Truth_and_Power
08-07-2007, 04:55 PM
So, I had a rather disturbing experience last night. A friend of mine who recently got married is about to end her marriage. That's the disturbing part.
What I learned in the process of helping her out a bit was that if you have a child out of wedlock, even if you marry the biological father afterwards, the child belongs 100% to the mother UNLESS she files for child support. So basically the father has no right to the child at all except what the mother gives him. In this case that works out for the best, but it smells strongly of blue laws to me. I could understand if the father wasn't around during the pregnancy and rearing, but that is apparently not considered under the law.
I don't know how exactly to put this, but I can picture a situation with a crazy woman denying a father the right to ever see his kid again out of spite, and the father having no recourse even though he's been raising this kid of all of its life.
What I learned in the process of helping her out a bit was that if you have a child out of wedlock, even if you marry the biological father afterwards, the child belongs 100% to the mother UNLESS she files for child support. So basically the father has no right to the child at all except what the mother gives him. In this case that works out for the best, but it smells strongly of blue laws to me. I could understand if the father wasn't around during the pregnancy and rearing, but that is apparently not considered under the law.
I don't know how exactly to put this, but I can picture a situation with a crazy woman denying a father the right to ever see his kid again out of spite, and the father having no recourse even though he's been raising this kid of all of its life.