I'd suggest that the child's father is the person who provided the sperm. There are good fathers and bad fathers. Some men who provide sperm are bad fathers, some very bad indeed. But it is kind of loose or poetic to say they are not fathers, and it confuses conversation.THe child may have a step father, an adoptive father, a father in the eyes of the law, and any of those "fathers" may not be the father who provided the sperm. But since when is law a canon of reality?
It sounds lovely to talk about the man who takes up the responsibility of interacting with, providing for, guiding, sometimes tolerating a child as being a "real" father. But doing so creates problems. For example. A man begets a child on his wife, has a very large insurance policy with the future child as beneficiary, very much wants to be a father and husband, and a piano falls on him. He's not there for the mother and child, so he's not the father, some would say. So does that mean the child is not his child and therefore does not get the payout of the policy? Of course not?
Then "Father" is going to end up meaning different tings in different ssituations.
The child, I think, has a father. The Mom, the child, OHSU, of the courts may decide that the father is not allowed to do major parts of the job of fathering.
I'm babbling, maybe, but this comes down to unnatural gnosticism, where the notion of the "real" father is divorced from the notion of the "natural" father. I don't think it's good discourse or good thinking.
Under well-established common law, a man is the legal father of any child born to his wife during a marriage. Unless a state's case law or statutory law has explicitly overturned this, or there has a been a court-ordered termination of paternal rights in a specific case, the common law holds. Plenty of men have found this out the hard way, when they were forced to pay many years of child support for a child born to their ex-wife during the marriage and biologically fathered by another man.
Under well-established common law, a man is the legal father of any child born to his wife during a marriage. Unless a state's case law or statutory law has explicitly overturned this, or there has a been a court-ordered termination of paternal rights in a specific case, the common law holds. Plenty of men have found this out the hard way, when they were forced to pay many years of child support for a child born to their ex-wife during the marriage and biologically fathered by another man.
Then what is the woman's husband? The one who, presumably, will raise him, and support him? It's says alot of bad things about our society that we have to make these distinctions, but I don't think it's fair to relegate Jane Doe's husband to step father, or surrogate father, or just meal ticket.