What are the quotes around "children" designed to indicate: that these aren't actually children? Is their legal entitlement to support from the adults around them "unjust" unless it corresponds to possession of half each adult's genome? Are adopted children "children"? If not, why is adoption an appropriate basis for legal obligation, but not contemporaneous marriage to a biological parent?

Nevertheless, these men's legal obligation to pay for a child that is not theirs is a continual, bitter reminder of their status as dupes. As the Alaska Supreme Court noted in a "paternity by estoppel" case, the legal duty to pay child support can poison the very relationship it hopes to save.

Hadn't you better get your breathing under control and check your analysis? A woman has married, and she has borne a child. Her husband is financially responsible for the support of that child: his obligation arises from the marriage, rather than from any representation the woman has made, or any intention she had of his relying on it. "Fraud" is a metaphor, and depends for its effect on the unestablished, and largely inaccurate, proposition that adultery is a crime. A man who wanted to be sure that the children he is going to be charged with supporting are his genetic offspring could have paternity tested in utero, or divorce his wife unless she agreed to the test. You would say, I suppose, that such a fellow is trying to avoid fraud. I might reach a different conclusion.

and the true father bears none of the financial responsibility for his child. These inequalities demand reform.

Perhaps abolishing marriage would work for you?

First, the true father, if found within the statute of limitations, should take on the financial responsibility for his child, just as he would if no other man had been duped. i

Gaining parental rights in the process? Otherwise, new inequalities will demand reform, n'est-ce pas?

Furthermore, after the child reaches an age at which it no longer needs to be supported, the mother, the true father, or both should recompense the deceived father for the money he has spent as a result of their fraud.

Surely you don't expect that to turn out very well, do you? You see judgments enforced by husbands against wives out of the common marital property? Or this is a special benefit for divorced former husbands only, giving an immense apparent financial incentive for family breakup? You anticipate significant and effective collections of the sums expended by resident fathers from the transient uninvolved parties you call "adulterers"? Good luck with that. You should have been able to see why this proposal is not only not going to happen, but couldn't actually happen.

Doing so would enable the mother to receive child support when she needs it and would still save the relationship between the deceived father and his child from the bitterness discussed above. The injustice to the deceived father, while not entirely erased, would be greatly diminished. What's more, the deceived father should be looked favorably upon in custody disputes. By continuing to support a child that is not his, he has movingly proven his emotional attachment and commitment to the child.

Marriage is not only a right, after all, but a responsibility. So is biological parenthood, but it is not terribly surprising that where the law terminates parental rights, it also terminates support obligations. Would you establish also, in addition to these residual support obligations for previously-unidentified biological fathers, residual rights to visitation and shared decisions on upbringing?

You have made a variety of assumptions about the story I told, not the least of which is that it's a story of "injustice." I'm not convinced of that, but I am convinced of the difficulties the criminal justice system faces in a situation which, as I pointed out, had as much to do with the extracultural origin of the two young people whose fight turned into a felony prosecution as it had to do with anything else. Your supposedly analogous situation is in fact quite different. All the fulmination about "fraud" explains why. Here you are arguing that a rule of which everyone can be prospectively aware, which has been in place for more than a thousand years, and which serves a variety of positive social purposes, is "unjust" because it operates as it has always done. In order to take that position, you have to decompose marriage as a civil contract, with specific obligations, and restore it to a kind of market participation, in which—I suppose—men buy sex in return for an obligation to support any children they actually engender. Whether that would be a better approach to the institution of marriage (which you might just as well argue ought to be disestablished outright) seems to me to involve more questions of "justice" than the one terribly hard case of fathers who have been cheated into loving children they didn't fuck into existence.