Horse Crap! This society systematically strips fathers of any leverage they might hope to use, then tools like you have the audacity to ask "where was the father?"
Where were you when this farce of a "system" was being established?
I was doing graduate work and continuing research in the Marxist drift of American family law and the social norms of marriage since the 60s, thank you.
I agree that marriage is harder than it used to be when we were a Christian nation. This increasingly secularized society has not just made marriage unfashionable; it has made adult responsibility uncool. Everyone suffers. But a signal part of conservatism is assuming personal responsibility and choosing the life one leads with care and forethought.
It sounds like the biological parents in this situation above, like so many others these days, never bothered to establish a firm family before having a child.
Either men or women who have sex and make babies without being sure of their partner's character and the depth of their partner's and their own commitment -- made sacramental at the altar with family and friends -- have no room to play the victim when a split occurs, even if the split is because they remain essentially uncommitted, to the relationship, to the child or to the God who made them all.
Life is very hard. Adulthood requires preparation, spiritual humility, and continual maintenance. You can do what it takes to ride your horse, or you will get dragged behind it.
You’re both right and both wrong.
Women should not be having sex, which by definition might produce a child, unless married to a man who will stick around and be a father if need be.
And men should not be having sex unless married to a woman who will allow them to be a father if a child is created in the process.
Goose and gander and all that.
Don’t scatter your seed about and then complain about “the system.”