”On a wider point, this thread - along with many others atm - is a worrying illustration of how much kneejerk homophobia is creeping back because of the reaction to gender ideology nonsense. It's real backlash stuff and people need to be more careful.”
Bollocks. Stop accusing us of homophobia, because that is not what this is.
As I understand it, this is a discussion about legal changes which have been brought in without it being publicized and concern for how that might impact the child. It is nothing to do with an irrational hatred of lesbians.
I have my child’s birth certificate beside me and it unequivocally gives “Father’s name” and “Father’s Occupation”.
So in the early 2000s in Scotland, it was supposedly the father who was recorded on the birth certificate. When the “Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland Act 1965) was written, however, it does appear that because of the different morality at the time, the listed father was generally the woman’s husband and father may not have meant biological father, as I had always assumed, other than that, in the majority of cases, the husband was also the father.
So from reading the law, it seems in 1965, if the biological father wasn’t married to the mother, it took an extra effort to get him added. He could be listed, but the mother had to jump through hoops to allow that to happen and I suspect that was mostly about the moral values of the time. Unmarried mothers were very much frowned upon.
So presumably, it was quite well understood, if never openly mentioned, that if a man married a pregnant woman, even if he was not the father, he would be listed, perhaps because not listing anyone was scandalous. Presumably, according to the morals of the time, it was better to have any husband, who would be listed as the father, as otherwise the child would be considered to be a bastard, which was very much frowned upon.
So those saying it’s realistically always been the man legally attached to the woman ahead of the child’s biological father are in fact more correct than those of us assuming it’s always been the biological father.
It strikes me that this all stems from earlier times, when women couldn’t own property and therefore virtually needed a man to be able to exist. So legally having a husband was more important for the child than knowing who its father was. Genetics were obviously important, which is why Queens always had to be virginal, but obviously birth certificates have always been more of a fudge than I had realized when it comes to fathers.
It has crossed my mind, reading this thread, that perhaps only one parent could be listed, that being the mother, but of course now, even that is somewhat complicated as the birth mother and the genetic mother are no longer always the same.
So I don’t have any answers, other than it makes sense to me to have it specified what role the second parent listed has in relation to the child. And perhaps we need to bear in mind that biological parentage is actually more important now than it used to be, as we recognize the clear effects of genetics on health.
I feel that perhaps those making law should perhaps start again from scratch and work out what a birth certificate should usefully document and why, and take it from there. Continued fudging is not necessarily the best way forward.