Essential information for unmarried expectant parents – Ten top tips and Baby-on-Board Badge

Treoir, the National Federation of Services for Unmarried Parents and their Children has launched a public information campaign to provide information for expectant unmarried parents, living together or apart. The campaign aims to highlight essential information for parents who are not married e.g. establishing paternity, cohabitation, shared parenting, maintenance, maternity benefits.

To promote the information campaign, Treoir has produced a specially branded ‘Baby on Board’badge which pregnant women may find useful when seeking a seat on public transport.

Margaret Dromey, CEO, Treoir expressed concern about the lack of information and the misinformation that is “out there”. “The legal position of these families is very different to that of married families and it is hugely important that women and their partners know and understand their legal rights and financial entitlements. Over 25,000 births were registered as outside marriage in 2011, which represents 34% of all births in the country”.

Points of information from Treoir’s information campaign:

• If the pregnancy is stressful or unplanned, talk to one of the state funded crisis pregnancy agencies.
• Where possible it is good for your baby to have the names of both parents on her/his birth certificate.
• An unmarried father does not get any legal rights to his baby by having his name on the birth cert.
• For the first time, couples living together, both opposite and same sex, may now be eligible to apply for maintenance, property and other benefits if their relationship ends.
• If you are not living together you will need to think about how much maintenance the non-resident parent will pay in respect of your baby.
• It may be necessary to establish paternity where paternity is in doubt.

Further details on the Information Campaignand on how to get a baby on board badge can be found on www.treoir.ie

Births outside marriage Ireland – the statistics[1]

• There were 25,190 births registered as outside marriage in 2011.
• This accounts for 34% of all births, the same as 2010.
• Almost 55% of births outside of marriage were to couples who are living together (cohabiting).
• The highest percentage of births outside marriage occurred in Limerick City at 49%, while the lowest percentage was 25% which occurred both in Galway County and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown.
• A total of 1,720 teenagers had babies last year, 40 of these were aged under 16.