t remember who she slept with, or not even having the decency to accord him the respect of telling him who his father is, preferring instead to keep that knowledge to herself.
Far, far worse is the situation of a child raised in full awareness of who his father is, and with that man a more or less constant presence in his life, who then finds out when he first sees his birth certificate – when applying for a passport, for example – that his father is technically unknown. He goes to his mother for an explanation and she says: “Oh, what’s the fuss? You know who your father is. We decided to say that I couldn’t remember who fathered you so that we could collect social security.” That should go down well – because here’s the thing: once you’ve put “unknown father” on the birth certificate to collect social security for 16 years, you can’t go back to the public registry when the cheques stop coming and say: “Now that’s it’s over, I’ve remembered who fathered him.”
I think if the mother were to be made fully aware of the significance of that “unknown father” bit, she wouldn’t do it, no matter how much her partner tried to pressure her into it. And, quite frankly, she should also be aware that any man who is so quick to publicly disown his own child, while passing it off as a
cunning little way to get money off the government, is going to be a shifty piece of work to deal with where she’s concerned too, sooner rather than later.
There are cases in which I can understand why a woman might register her child as having an unknown father. This is if she has no relationship whatsoever with the man, if he is abusive, or if having him in the child’s life would turn out to be for the worse. Women in this situation have a very, very difficult decision to make, and it is wrong to be judgemental. I can really understand what they are going through, having had a couple of friends who went through the same thing. You get pregnant by accident. The man doesn’t want to know, isn’t seeing you anymore, and wants you to have an abortion. He hates you because you have attempted to ruin his life by becoming pregnant (he never thinks of your life). He sees you as the vicious enemy, the bitch who’s done him in. He shouts at you and is abusive. Then he attempts to accuse you of sleeping with somebody else and trying to pass the baby off as his.
Seeing his attitude, you don’t want him in your life or your child’s life. You have to weigh things up. Do you register him as the father, and let him be what I like to call “a present absence” in the child’s life and, what’s worse, one who can call the shots by refusing his signature for a passport, and so on? Or do you pretend that he never happened, say that you can’t remember who the father is (which is like saying you are a common whore) and hope that by the time your child starts asking questions, you will have worked out some answers that will be good enough to prevent him turning on you in a rage? It’s a tough call, and nobody can presume to know the answers.
The trouble with the present legal situation is that the father’s rights are immediately enforceable but his obligations are not. So, if the father refuses permission for the child he never sees and doesn’t pay for to have a passport, then that child can never travel until he is 18. Do you think this is far-fetched? All I have to do is remind you of the teenage girl who had to have official sanction from a government minister to travel to Rome for a day for the beatification of Dun Gorg Preca, all because her father refused to sign the documents that would give her a passport. And when she went, she and her mother were guarded by a government official who even slept in the same room as they did.
Yet when it comes to getting the father to fulfil his obligations, things are not quite as summarily executed. Women end up in court suing for miserably small maintenance cheques and scrabbling by on the kind of money that wouldn’t even keep a family in bread and water. They pay for all their children’s clothes, medicines, books, toys, food, water, electricity and the roof over their heads, and then the present absence exercises his right to refuse to sign for a passport for the children just in case they disappear and he never sees them again, even though he never sees them in the first place. What is this? It’s insane. Imagine the situation of a child who never gets to leave the island until the age of 18, all because his absent father refuses to sign the passport documents. And this is something that the children of married but separated parents go through too.
Posted beneath the on-line story about these new statistics were several comments from people who think that the suspected sexual partners of a woman who tries to register her baby as having an unknown father should be forcibly DNA-tested, along with the baby. This shows a pitifully poor comprehension of civil rights. Some said that women who claim they don’t know who the father of their baby is should not be given social security, which begs the question: then who should? If there is a father in the picture, then they don’t need social security. Ah, but here’s the thing: the erroneous assumption is that the presence of a father means a source of income for mother and child. Oh, how wrong these people are, and how cruel, too, to force a woman to spend her life begging and chasing a man who doesn’t want to support his child or the woman who he made pregnant, leaving her unable to work and provide for her own living, still less that of two people.
Those who think that a wholly unwilling man can be made to cough up have obviously never tried it. Just imagine being a woman with a child forced to live in such circumstances, never knowing whether there is going to be enough money to last the day, still less the week. Ironically, those who say “she should have thought of that before she had sex” are usually the same ones who speak out against abortion. So they won’t allow her to have an abortion, but they won’t help her live with her baby either. They might as well take things one step further, and demand a return to the days when women in this situation got thrown into a workhouse, or begged on the streets with toddlers clutching their petticoats. I sometimes wonder what happened to people who think like this, that they are so harsh and insensitive to the trials of others.
Much as I object to the abuse of the social security system, I have no hesitation in saying that it is far, far better to have a social security system that is abused than a one in which desperate women with babies to care for have their lives ruined and their children’s lives blighted by 18 years of being beholden to a man who doesn’t care and doesn’t pay. There are enough married women in that situation, who have never had any hope of being rescued by a social security cheque, without dragging in the unmarried ones as well. Malta is full of married women who have raised their children in poverty in the households of men who earn money.
At least their unmarried
sisters can turn to the state and say: “Help me.” The
married ones can’t.