(hey, didja know that one of the purposes of marriage is to 'legitimize' children, that is, give them a legal father regardless of genetic parentage?)
Yup; there's going to be a chapter of my dissertation about how courts and legislatures decided that, in cases of donor insemination (by a heterosexual, married couple-- this was the 1950s and 1960s), the legal father on the birth certificate should be the mother's husband, not the genetic father. Before that, there was considerable legal limbo— including at least one mother's kids who were declared illegitimate for a while because their genetic father wasn't their mother's spouse.
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Date: 2008-10-10 10:54 pm (UTC)Yup; there's going to be a chapter of my dissertation about how courts and legislatures decided that, in cases of donor insemination (by a heterosexual, married couple-- this was the 1950s and 1960s), the legal father on the birth certificate should be the mother's husband, not the genetic father. Before that, there was considerable legal limbo— including at least one mother's kids who were declared illegitimate for a while because their genetic father wasn't their mother's spouse.