The Archbishop of Canterbury is not the biological child of his mother's deceased husband...and why that matters to same-sex couples

So it seems the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was born nine months after his mother's marriage, was actually the biological child of a different man with whom his mother's had sexual relations.

That may seem to have nothing to do with same-sex couples, but it does.  Right now courts across the country are grappling with whether a married woman's female spouse is the legal parent of the child she bears.  Phoenix family law practitioner Claudia Work told me that, on the same day this past week, two different Arizona judges in two different cases decided that issue in diametrically opposing orders; one applied the presumption and determined that the spouse was a parent and the other said the word "husband" in the parentage statute applied only to a male spouse until the legislature says otherwise.

It's the marital presumption that made the husband of the Archbishop's mother his legal father.  No one rebutted that presumption.  End of story.  At least end of both the legal story and lived story of this family.

This week the New York Times ran a story whose main point was that not so many children are actually the result of extra-marital liaisons.  But to say that the number is not the 8% to 10% of urban legal is actually not to state that there are few such children.  A major research study estimated the number at 1-2% of births to married woman (this can sometimes include unmarried women where the male partner has a high degree of certainty that he is the biological father).  In 2014, there were almost 4 million children born in the US.  Almost 59% of those births were to married women -- a total of almost 2.4 million.  Even if only 1% of those children are not biologically related to their mother's husband, that is 24,000 children per year in the US.  If it is 2%, that's 48,000.

Demographer Gary Gates, formerly of the Williams Institute, estimated from the 2008-2010 American Community Survey that 2% of women in same-sex couples reported giving birth the previous year.  The 2010 Census showed  almost 333,000 female same-sex couples, which translates into about 6,600 children born per year to those couples.

And so to my point.  The fact that a woman's female spouse is not her child's biological parent is decidedly not a justification for denying her the marital presumption.  If someone outside the marriage tries to rebut the presumption, well, resolving that dispute can wait until there actually is a dispute.  Until rebutted, that spouse is a parent, just as every husband is, even though four times as many children -- or maybe double that -- are born each year to married heterosexual couples where the husband is not the biological father.  In almost every state the husband's lack of biological tie does not, in every imaginable circumstance, automatically disestablish his parentage.  The law is more nuanced that that.

And so it should be for married lesbian couples.  Both are the child's parents from the moment of birth until a court says otherwise.