A mother of one has opened up about her tragic experience as she revealed she delivered her baby early so that her partner could meet his daughter.
Baby Harper-May was born to parents Beccy and Jamie Hunter in May 2020, just two days before her father died from kidney cancer.
Beccy has since revealed that becoming a father was all that her boyfriend ever wanted as she recalled giving birth at eight months into her pregnancy to allow Jamie to meet his daughter.
Following the man’s premature passing, Beccy was in for another heartache as officials refused to recognize her late partner’s name on her daughter’s birth certificate.
It wasn’t until after a 2-year legal battle that the grief-stricken mom finally felt some relief as Jamie’s name was added to Harper’s document.
“It’s been hell, it makes me so mad that we had to go through this. If we had been married, they would have just taken it as gospel that he was the dad,” Beccy, who changed her surname just days prior to her partner’s death, explained.
“It’s just because the law is so outdated. Today, lots of people aren’t married when they have kids.”
Speaking of the long and painful process to get Jamie acknowledged as her daughter’s father, Beccy added: “I had to arrange for a company from London to get a DNA sample from Jamie. It meant I wasn’t allowed to go and see him at the funeral home for weeks in case I contaminated the body.
“It wasn’t nice for Harper either. She was only three weeks old and they came in, all masked up, to take her sample. But that was only part of the saga.”
Beccy also revealed she had to face interviews with social services in order to “prove” that Jamie really was her daughter’s father.
“When an unmarried couple register a birth, they go to the register office together and that way the dad gives his consent to be named on the birth certificate. The difficulty here was that Jamie was not here to prove his consent,” she explained.
“I had to go to court and swear on the Bible, standing in front of three judges to persuade them to put Jamie’s name on the birth certificate. It was so nerve-wrecking, I was in bits. I’ve never been in court before, I felt like a criminal.”
Fortunately, the matter was resolved after an unforgiving two-year process which the mom branded as “wrong” and unfair as she called for raising awareness about the struggles unmarried couples with children might be forced to go through.
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