Twenty-two years ago, I became part of a club no-one wants to join: the young widows club.
My husband, Nick, had died of oesophageal cancer, leaving me with an 18-month-old baby and a toddler.
Not long after, I joined a support group for young widows and widowers, and we navigated this strange and unwelcome new reality together – a strange way to make friends but even more welcome because of that.
Some of the women I met were part of an even smaller, even more unlucky club than me. The one where you are widowed while pregnant, where you give birth alone, while at the same time grieving for the partner you’ve lost and the future you’ll never share.
I met these women through WAY – Widowed and Young, a fantastic organisation that has been running the Blank Space Campaign for some time and which I was proud to bring to Parliament last week.
Because for many of those tragically unlucky women, it gets even worse.
Every year in the UK, young, bereaved women are drawn into a ridiculous, unnecessary, and costly legal battle to have their baby’s father’s name registered on their birth certificate.
Incredibly, in 2025, if you’re pregnant when your partner dies, but you are not married, the law says you cannot automatically name the father on the birth certificate.
You can if you were married – the law assumes that if you are legally married there can be no question over your baby’s parentage. But if you don’t have a ring on your finger, the paternity of your child is in question. It’s an archaic situation that is demeaning and insulting to women. Especially when the number of babies born outside marriage now outnumber those who were born to parents who were married or in a civil partnership.
Having been through the unimaginable experience of losing your partner while carrying his child, you then have to enter a sometimes tortuous legal process to prove he was indeed the father, so that your child doesn’t grow up with a blank space on their birth certificate.
I shared the experiences of Paula, who was 18 weeks pregnant when her partner was killed while cycling to work. Despite having his DNA and a proven 99.9% match, it still took three and a half years for her to get a birth certificate with his name on it. The process cost nearly £3,000.
And Elanor, who was not so fortunate. After her partner was killed 18 days before his baby daughter was born, Elanor fought the system to get his name on the birth certificate, but, in the end, the complexity and expense proved too much for her. There is still a blank space where his name should be.
What these examples show is not only how cruel the situation is but how different the process can be depending on where you live, which court you apply to, and who hears the application. Like so many other things, it can become a postcode lottery.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In Switzerland, France, and Germany, unmarried fathers can declare their parentage early in a pregnancy to protect their rights.
Here unmarried fathers can claim parental responsibility for a child, so perhaps one answer is to bring this forward into pregnancy, so that should the worst, most unimaginable tragedy happen, there is proof of paternity.
Another option could be for doctors to make a record of who the father is when a pregnancy is first entered into medical records. Advice could be given at antenatal appointments to make people aware of the issues that can arise if parents are not married.
This is not an insurmountable problem. A quicker and easier process needs to be found – and I believe solutions are out there if we are creative and willing enough to grasp them.
The Justice Minister promised to work with me and I look forward to working with her to update our law, to better reflect the reality of the UK in 2025, so that no child whose dad died before they were able to meet him grows up with a blank space on their birth certificate.
