Parliament erased fathers – The Court of Appeal just put them back

Last Saturday, we looked at the crisis in fathers’ rights with Dr Bruce Newsome. Now the Court of Appeal has weighed in – and its finding should be of interest to every supporter of real marriage.

In Re J, Re M and Re P [2026] EWCA Civ 344, Sir Andrew McFarlane – the President of the Family Division – ruled that only a child’s biological father can acquire parental responsibility by being named on a birth certificate. The birth certificate does not create fatherhood. Biology does.

In one of the three cases, a man who had loved and raised a child as his own for two years – who genuinely believed he was the father – was told the law had never recognised him as such. Not that his recognition had been taken away. That it had never existed.

Sir Andrew put it plainly: “only the individual whose sperm has fertilised an ovum so as to create the embryo from which the living child has developed can be regarded, in law, as that child’s father”.

If biological fatherhood is foundational – and the Court of Appeal has now confirmed that it is – then the institution that binds biological fathers to their children matters more than ever. That institution is marriage. And it is in freefall.

UCL’s Millennium Cohort Study shows that 45 per cent of teenagers are no longer living with both natural parents by age 14. The Centre for Social Justice finds 2.5 million children without a resident father – and warns that the collapse of youth clubs and the retreat of men from community life has left boys with nowhere to turn but the manosphere. The NASUWT reports that nearly one in four female teachers have now been subjected to misogynist abuse from boys in their classrooms.

In 2008, when Parliament voted down an amendment to retain “the need of that child for a father” in fertility law, rather than replace it with “supportive parenting”, Iain Duncan Smith warned MPs that children without fathers were “75 per cent... more likely to fail at school” and “70 per cent more likely to succumb to drug addiction”. His amendment was voted down, 292 to 217. The warning signs were there. Parliament chose to look away.

The Court of Appeal has now reaffirmed what that vote tried to deny: fatherhood is not a label to be assigned by paperwork, but a biological reality the law must respect. Marriage is what turns that reality into a lifelong commitment – a man and a woman bound to one another and to the children born of that union. Not by a birth certificate, but by a vow.

That is what C4M is here to defend. The truth has a way of reasserting itself. We will keep saying it until the law catches up.