Last week the actor Jason Patric went to court to “fight ’til I’m dead,” as he put it, to see his 4-year-old son. Patric and his girlfriend conceived the child through in vitro fertilization, and a judge earlier denied Patric any paternal rights reports Slate.
Cases like Patric’s and Miller’s, which involve fathers who never married the mothers, petitioning for custody are becoming more frequent in Courts, but divorce courts have a long history of trying to keep up with changing gender dynamics.
Men’s rights activists complain that despite the legal changes allowing for a greater gender equality, family courts preference for custody being awarded to a mother over a father still lingers and studies have shown that through the 1980s sole custody being awarded to the mother generally still prevailed.
A father who never married the mother of his child has a much shakier legal status. Petitioning the courts for paternal rights as a father who had a child out of wedlock is complicated to do and much less likely to be successful. Paternity lawyers in Thailand, Chaninat & Leeds explain that in Thailand, paternity rights are established either by marriage to the mother, through court action or government registration. In this regard, a man may be the biological father and have established a relationship with his child, but without having met the necessary legal requirements, may lack the legal rights to his child.
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