Fathers’ Legal Ties That Bind

As his 2-day-old daughter squirms in her mother’s arms, Nicolas Reyes, 23, prepares to take a step that will make an indelible impact on the child’s future. Slowly, carefully, he signs his name on a short white form.

The signature etches into the legal record the formal declaration that Reyes, an unmarried man, is the biological father of Carla Reyes-Osoy and in a few short moments cements a legal link between father and daughter that will govern the rest of their lives.

When he finishes, a shy smile spreads across the new father’s face. “I want my name to be on her birth certificate,” he says. “I think it’s very important for her to have my name.”

In California, where one in three children is born out of wedlock, unmarried fathers like Reyes have been stepping forward in record numbers to voluntarily sign legal declarations of paternity.

In 1997, the number of new fathers who put their names on the form soared to 111,850, more than a 600% increase over the previous year.

Their signatures represented 66% of all out-of-wedlock births that year, a dramatic jump from 1996 when only 10% of unmarried fathers signed declarations. In 1998, the numbers have continued to climb.

The ramifications of the trend are huge not only for the well-being of children but also for taxpayers who must foot the bill for the support of many poor youngsters who were born out of wedlock.

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What makes 1997 the watershed year, officials say, is a little-noticed law that required unmarried fathers to sign paternity declarations before their names could go on their children’s birth certificate.

The law, effective in January 1997, replaced the practice of simply allowing the mother to decide what information would go on the certificate.

“Under the old system you could put anybody’s name on that certificate,” said Leslie Frye, chief of the state’s office of child support. “You could put Mickey Mouse. You could put Bill Clinton, and it meant nothing legally.”

The new law makes the name on the birth certificate legally binding, entitles the unwed father to the same rights as a married one and obligates him to help provide child support.

“Nobody expected this kind of reaction. We thought, if anything, the new law would create a marginal increase in paternity declarations,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Sciorra of Los Angeles. “But . . . the results are staggering.”

The paternity declarations are an outgrowth of a national effort to reconnect fathers with their children and a governmental campaign to extract child support from more absent parents.

Both have been given impetus by federal welfare reforms, which require states to establish paternity for increasingly higher percentages of fathers or face the loss of welfare funds.

For decades, out-of-wedlock births have been inextricably tied to the welfare system. Four out of five unwed mothers go on welfare within a few years of their first child’s birth, according to a 1990 congressional budget office study. In California today, 50% of the single mothers on welfare have never been married and 38% of the children have no paternity established.

Governmental efforts to push welfare families into self-sufficiency have put a spotlight on absent fathers. But in the case of unwed fathers, district attorneys cannot seek child support until paternity is established. When a voluntary declaration is already filed, however, it saves the time and cost of a court action.

Advocates say that it is too early for the explosion in paternity declarations to show in child support statistics but that it is bound to increase the number of fathers participating in their children’s lives and contributing to their support.

“This is clearly something positive for children,” said Leora Gershenzon, directing attorney of the child support project of the National Center for Youth Law in San Francisco.

Besides receiving child support, she said, the children benefit from access to the father’s medical history, rights of inheritance and eligibility for the father’s health insurance. In San Diego, a newborn baby became eligible for Social Security benefits when his unmarried father was killed in a drive-by shooting just a few hours after signing a paternity declaration.

But more important, say other advocates, is that the paternity declaration helps the father maintain a relationship with his children. Studies have shown that children whose fathers are active in their lives do better in school and are less likely to succumb to crime and drugs.

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Even before the federal welfare reforms of 1996, California had been moving to boost the number of voluntary declarations of paternity. In 1993, hospitals and an advocacy group, Children Now, teamed up with the Wilson administration to pass legislation creating a pilot program in Humboldt, Nevada and Los Angeles counties.

The Paternity Opportunity Program was designed to create a parent-friendly procedure. Instead of requiring parents to go through an intimidating court session to establish paternity, unwed couples would be approached at the hospital and given the option of doing it cost-free right after the birth of the child.

“I give all the credit in the world to the hospitals,” said Jim Mullany, the state’s program coordinator. “They were really on the front lines. They either make it or break it for the program.”

At the time the program was established, Mullany said, 75% to 80% of unmarried fathers came to the hospital to be with mothers when they gave birth. State officials reasoned that if the fathers showed enough interest to come to the hospital, they might be willing to acknowledge paternity.

