Something in the “advice” column caught my eye this morning. (The only place I can find to link to it is here, and you will have to register, though that is free.) Here’s a place where perhaps the law is actually working well, or working as it is meant to, or at least not making things worse.
Here’s the story: A woman is getting married. She is pregnant. The baby is (as she puts it) “not the groom’s.” He knows this, as do all their close friends and family. The concern expressed in the letter to the columnist (Carolyn Hax) is what (and perhaps how) to tell the other guests about the parentage of the child.
Now I’ll admit that my first question (and the first question considered in the advice column) is why on earth one would feel compelled to tell anyone anything. The answer to this seems to be that the bride is afraid that people will make assumptions–that is, people will assume the the groom is the father of the child.
Well here’s the beauty of the law–the groom actually is the father, or will be once the child is born. Isn’t that tidy? There’s no need to say anything because there is actually nothing to say. The child’s parents will be just who everyone at that wedding will they they are.
If you are wondering what makes him the genetically unrelated groom the father, the answer is the fact of the marriage. One of the most common laws about parenthood is a presumption that a married man is the father of his wife’s child. I think every state has some form of this presumption. And it generally applies as long as the child is born while the woman is married, no matter whether she was married when she became pregnant: When a married woman gives birth, the father of her child is her husband. (This is why it is possible that the man who was married to Nadya Suleman (the mother of the octuplets) is the father of some of her earlier children, even though it is quite clear that they have no genetic connection to him.)
In fact, the case recited here is the sort of situation for which the law is designed. Here’s this man who is willing to marry this woman when she is pregnant. He knows there was some man in the past who will have a genetic link to the baby, but he’s willing to step in anyway. From a societal point of view, he’s doing a good thing. The law will regularize the family structure–declare him the father (which also means declaring that the other guy is not the father) and make everything neat and tidy. So there’s nothing to say to any of the wedding guests.
I can see interesting questions for the future. Would you tell the child about the absence of a genetic connection? If so how and when? How should we describe the relationship of the absent man to the child. All good things to think about, but the law has at least the formal and legal part of this covered. He’s not the father–the groom will be.
In general the bride and groom are not expected to disclose whether or not they’ve had sex with people apart from their intended spouses. That’s a good thing, really, when you think about it. There’s no reason to vary the custom this time.
Related Topics 
The reality is that the groom is not the father {the law gets it wrong and is easily abused}. My question would be does the actual father of the child even know that he is indeed a father if not then the bride has denied the father his basic human right to his own child. Not only does this happen all too often but because of the so called law you talk about far too many men are forced into raising and/or paying child support for a child they didn’t father because their SO cheated on them.
This happens so often that it calls into the question the morality of the feminine gender and suggests that the average female is unworthy of trust…
I’m always a bit leery of the invocation of “reality.” The law establishes the husband as the father. (Who will acutally play the role in the life of the child is a different question. And who is genetically related to the child is yet another question. It may be that you would assert that the law should (always?) give meaning to the genetic connection, but it is not now nor has it ever been the way the law is structured. Which is really my point here–for the moment this isn’t about what is right and what is wrong. I just want people to see how the law works.
Re: The law establishes the husband as the father.
____________________________
This law was written long before DNA testing was possible and needs to be updated to reflect that reality and because it hasn’t been it is abused on a daily basis by far many more females than people realize. For instance about 30% of those men tested end up finding out that the children they thought were theirs were in actuality fathered by somebody else.
Hence the law isn’t sacred but actively promotes both fraud and injustice…
Finally – logic
There have been extensive discussions on the blog about what the legal signifigance of a genetic link betweeen a man and a child ought to be. I won’t rehash them here. But the long and short of it is that I don’t agree that biology defines who is and who is not a parent. I am fairly certain we disagree on this point and given that disagreement, we will inevitably disagree in many other places. So, for example, I wouldn’t say that since we can now test DNA we should reject the presumption. Similarly, I wouldnt say that that the 30% of the men you refer to are raising children that aren’t “theirs.” They may be raising children that are not genetically related to them, but may also be parents to those children. (By the way, I’d love to know where the 30% statistic comes from.)
I don’t say this to foreclose debate. And I invite you to look around the blog–there are lots of discussions relevant to the point you make. I just think it may be useful to acknowledge that you and I disagree on a basic point and that this is the root cause of many other disagreements.
Julie what do you have against holding people accountable for their own actions rather than for the actions of others? Why would you not at least want everyone involved to have a fair shot and handling their own responsibilities and the right to know that the responsibility they are taking on should be handled the man who fathered the child.
The root of our disagreement isn’t a basic point but has to do with intellectual dishonesty. Your views have been used by the legal profession at the demands of the feminists to force men to pay child support for children that are not theirs and didn’t find out until their wife revealed this fact to them during a custody fight. This is fraud and those who justify it are not only intellectually dishonest but judicial perverts who intentionally pervert the law with both malice and forethought.