In other words, no evidence for your assertion. No more than mine.
If your complaint is that I can't know with any certainty what would happen, then yes, that's true. It follows from the fact that I don't have access to a parallel universe where this policy has been enacted, Al Gore is president, and Elvis is dead.
But I have tried to present what I feel are some reasonable hypotheses on the basis of what we already know about human behavior in general and how it might apply here, which is often the best we can do when it comes to politics.
One thing I'd like to find out is what kind of effect the welfare reform legislation of 1996--which excludes recalculation of benefits for women already on welfare if they have more children--had on birth rates. Haven't had much luck with that. There has been a levelling off in the birthrate among non-married women in general, as seen
here.
This study (Word document) is interesting, in that it indicates that birth rates go down as enforcement of child support payments becomes stricter. This would tend to imply that reducing the cost of fatherhood for men would increase the rate of birth, not reduce it.
So, yeah, I don't have a bulletproof argument here, but I think I'm justified in provisionally believing that more unsupported children would exist than currently do.
Let's analyze your performance here: First, I haven't suggested that the criminalization of dads is related to welfare roles. So you're just building a straw man.
Well, no. I was talking about welfare, so I didn't see the point of introducing this strange idea about criminalized dads. Just trying to clarify a bit, since there seemed to be some confusion. It's a bit difficult to take your cries of 'Straw man!' seriously, considering how you consistently rush to the worst possible conclusion about other people's views.
Then, "it seems to me" translates to "I believe" or "I think" or "I'm going to say". I agree that it seems to you. I even agree, and already did, that there will be some effect on welfare roles, just not the explosion that you "think of the children" people are proposing.
Here's a good example: I believe that I spoke of the welfare rolls swelling, not exploding.
Anyway, yes, I was qualifying my statements to be clear that these are very tenuous arguments. I like to do this when I'm not certain that what I'm saying is true.
Finally, you don't know how potential mothers will react any better than I do. Some will not abort no matter what, some might react differently. So you don't get to make any conclusion there. Then you say "significantly depress birth rates". That's not really what the fact would be, it would be "depress the birth rate enough to mostly offset the absent, non-paying dads. After that, you go on to say "I don't think". Again, no evidence.
You'd need this policy to reduce the birth rate among those women who would qualify for welfare without child support in pace with new cases as child support from unwilling fathers dries up. Since I've now provided some evidence that reducing the cost of fatherhood increases the birthrate, I hope you'll agree that this isn't likely.
Now, what irritates me is that I think that I AM thinking of the children. You're casting this purely in dry economic terms, ignoring the effects of an unwilling dad on a child. There are costs that go well beyond the financial, as we can see in the newspaper every day. Why do you seem to ignore those costs? Does it help society to grow up more emotionally or physically crippled children if that can be avoided?
I don't think I am ignoring those costs. I believe I've read that children are better off psychologically and economically when both parents are involved raising them, but I don't know how the effect of unwillingness could be measured. It does seem that if a parent is unwilling to the point where abuse is likely, it would be best to limit visitation, but I imagine this already happens.
