Fathers no longer needed under fertility law overhaul | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
Dr Harris, a member of the Commons science and technology select committee, said the existing act was “unjustifiable, discriminatory and vindictive. It was also unsustainable in human rights and equality terms. The evidence suggests children do very well brought up by lesbian couples and solo parents, so good riddance.”
And on the other
New powers to target child support debtors
Registering the names of both parents at birth will also become compulsory “unless it would be unreasonable to do so”.
I’d like to point out to anyone who doesn’t already know, that until very recently, if you weren’t married you could only register the father on the birth certificate if you could get him to turn up to the registration office. They seem to have changed the rules slightly since then, but it still relies on the parents cooperating with each other - the frequent implication that feckless women can’t be bothered to write down some bloke’s name really irritates me.
When are we going to recognise that you can’t legislate responsibility into ppl? I’m too wound up to blog coherently on this topic right now, I may return to it soon though.
10 Comments
Hear, hear… i think.
What if you only have the father’s mobile phone no? Can you put that on the birth cert?
I never knew that about registering the birth! When I registered Lyddie I had the choice, so the change must have happened before then.
Yup, it should be assumed that a woman who chooses not to name the father must have good reasons for not doing so other than ‘can’t be bothered’. It’s not like she even has to write it herself!
I’m starting to think (OK, scratch the ’starting’ bit
) that coercing people into making ‘good’ choices *for themselves* isn’t the aim at all.
Only if you write “he sez c u l8r”
ROFL
Hmph! This is a subject I could really rant on about as well. What would be considered: “unreasonable to do so”.
Good question - no idea. But probably not what I would consider to be so.
I understood that the reason he had to show up to get on the birth certificate was to prevent women from fraudulently claiming that some bloke was the father of their child without his knowledge. I mean for a lot of the single moms who are on income support, the actual father of the baby might not be a good bet for child support anyway on account of him not having any money anyway. So why not write in Mick Jagger? or Prince Charles?
I could rant forever on the Child Support Act (1991), but my favorite peeve about it is that only 2 years after the Children Act, it wrote into law a biological definition of fatherhood. Prior to this, the man married to the mother was the legal father of the baby. The Children Act (1989) made all kinds of moves to recognize social parenthood in making decisions about parental responsibility. And then the Child Support Act actually says that the biological father is financially responsible. I recall that a couple of years later a man got out of his support payments for his daughter on the grounds that he was not her biological father despite the fact that he was married to the mother at the time of the birth, and that the mother got pregnant by donor insemination because he was sterile WITH HIS CONSENT.
Idiots.
Idiots indeed - welcome to the blog