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45 Fam. L.Q. 219 (2011-2012)
Marriage, Parentage, and Child Support

handle is hein.journals/famlq45 and id is 231 raw text is: Marriage, Parentage, and Child Support JUNE CARBONE* & NAOMI CAHN** I. Introduction Child support calculations have become a matter of routine.' The par- enthood determinations, on which they rest, have not. Marriage once served as a system designed to channel childrearing into two-parent fam- ilies and keep it there. Within this system, the marital presumption dis- couraged efforts to inquire too closely into the circumstances that might rebut a husband's paternity and the stigma against nonmarital births and divorce eliminated much of the need for such determinations. Today, the messy facts of biology are only too plain to see. Forty-one percent of American births are nonmarital2 and may give rise to fights over parent- age and support. Americans lead the world in family instability, cohabit- ing, splitting, marrying, and divorcing, and, as a consequence, involve a host of unmarried parents, stepparents, and others in children's lives to a greater degree than in most of the rest of the developed world.' And almost every parent who chooses to do so can discover the truth of bio- logical parenthood, whether or not a court chooses to admit the evidence. Yet, no comprehensive system has arisen to replace marriage-or the marital presumption. During the seventies and early eighties, the United * Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. ** John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School. Our thanks to Tom Oldham for his support of this article, to Leslie Harris for her care- ful reading ad comments, and to Jose Recio for research assistance. 1. See Katharine K. Baker, Homogenous Rules for Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Mar. 9, 2011, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=1782051 (courts increasingly rely on mechanical formulas in determining support). 2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unmarried Childbearing (2011), http:// www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm. 3. ANDREW CHERLIN, THE MARRIAGE-Go-RouND: THE STATE OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY IN AMERICA TODAY (2009). 219

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