Joint Birth Registration & Parental Responsibility

The Government have published a White Paper on Joint Birth Registration following responses received from its Green Paper on the subject last June. The new law will form part of the Welfare Reform Bill in the Autumn and proposes changes to make joint birth registration a legal requirement for all unmarried parents.

This is part of the Government's proposal to promote child welfare and parental responsibility where 45,000 children born each year are sole registered. The Government believes that in 45% of these cases the father has regular contact with the child. In Australia where there is similar legislation sole registration accounts for 3% of registered births.

The Times reports that under the new system the mother will be asked by the registrar to name the father and "the registrar will be obliged to pursue him until he signs." The father can take a DNA test if paternity is disputed and will be fined if he fails to co-operate. There is concern from Union of which most registrar's are a member, that adequate resources will not be provided to registrars to achieve this. There will be very little that the registrar will be able to do other than fining fathers who fail to respond to their requests. Under the new changes fathers will be able to registrar by post and will not need to go to the Registry Office as they have under the present legislation.

The new law will also give fathers the right to insist that they are registered and to have parental responsibility. In these circumstances fathers will be able to take a DNA test if paternity is disputed.

As the piece in The Times says there is nothing that can be done when the mother does not want to name the father. In cases where this is the case or the mother does not know who the father is the registrar will be able to use their discretion to make sole registrations where it is "impossible, impracticable or unreasonable" to obtain both names.

DNA testing

Further to my earlier post about DNA testing, the Government has just added a new service to the list of those accredited under s 20 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969 & has republished the complete list .

Daddy cool, daddy cool?

The Observer reports on the so-called Daddy Wars, a phenemenon apparently rampant in the US in which fathers, deprived of their role as breadwinners, fight to assert themselves in the sphere of childcare.

This is a theory apparently propounded by Dr Caroline Gattrell in her paper, 'Whose Child Is It Anyway? The Negotiation of Paternal Entitlements Within Marriage', which will be published next month in the peer-reviewed Sociological Review. She found that men develop strategies to secure their position at the centre of the home. 'I saw fathers in dual-career couples consciously mobilising their so-called "paternal rights" as a reaction to the shift in the traditional patriarchal culture of power and authority,' she said. 'They asserted their paternal "rights" in a way that suggested that children have become the focus for power and negotiation struggles.' So there you have it! It certainly seems to fit with some of my recent experiences of private law contact / residence disputes where time with children is traded with as much hard-nosed bartering as one might expect in a bear market.

Two Sides to Every Story

Further to the earlier post Sow & Ye Shall Reap about the seemingly uncharacteristic vigilance of the CSA in pursuing a sperm donor to lesbians who wanted children, the Times reports that the man in question actively sought and for a while enjoyed a rather more developed role as a father than the original report might have suggested. I can't believe I fell for another Evening Standard headline!