as always, it’s not possible to make statements about the law without knowing the jurisdiction.
for instance, if this case arose in Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the mother cannot exclude the father from the birth certificate; the father has the constitutional right under the equality clause of the Charter to be listed as the father and to participate in the naming of the child.
Not intended as legal advice, of course, but simply to comment on a matter of public interest. The OP should try to obtain legal advice from a lawyer knowledgeable in this area of the law in her jurisdiction.
My son is 22, and I am not trying to get involved. He has asked me to help him! The thought that a baby that could be his, is out in the world just bothers him. He lost his dad years ago and he feels that a father is very important to a child. He wants to do right by the baby, and have a relationship, but if she does not list him as the father then he is not sure what to do next. Thank you all for your kindness, not looking for legal advice just was seeing if anyone ever went through this and was asking what they did. God Bless You all!!!
Well, I haven’t been through it myself, but my suspicion is that of the people who have, the best outcomes tended to be experienced by those who DID get legal advice.
Best of luck to both of you; your son is already ahead of the game by having a caring mom looking out for him.
You may think you don’t have the money (maybe expenses of a thousand dollars?) for a lawyer right now.
But you’re not looking at a problem that will go away right now, and you’re not looking at expenses of only a thousand dollars.
You’re looking at a problem that could continue for 18 years and expenses totalling maybe a million dollars .
I’d tell my son to walk away and never talk to this girl again. It just sounds like hillbilly bullshit drama, and if he has a get old of jail free card, I’d tell him to take it. He can lawyer up if and when the girl demands, through the courts, that he be ordered to take a paternity test.
If your son in any way establishes a parental relationship with the child, he can be on the hook for child support payments until the child is 18-21 regardless of whether or not he is the child’s father. So do not seek to be on the birth certificate unless the son already knows for sure he is the father. Ending up on the certificate would just legally encumber him if it ends up he is not the father.
Do not give the mother any money whatsoever, period. My advice would be different if this was a situation where your son was the only one known to be banging her in the time frame of conception etc. In that case I’d say he’s probably the father and has some obligation to help out with initial expenses. Here it sounds like it is highly questionable as to who the father is. Making payments now might encumber him legally down the road even if he ends up not being the father. Additionally, if he is the father and makes payments to her in a way that cannot be tracked she could go back years later and claim he was not making child support payments and he could get massively dinged for back child support.
This is a situation where the courts protect both the mother and your son. When the baby is born she will most likely be required to fill out information about the father if she’s receiving any government assistance at all. That will start a process where they will try to begin collecting child support payments from the father that she names. If that ends up being your son, at that point you can contest the paternity and demand a DNA test. If the DNA test comes back showing your son isn’t the father then he is off the hook. If it comes back showing he is the father, then he will be required to pay child support (as he should) however he’ll also now have parental rights proven by DNA test and will almost certainly be able to get court-mandated visitation rights to the child.
If the government never starts a child support claim against your son it means she named another man as the father, or she isn’t receiving government assistance and has declined to pursue it on her own initiative. In that scenario, if your son wants to know for sure I believe he can pursue a court order mandating a DNA test in order to secure his parental rights. But he had better be very sure that is what he wants, because once that process is underway and it is proven he is the father, he’s responsible for the kid financially until they are 18-21.
Your son should not pay a dime outside of the courts but he should set aside money in a savings account as if he were paying support. If he turns out to be the father 6 or 8 or 12 months after the kid is born he could be on the hook for thousands of dollars in arrearages.
The main dysfunction with everyone yelling at you to get a DNA test done is that your son evidently *wants *very much to be this kids daddy and the foolishness of the mother’s demands for money and non testing are hardly registering with him.
Your claims for no money for a DNA test are (IMO) borderline asinine. If you were not going to get a meal or shower or cigarettes until you came up with a hundred dollars I’m pretty sure you could work it out. You honestly don’t seem to be trying very hard on the whole baby daddy birth validation issue. It’s a straightforward and not wildly expensive process.
Forget about your son for second, he’s kind of an idiot. You know this. The point YOU need to understand is that a lot of this is going to come crashing back onto your shoulders if support is expected of your son. YOU are the one who will be looked to for helping him with the child or the support payments. In the end of lot of this is going to wind up in your lap. You need to press this issue re certifying the kid’s ID otherwise YOU may well be paying for some non-biologically related child well into your old age.
You need to scrape the money together and take charge of this issue, he’s not going to.