“A lot of kids were losing out because of the trend of people not getting married,” said Wayne Doss, director of family support operations in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. “Someone said, ‘What can we do? We’ve got this archaic method of getting dads and kids together.’ This was the answer. It was a sea change.”

The pilot program was barely underway when the federal government mandated that it go statewide in 1995.

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Then came the bad news. The early results were disappointing. In 1995, only 10% of the new unwed fathers statewide and 8% in Los Angeles County were signing the declarations. A year later, the numbers actually dropped in Los Angeles despite the efforts of big hospitals such as Queen of Angels and St. Francis Medical Center.

Mullany remembered that a key to success in other states had been the connection between paternity and birth certificates. So he sought a new law to rescue the program. Then-Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame), a leader of efforts to improve child support collections, pushed the proposal through the Legislature.

“You want paternity to be established just because one of the fundamental set of values of our society is that we want to encourage the family unit,” Speier said recently.

Carrying out the new law fell to hospital workers like Art Vigil, the birth certificate coordinator at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood where nearly 5,000 babies are born each year. At first, he recalled, the mothers were angered that they didn’t have the option of determining what went on the birth certificate.

“Oh God, I just wanted to run out of the room sometimes they would get so upset,” he said.

But the animosity lessened, he said, as unwed couples learned what to expect when they came to the hospital.

“Eventually I had fathers asking me before I could even say anything, ‘Where is that new form I need to sign so I can get my name on the birth certificate,’ ” Vigil recalled.

To Frye, the favorable response undercuts the conventional wisdom that the emotional bond between unmarried fathers and their children is tenuous.

“I think we have maybe done unmarried men a tremendous disservice over the last 30 years,” she said. “I think more and more research is indicating that . . . if given the opportunity to make the legal link [with their children] in a no-cost way, they’ll do it in huge numbers.”

But Reginald Brass, founder of the Los Angeles advocacy group My Child Says Daddy, said he doesn’t think that most unwed fathers really understand what they are signing.

“They don’t know what they’re getting into,” he said. “The next thing they know, a year or two down the line, the district attorney’s office is prosecuting them for not paying money because the mother is on [welfare].

“Fathers have always been there for their children, but all this is about is dollars and cents.”

Ruth Hauser, health information services director for St. Francis, disagreed, saying fathers are told orally and in writing that signing the declaration will obligate them to help support the child.

Despite the recent success of the voluntary program, paternity still has not been established for thousands of out-of-wedlock children because they were born before the creation of the program.

For those children, paternity becomes an issue if their mothers seek welfare. By then, Mullany said, time has elapsed and fathers are hard to locate. Often they deny paternity, contending that the mothers never told them about the birth of the child.

“We get a lot of letters from fathers saying, ‘I never even knew I had a kid until that child was 10 years old and [the mother] went after me for child support,’ ” he said. “That’s a pretty heavy burden to lay on somebody.

“The biggest service this program does, even for the fathers who don’t sign, [is that] it brings an awareness of their responsibilities for having a child.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Paternity Filings

A new state law has helped prompt a huge increase in the number of California fathers to officially acknowledge paternity of children born out of wedlock.

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Percent Number of paternity declaring declarations filed paternity ’95 20,492 10% ’96 18,322 10% ’97 111,850 66%

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Source: State Department of Social Servies

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Paternity Filings Increase

Under a year-old state law, unwed fathers are required to sign a declaration of paternity or they cannot be listed on the child’s birth certificate. This law and national welfare reforms have helped prompt a dramatic increase in the percentage of fathers who officially acknowledge paternity of children born out of wedlock.

Los Angeles County

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Percent who Los Angeles County acknowledge Paternity declarations Year paternity Unwed births received* 1995 8% 79,379 6,403 1996 7% 67,315 4,668 1997 53% 63,076 33,717

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Orange County

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Percent who Orange County acknowledge Paternity declarations Year paternity Unwed births received* 1995 14% 14,395 1,993 1996 16% 12,231 1,931 1997 80% 12,888 10,295

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Ventura County

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Percent who Ventura County acknowledge Paternity declarations Year paternity Unwed births received* 1995 11% 2,091 240 1996 9% 2,579 225 1997 77% 2,547 1,971

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Source: State Department of Social Services