Excerpt

Involving fathers before their babies are born makes it easy to establish paternity afterwards, and paternity establishment is critical to child support collection, cost effective even among benefit-dependent families and an important means of making an emotional, as well as financial link with fathers (Legler, 1996). To facilitate this, birth registration procedures could be extended to include birth registration in the hospital setting. Legler reports that, in the US, two thirds of young, unmarried fathers go to the hospital when their babies are born, and 80% take care of their child in the year following the birth.
< back