This ex-girlfriend may be a con artist. For all you know, she may be telling half a dozen guys that they are the father. She tells each of them that she doesn’t want the courts to deal with it. She tells them each that they can pay her a certain amount of money each month in cash. She may even let each of them visit the kid one evening a month. She makes sure that none of them know about the others. Do not let your son get sucked into this kind of situation. You and your son should have no further contact with the ex-girlfriend except in a legal context. You and your son should visit a lawyer once and explain what’s happened. Let him decide what to do from then on.
It’s ridiculous for him not to use the courts. After all, if it’s proved he is not the father, there is still nothing from helping her out financially or emotionally if he so wants.
It’s generally a good thing that the son’s first inclination is to step up financially and wants to be involved as a father. But this is a scenario where his good intentions could result in a lot of heartache. Long term your son will not be happy supporting a child that isn’t his, because even if the mother allowed him to have some relationship with the child it would always be totally at her whim as to what access he would have. Eventually this woman will probably settle down long term with another man and she will not want your son having any relationship at all with this child although she may still attempt to continue collecting child support.
Generally it’s never a good move to try and be a fathers to a child that isn’t yours unless we’re talking an adoption or step parent scenario. That’s why if your son feels he absolutely must step up to the plate and isn’t willing to just back away and wait to see how the courts act that he really needs to determine paternity. Most likely I bet his paternal feelings he’s having right now will dissipate if a DNA test comes back showing he isn’t the father.
You really need to push your son to come up with the money for testing, and need to help him with that. That is out of self-interest, I’ve never heard of a situation like this where a young parent doesn’t have expenses and work rolling up to the grandparents. It will most likely be significantly better for you personally to help pay to settle the paternity issue than it will be if you leave your son to navigate this on his own.
Penelope, your choice of words leads me to believe you live in Ohio. Here are basic instructions to getting you started on establishing paternity in Ohio. As you can see, genetic testing can be requested by an alleged father. It looks like you file an Acknowledgment of Paternity, get a test ordered and if the child isn’t his you have 60 days to rescind the Acknowledgment. They link to numbers you can call for more information. I would speak to a lawyer who has your interests at heart first though.
The girl wants to keep the courts out of it so she can cash checks from multiple sources. The government, your son and some other guy.
If having a son/grandchild is important, you had better find a way to pay to speak with a lawyer who knows what he or she is doing and can give you the best possible advice on how to handle this. If you can’t afford to talk to a lawyer for an hour to set up a basic plan to establish your rights and interests, how are you both planning on affording a son/grandson?
This sounds like the best solution to me. Put money aside as if he were paying child support, in a high-interest-bearing account. Wait for proceedings to occur and for government to come after him for child support, then sort out DNA issues and confirm paternity. If the child is his, then there’s a lump of the back-payment already waiting to be paid, if it’s not then hey - at least he’s now got some savings.
There is no way to get around needing a paternity test.
It’s the only moral thing to do. If he is the father, he has a moral and legal responsibility towards that kid, and her opinion of that doesn’t really matter one whit. Furthermore, he has rights as a father, and courts can and do enforce these. He can, and should, be a part of that child’s life. And it’s chickenshit to let fear of financial obligations keep you from doing all you can to make that happen.
But it’s true that once you begin to be a father, you don’t get to stop acting like a father. That means that if you have spent a long time supporting a child, you can’t suddenly decide you are no longer in to it, even if you figure out that they don’t happen to share your DNA. Hence, the test.
Realistically, he’s got to have some good idea of if he’s the father or not. Babies take a pretty predictable time to gestate, and you can usually nail these things down to within a couple weeks. Even if she was banging out other guys under his nose, there are some realistic limits to the sheer number of guys a person is likely to be getting it on with in a two week period without their boyfriend noticing.
That said, we know jack shit about this situation. I’m shocked at the number of people who’ve already determined she’s a lying slut. We have no idea of their circumstances or why she may not want to be legally tied to this individual.
Technically, there only needs to be one additional guy to throw the who thing into a huge grey area. At best he could disqualify himself, if he had reliable information as to the gestation date, which he’s not going to have.
As an aside, I’m rather insulted by the idea that the child’s father has no right to be at the hospital, and no rights or claim over the child unless the mother chooses to include him. There may be no way to realistically let him exercise those rights without a courtroom battle, but a father has a right to visit his child in the hospital.
