A comprehensive document including all the relevant information on parental responsibility and parentage in UK Child Law, from sources such as Family Law by Polly Morgan, Parental Responsibility and Shared Residence Orders: Parliamentary Intentions and Judicial Interpretations by Peter Harris and R...
Contents
Biological Parenthood
Legal Parenthood
Person with Parental Responsibility
- Definition and purpose
- Allocation
- Rights allocated
- Unilateral application
- Human Rights elements
- Removal
Perspectives on Parental Responsibility
,Biological Parenthood
In law, every child at birth has a mother.
Where there is a surrogacy arrangement, where the
child is being carried by one woman for the
commissioning parents, the woman who gives birth is
the mother and the commissioning parents must
acquire parentage.
S 34(1) Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008:
“The woman who is carrying or who has carried a
child… and no other woman, is to be treated as the
mother of the child’
Transgender men who give birth are still to be
recognised as the mother on the birth certificate, in
spite of any changes under the Gender Recognition Act
– R (On the Application of TT) v The Registrar General
for England and Wales [2019] EWHC 2384 (Fam) and
[2020] EWCA Civ 559
Under s 20 Family Law Reform Act 1969, the court can
order DNA testing, however, a person’s consent is
required for them to be tested (s 21).
The standard of determining parentage is the balance
of probabilities: is it more likely than not that this man
is the father?
, Legal parenthood
A child’s legal parent does not automatically have
responsibility for that child and the person with
responsibility for a child is not always the legal parent.
Who is a child’s legal mother?
The woman, or individual, who carried the child is the
child’s legal mother.
In the Ampthill Peerage case, the House of Lords simply
noted that ‘Motherhood, although also a legal
relationship, is based on a fact, being proved
demonstrably by parturition’ [childbirth]
Re G (Children) – it was observed that while the
attribution of motherhood to the person bearing the
child ‘may be partly for reasons of certainty and
convenience, it also recognises a deeper truth: that the
process of carrying a child and giving him birth (which
may well be followed by breast-feeding for some
months) brings with it, in the vast majority of cases, a
very special relationship between mother and child, a
relationship which is different from any other’
Who is a child’s legal father?
Where:
- The mother is married to a man and had sex with
that man
- The mother is married or civilly partnered to a
woman and had sex with a man
- The mother is in an unmarried relationship with a
man and had sex with that man
- The mother is in an unmarried relationship with a
woman and had sex with a man
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