Per this scenario with Simon Cowell in the news if the baby is born before she gets divorced what duties does the cuckolded husband vs the baby daddy typically have?
The cheating wife in this scenario appears to be very eager to have Simon Cowell’s baby. Does she exercise sole control on who goes on the birth certificate as the father. If the husband insisted on putting himself on the birth certificate as daddy to interfere with her anticipated CS payday from Cowell does he have any standing to force this?
In my state, if the baby is born during the marriage, the husband is the legal father of the child, and is presumed to be the biological father as well. That presumption can be rebutted with DNA evidence, but it would require legal proceedings to establish paternity by the actual father. The existence of a child fathered by another man would be prima facie evidence that the husband is entitled to a divorce on the grounds of adultery.
I seem to recall that there is a time limit in which the paternity can legally be called into question. After that limit, even with DNA testing the former husband is legally responsible.
Yes. If you find out that your 14 year old kid is not yours, it would generally not be legal, let alone ethical, to disavow them. The time period varies, but it’s not generally a short time.
Loophole? She had kids. Michael was claiming them as his own. She wasn’t disputing that then. No other man was in the picture to fight his claim. Therefore he wasn’t doing anything particularly shady (in a legal sense, not a creepy sense). In other words, would it matter which state law he was under?
What I meant by loophole was he found a perfectly legal way to buy 2 human babies. He paid the woman to marry him (sure, she was willing to bear children for him) and he paid for her to be artificially (I presume) inseminated with someone’s semen. But since he was legally married to the mother and she put his name as father, on the birth certificate, no one looked at it.
Having followed the infamous Baby M surrogate mother case, Mary Beth Whitehead first tried to claim that her (vasectomized) husband was the father of the child (because vasectomies have been known to fail, though she hadn’t gotten pregnant since he was snipped) or that the clinic maybe slipped up and gave her some other man’s sperm. Then her attorneys tried playing “Her husband is the legal father,” despite the fact that they both had signed a statement that he wasn’t the legal father because they had not been having sex when the conception occured. She claimed the paper was a fraud.
Later, when she got pregnant by another man, despite the fact that she was still married to the same guy, she claimed Bachelor #2 as the daddy.
[QUOTE=astro;16537883Per this scenario with Simon Cowell in the news if the baby is born before she gets divorced what duties does the cuckolded husband vs the baby daddy typically have?
[/QUOTE]
In Part, In Ohio;
3111.03 Presumption of paternity.
(A) A man is presumed to be the natural father of a child under any of the following circumstances:
(1) The man and the child’s mother are or have been married to each other, and the child is born during the marriage or is born within three hundred days after the marriage is terminated by death, annulment, divorce, or dissolution or after the man and the child’s mother separate pursuant to a separation agreement.
Yeah, he totally took advantage of the “marry a woman and get her pregnant loophole” for acquiring kids. He didn’t exploit it as much as some people though. Lots of guys also get to have sex as part of this deal. The whole institute of marriage is just a thin veneer over state-sanctioned sale of babies, if you ask me.
lawbuff, if a woman were married to two men (sequentially) during her pregnancy, would that make both of them the legal presumptive father in Ohio?
Donor sperm is an entirely common form of assisted reproduction, and there is nothing unusual (i.e., nothing that needs to be “looked at”) about the man who intends to raise the child, a.k.a. the intended father, being legally deemed the father. This most typically happens in the context of a marriage but does not have to.
I remember hearing something about what name the mother wishes to have put on the birth certificate rendering that person the legal father in California. Because she is married one would assume the husband would be on the BC but choice appears to be hers and hers alone.
Psst, lawbuff, there’s a ‘sequentially’ in there. Which I take to mean something like Jane is legally married to Alex at the beginning of 2013, but divorces him (let’s assume with mutual consent and no evidence of adultery) on April 31, and on May 1, Jane marries Bob. Jane gives birth to Zacharia on August 7, 2013.
Now, August 7 is both within 300 days of the termination of Jane’s marriage to Alex and within the marriage of Jane and Bob. Therefore, by a simple reading of the statute, both Alex and Bob are Zack’s father.
Untrue. Yes, the most common way of becoming the legal father of a child is if your name is on the birth certificate, no one else claims paternity of the child, and you do not dispute paternity within a time limit, typically one year after birth. If that happens, then you’ll be the legal father of the child regardless of biological fatherhood.
But note that this requires that the person listed on the birth certificate as the father does not dispute paternity. If you dispute it, you can get a DNA test to determine whether or not you’re the biological father, and if you aren’t then you won’t be the legal father either.
Biological paternity is only relevant in cases of disputed paternity. You don’t need to get a DNA test to prove you are or are not the father of a baby unless there’s a dispute. If you say you’re the father, she says you’re the father, and no one else says they’re the father, then there’s no dispute and you’re the legal father, no DNA test required. If she says you’re the father (by listing you on the birth certificate as the father), and you go “Huh”? but don’t deny you’re the father, then guess what, you’re the legal father.
Seems like the law should be set up based on the baby’s likely conception date to avoid that necessity. Of course, two marriages in that short of a time scale may imply adultery, so maybe it’s not worth it.
Even basing the law on the conception date wouldn’t eliminate ambiguity. Say Jane divorces Alex on April 30th, marries Bob on May 1st and gives birth to Zachariah 38 weeks later (I don’t feel like doing the maths) - there’s no medical way to tell, based on the dates, whether he was conceived in one last goodbye shag with Alex or in wedding-night sex with Bob. The law would have to say something like ‘the man who was the husband at the medically estimated date of conception’, and that still leaves Zach with two dads.
But of course the “presumption” of paternity is rebuttable. All you need is a DNA test. The law does not invariably make the husband the legal father of the baby, it only makes him the father of the baby if he does not dispute paternity.
As I said above, the law generally makes you the legal father of a baby if you say you are the father, the mother says you are the father, and no one else claims to be the father. Nobody checks DNA or goes through hotel receipts if this happens. And being the father of a woman who has a baby is equivalent to claiming to be the father, unless you take active steps to deny paternity. That’s all.
So the answer to the question of who gets named the father in the serial marriage case, is whoever claims paternity. The law will only get involved if there are disputes between the woman and the men involved. If there’s a dispute then we break out the DNA tests.
In the olden days before DNA they’d let a jury decide, going into evidence and testimony about who had sex with who on which dates, and the jury deciding who was more credible. That’s what happened to Charlie Chaplin who was ordered to pay child support even though a blood test determined he could not be the genetic father of Joan Barry’s child.
But also note that in the olden days it would be highly humiliating for a man to claim that his wife’s baby was not his, and would make him a laughingstock.