Well, I for one don’t think they need to know the kind of truth the child referred to in the OP learned, that her parents have been unfaithful to each other and that her dad has always had misgivings about her. And that the sperm-donor that is her bio-dad is someone so forgettable that her mom can’t even remember his name. How has this truth helped her? How will it help her to learn his name if he wants no part of her? Truth isn’t necessarily good, ya know.
And children have lots of rights. Some they don’t get until they are old enough to handle them responsibly.
The above underlined statements are assumptions that you have made that are not necessarily true. There are at least 2 other possibilities I can immediately think of —
the mother knows exactly who he is and won’t tell.
She truly does not know who he is or his name, maybe because of the circumstance of the affair she had.
As in the case of John Edwards, the woman he had the affair with named another married man knowing all along that her child’s father was John Edwards.
Why should the state permit that lie on a child’s birth record?
The father’s name is not listed on the birth certificate, doubtless because Edwards was denying paternity at the time and the birth certificate was sure to become public. An Edwards aide lied to the public for a time and said he was the father, but his name isn’t on the birth certificate. So there is no lie there. There’s an omission, but no lie.
And DID she put him on the birth certificate instead of “John Edwards” or unknown? I thought they just came up with that story months after the child was born…months after the birth certificate would have been filed.
Neither hypothetical would make it any of the state’s business.
It’s not a lie. The man named on the birth certificate is the legal father. The bio father is irrelevant, The state doesn’t care and doesn’t need to know, unless the bio father is also the legal father.
This is the point you seem to be having some trouble grasping. The purpose of a birth certificate is not to collect genetic information, but legal information. The legal father is the father, and it’s insulting to all adoptive fathers for you to call that a “lie.”
I actually don’t know, but if he did cowboy up and sign off as the legal father (and that’s way more loyal than I would ever be), then he is the legal father, and the birth certificate is truthful.
Hello, is this thing on? What about the case where the biological mother is unknown, as in the case of egg donation? I think this is the third time I’ve brought that up.
Exactly right, and the OP should read this sentence a hundred times until it penetrates his skull.
It’s very important in the infertility community. The legal father and/or mother is always the sperm and/or egg recipient, not the donor, and that’s whose name goes on the birth certificate.
If he cheats, it’s his fault. If she cheats, it’s his fault. :rolleyes:
I can think of a number of reasons you might cut yourself off from a child you’ve raised upon finding out this information. Members of my family have been faced with this situation more than once. While it is absolutely heartbreaking, it’s also absolutely necessary when you’re dealing with certain kinds of people. You can’t cut yourself off from the former spouse if the child is being held by said former spouse as a hostage/bargaining chip through abuse of custody laws. When there is nothing you can do to protect the child, all you can do is leave and maybe protect yourself from the abusive, dangerous spouse.
This is never an easy decision in my experience, and not one of the individuals I’ve met who had to make it was able to just flip a switch and stop caring about the child, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes you lose the really important fights, and all you can do is cut your losses and try to move on.
There are a lot of protections listed there, but every place in that doccument where actual rights are touched on, the function is to limit and infringe upon those rights. Lots of stuff in there about the rights of parents to exercise soverign control over the child, and some protections provided to the child by the government against some of the abuses of the absolute power granted parents. But no actual rights of the child guarenteed in that doccument.
What if, instead of an affair, the woman was raped?
In which case she really may have no idea who the bio-father is, and no way to locate him for a paternity test.
It is not unheard of for a man to blame his wife for a rape, or to view it as an infidelity, even if quite a few of us would hold the woman blameless in such circumstances. There is still also quite a bit of shame associated with rape, such that it is conceivable a woman might be raped and not tell anyone about it for fear of shame or ostracism.
Needless to say, if 12 or 15 years down the road the husband suddenly finds that he’s not the bio-dad of one of his kids that could really blow up into an ugly situation.
This is not to imply that that is the circumstance in the OP, just offering it as a hypothetical situation where the women may genuinely not know who the bio-father is without any unethical intent on her part.