Interstate Enforcement of Child Support Orders, 37 Am Jur Trials 639 (1988)

In 1988 I had published in the American Jurisprudence Trails by The Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing Co. of Rochester, NY an article about interstate enforcement of child support orders. The article now over 20 years old is dated, we have come a long way since then. I mention it here because it is difficult to find that article. I had some re-prints available I gave out back then but those are gone. I did the article from the many years of work I did as head of the Child Support Division of the New Orleans District Attorney's Office. Basically we went from nothing to a large operation obtaining child support for the many kids in Orleans Parish whose fathers failed to pay support letting the tax payer through welfare raise their kids. I have many war stories from those days but basically lets say the attitude of the fathers were let welfare pay for my child as they have done in the past. The change in making them support what they created took a while to take hold. I was surprised to discover we had about 20,000 children on welfare whose fathers were missing or failed to pay support. The other surprise was the number of illegitimate children. So we had to create a process of going to civil court to get a determination as to who was the biological father of the child. In many cases the man denied paternity like you watch on the Maury Show. We began the use of the paternity test way back then. After proving who was the daddy we then were able to get an order making the father support his child. Being away from it these many years I am not sure what the current numbers of children with fathers who are missing but I assume by doing the work we did back then the numbers have fallen a lot. It would be interesting to me to see how what I worked on to help create is doing these days.