“I didn’t think there was any difference. I thought, like, if the child's yours and you sign the birth certificate…at the end of the day it's your child.”
Unmarried father interviewed for the research.
Hundreds of thousands of unmarried fathers are raising and supporting their children without realising that they have no legal say in important decisions about their upbringing, including naming, medical treatment and religion.
Research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that the vast majority of fathers - married and unmarried alike - have no idea that men who are not married to their child’s mother need a court order or court-registered ‘parental responsibility’ agreement before they can exercise full parental rights.
Those questioned in a survey commonly assumed that registration of a child’s birth by both parents was enough to confer legal status on the father. As many as three out of four wrongly thought that if a cohabiting mother died, her unmarried partner would have an automatic, legal right to look after their children.
Births outside marriage have risen to 38 per cent of all births. Approaching three out of ten babies are born to unmarried parents who jointly register the birth. Yet out of 230,000 babies born each year to unmarried parents, only 3,000 couples make legal agreements and another 5,500 fathers obtain court orders.
Ros Pickford of Cambridge University’s Centre for Family Research surveyed a random sample of more than 200 fathers. She found that unmarried fathers who knew about the law had mostly found out as a result of a problem. These included a father who had taken his child to hospital with heart problems, only to discover that he was not allowed to sign a consent form for treatment.
Reactions from unmarried fathers who discovered their lack of legal status as a result of the research ranged from disbelief and bewilderment to anger and fear. All those who were cohabiting or supporting their children said they could see no difference between their situation and that of a married man. Most married as well as unmarried fathers felt that marital status was irrelevant to their role as parents.
In general, the survey found no differences between fathers who were married and those who were cohabiting in terms of their attitudes towards parenthood or their involvement and commitment to their children. There were also few differences in lifestyle between married and cohabiting fathers - although cohabiting parents tended to have been together for a shorter time and a higher proportion of pregnancies had been unplanned.
The study concludes that there is an urgent need for clear information about the law to be given to parents at appropriate places, such as ante-natal clinics and birth Register Offices. But it also argues that it is time for the Government to act on a commitment made more than a year ago to change the law on Parental Responsibility.
Ros Pickford: “The existing law is plainly at odds with other areas of family law such as child support and social security where it makes no difference whether parents are married. It was viewed by most fathers we interviewed, whether married or not, as illogical, unfair and out of date. While recent policy has aimed to foster lifelong commitment on the part of parents, fathers in the survey felt their role was actually being undermined and devalued by this aspect of the law.
“A law which is so poorly understood exposes children to a range of problems resulting from fathers not being legally entitled to make decisions about their children’s upbringing. The Lord Chancellor’s Department announced plans last year to change the law to ensure that unmarried fathers were given parental responsibility when they signed the birth certificate. However, no date has been set for this change and there are no plans to alter the position of existing unmarried fathers – or those who become fathers while the waiting continues.”
