Do lesbians in a civil partnership who “divorce”, have to pay child support even if the child is not their biological child?

Question: My sister has been together with her partner in a civil partnership and helped to bring up her child that she had with a previous male partner before they met. Things have not been right between my sister and her partner for some time and I personally think they may break up. However I’m worried that her partner may look to ask her to pay child support even though the child is biologically not her child and nor did she adopt the child. I do not think it is fair that she would be expected to contribute towards the child, so I wanted some insight in case the worse happens and they separate.

Answer: Since the issue of a child that does not biologically belong has been raised, then this is not a matter of civil partnership or sexual orientation, but of legal parenthood.

All children of women are either biological children, or are adopted, or neither of these.

If a lesbian legal civil partnership consists of a biological mother and one other woman, then has the other woman adopted the child? If so, then upon separation, one can argue in court an obligation to pay child support. But notice that this applies to a lesbian partnership that is not a legal civil partnership too. If the adoption happened, then the obligation to support was taken on.
This also applies in the (unlikely) scenario where the child remains with the adoptive parent and not with the biological parent.

It is easy to see that if both parents are adoptive, then if the child remains with one of them, the other one can still be argued in court to have taken on the obligation of support.

From these situations, you can see that the law protects the child using the same rationale as if one of the parents had been a male adoptive parent. This might be described as a form of equality.

The actual decision about the payment of support can only be enforced if it is done in court. As such, the individual court hearing may come up with different answers in different cases. But the above is the basis for the decision in law.

This applies both if the civil partnership has been dissolved, or if the couple are still legally “married” but only separated, or if they were never in a civil partnership in the first place but an adoption still happened. The obligation of support can still be enforced by a court.

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