NEW DELHI: Resolving a conflict between paternity and legitimacy arising from the birth of a child to an adulterous woman by a man other than her husband, SC on Tuesday ruled that if the marriage subsisted and the spouses had access to each other, the husband would remain the child’s legal father despite not being the biological parent.
This intriguing facet of ‘paternity vs legitimacy’ debate in a case from Kerala led a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan to examine the family law position in the UK, US and Malaysia, all of which lean towards presumption of legitimacy even though they permit DNA test when legitimacy of the child is questioned.
Writing the judgment,…