Solo Mother

New husband makes the baby, old husband gets the credit!

by christina on January 8th, 2007

File this under the category of, “As if Divorce Wasn’t Hard Enough”

Seems that some parts of the world will automatically register a newborn baby with a divorcee’s ex-husband’s paternity if the child is born within 300 days of the divorce. The only way to reverse this is to get the ex to testify in court that the child isn’t his AND to offer DNA testing to prove the child is the new husband’s.

Whew!

This article, “New divorcees push for DNA testing to be allowed to prove paternity of newborn children“, from Mainichi News lays it out. Could you imagine having to go back to your ex and ask him to sign off on your new child? Talk about a painful stranglehold on future happiness! And I quote:

A 32-year-old woman living in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, married her current husband in December 2004 after divorcing her previous husband six months earlier, and gave birth to her daughter in January 2005. When she and her new husband registered their marriage at the ward office, she told an official that she was 10 months pregnant. [Solomother note: erm. I think this is s typo? 10 months pregnant?] At the time, the official told her that the child could not be registered in her husband’s family register, citing the Civil Code clause. The woman later discovered that she had to ask her former husband — who had abused her repeatedly during their marriage — to testify that the girl was not his child at a family court.

Ahem. Emphasis mine. Let’s see. Human gestation lasts 266 - 270 days. Seems to me that someone is punishing women for finding happiness a little too soon after the divorce!

 Many thanks to Hsien-Hsien over at A Hearty Life for the article!

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