Social Policy Minister John Dalli is concerned about the high percentage of father unknown births that are being registered on the island. He wants to set up a think tank to work in a more focused way on the issue and rope in the services of the Education Department and the Centre for Family Studies. Apparently, one of Dalli’s greatest concerns is teen pregnancies where the problem of anonymity is manifestly more acute.

He hasn’t called upon my services nor has he asked my opinion but he may find a few logical explanations much closer to home and he may not have to stray that far afield. You see, if you think about it logically the active subjects of a teenage pregnancy are usually both underage. For the most part, a 12-, 13- or 14-year-old girl who finds herself up the duff has usually been involved in a sexual encounter with a boy her age, sometimes slightly younger or maybe slightly older, but nevertheless still within the minor age bracket.

Now a child born out of wedlock can be acknowledged by both the father and the mother. However, if the father is a minor, such acknowledgement is null. So perhaps Dalli may want to have a look at the proviso to s.86 of the Civil Code and see if this makes any sense to him at all.

I am hard pressed to understand the logic behind this. For one, is there so much difference between an 18- and a 17-year- old to warrant the profoundly different treatment of the situation? But even if we concede that there is a difference between a 14- and an 18-year-old, the sort of person who becomes involved in this kind of imbroglio is usually pretty wily about sexual matters and life generally.

And since neither the law nor the minister can stop minors having sex or getting pregnant I don’t see why they get to stop minors from fathering their children. Acknowledging your child is the first step towards fatherhood and if the law itself refuses to acknowledge a father on a birth certificate just because he is a minor, then it’s no wonder that the island is teeming with unknown fathers.

So you begin to realise that the reason women sometimes opt to go down the seemingly un­savoury ‘father unknown’ road has little to do with cashing in on social benefits or with getting a free lunch. Nor does it have anything to do with women not knowing the identity of the expectant father on account of drunken, wanton sex as I vaguely recall was one of Josie Muscat’s (AN) primary concerns during the last election. It might be because the law as we know it is often an ass.

Women who get pregnant out of wedlock, who suddenly find themselves left for dead, abandoned and ignored by the man who made this possible, do not have a great deal of ammunition at their disposal. When registering her child, a woman who finds herself in this predicament can’t make a unilateral declaration to the effect that Mr X is the father because the law does not allow this. Nor does the law allow a man, who knows himself to be the father of a child born out of wedlock, to acknowledge this child, unless the mother is also in agreement. I know of a few situations where the cookie crumbles the other way – when a woman, knowing a man to be her child’s father, persists in refusing to acknowledge him. So you see it’s not always the men who should get a bad rap.

Women and men who find themselves in either of these situations can always file a law suit. A woman can request a declaration from the court to the effect that Mr X is the father, or, Mr X himself can ask the court for a declaration that he is the father. But in the meantime, while the drama is being battled out in court, children are registered as ‘unknown’. And surprisingly enough a man can still refuse to undergo DNA testing and the court can only take the fact of his refusal into consideration. Seems rather primitive to my mind.

You see, the situation is hardly child-friendly and seems to favour the person who is in denial for one reason or other. There are fewer people who would make false declarations either way, than there are people who refuse to shoulder their responsibilities.

Today, with DNA testing, a false declaration won’t go very far and few will be so stupid as to risk making one.

But the law seems to favour the fortunate – people who conceive out of wedlock and are lucky enough to meet a gentleman who offers full financial support despite the absence of marital obligations. Perhaps the law operates on the basis of rational assumptions and it reckons that there are very few men out there who would not want to father their own children and fewer women who would deny their children a chance at being fathered by their natural father.

While it may be true that male bonding might not be natural, nor instantaneous, most men, if nothing else, have a natural curiosity about their flesh and blood.

But there are always exceptions and unfortunately if someone has washed his hands of his responsibilities and leaves a woman in the lurch, unless the woman institutes court action he is basically let off the hook.

It would be quite a different story if a woman who found herself in a similar predicament could simply declare X to be the father and then let X challenge the declaration and fight it out in court.

I am not suggesting that fathers’ names be allowed to appear on birth certificates flippantly because this would be breeding ground for abuse and mayhem.

But when it comes to children conceived out of wedlock where fathers are mysteriously absent, there ought to be a sui generis system in operation where registrations are made provisionally pending DNA testing, which in my mind should be compulsory.

If people are adult enough to do the sort of thing that leads to having babies, then they ought to be big enough to face the music one way or another.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com