Birth records in Virginia were not required before 1912. In some ways, life was simpler then. A kid was your kid if you said she was your kid, and who was going to argue? With birth certificates, things got complicated and, sometimes, a little dicey. What if you put your name on the birth certificate and then found out you ...
This article is not about money. We know, child support means money, but the root of this issue is paternity, not money. If you are paying child support for children who are not yours, you have a paternity problem that has created a money problem. Here is what you can do about both. Asserting Your Rights Without appearing to be ...
Today's Latin lesson brings us the word “putativus,” which comes from a Latin stem meaning to believe or suspect. From this we get putative, as in Virginia's putative father registry. Lawyers love Latin. Putative means “generally considered or assumed to be.” As in, you are the child's putative father. How Virginia Birth Certificates Work We think of birth certificates as a legal magic wand, casting ...
The common cuckoo bird engages in a brutal behavior scientists call brood parasitism1. The female cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds' nests. Quick-hatching cuckoo chicks hatch before their nestmates. They push the other bird eggs out of the nest to the ground below, leaving the foster bird mom to feed only the cuckoo. From the cuckoo we get the ...
The legal word "consent" is often associated with intimate matters like sex, statutory rape and marriage. It also extends, though, to the often-inevitable outcome of sex: pregnancy. Women in Virginia have powerful rights to give or deny consent to the fathers of their unborn children, such as consent to attend prenatal appointments, consent to hear information from their obstetricians, and ...
Today’s Latin Lingo goes out to all those surprised Virginia Dads out there: Ignorantia Juris Non Excusat, which roughly translates to “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” It is, sadly, a reason given when surprised Virginia Dads find out they are, in fact, Dads. We are not here to tell you when to keep your pants zipped, but if ...
Dwayne Parsons knows what paternity fraud feels like. He will go on knowing for the next 1,913 years, after a Chester, Virginia judge ordered him to pay past child support payments on a child legally proven not to be his, at the rate of $1 a month1. Though he had been falsely accused of paternity for the child since 2000, ...
Some pieces of paper are unimportant: a losing lottery ticket; a completed grocery list; an expired gift certificate. Some incidental pieces of paper are extremely valuable: a contract signed by Jimi Hendrix sold for $45,9601 a few years back. Some important pieces of paper are priceless: the Magna Carta; the Constitution; a Virginia birth certificate. With the first two, you ...
Unmarried fathers, says the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)1, accounted for 36 percent of first births for fathers in the 2000s. Various Virginia institutions, traditionalists and social circles can frown and fret all they want, but practical agencies that deal with the day-to-day realities of life in 21st century Virginia accept unmarried fathers as inhabiting roughly one-third of the landscape. ...