February 22, 23

NEWS / OK couple fix birth certificate incorrectly listing mother’s ex-husband as father of child

An Oklahoma couple has managed to fix a state-issued birth certificate that incorrectly listed the mother’s now ex-husband as the father, having spent two years and a considerable amount of money on the matter. The error stemmed from the state’s Uniform Parentage Act that automatically printed the name of the husband in a marriage as that of the father. Meaghan McCraw and her boyfriend Donnell Teal had a daughter named Lillian in 2017, but Lilian’s birth certificate listed McCraw’s estranged husband, who she had not seen in years, as the father. “The day I held my daughter in my arms I cried. I said, ‘Hey, this is my daughter,’” Donnell Teal told KFOR News, “The hospital put it on the temporary birth certificate, and the state later said, ‘No, it’s not, it’s this man’s.’” The father listed on a birth certificate can be changed if the original father listed signs a denial of paternity and the true father signs an acknowledgment of paternity. A DNA test can be ordered by a court if either party refuses. McCraw claims that the complication allowed her estranged husband to use the fact that his name was on the birth certificate as leverage in their divorce. McCraw and Teal tried to seek help from local politicians and even governors Mary Fallin and Kevin Stitt (who succeeded Fallin in 2019), but to no avail. After a two-year legal battle with McCraw’s ex-husband, the court was finally able to force the ex-husband to renounce his paternity rights and get his name removed from the certificate. The couple is now trying to change the law. “In today's world, there are a lot of different types of relationships - some of them self-explanatory, some of them complicated - that could produce a child. I think it's wrong that the state is denying fathers like me rights to our child,” Teal told KFOR News. “We petitioned senators and the attorney general, and none of them really want anything to do with it. They seem more inclined to uphold the status quo and the state authority versus the individual rights of parents."