Are you pregnant but the father is denying responsibility? According to state law, the biological father of your child is legally required to contribute financially to the cost of raising your child by paying child support. As such, it’s your right to step forward and file the appropriate paperwork to prove paternity in court. If you need to do this, keep reading.

Paternity blood testing became possible in the 1970s. This allowed parents to establish paternity with 95 percent accuracy for the purposes of demanding child support payments. This revolutionized the family law system and was a major step forward in women’s rights. Unmarried women no longer needed to worry about bearing the full financial burden of raising their children in cases where the father refused to admit responsibility.

Later, especially in the 1990s, DNA testing became the most widely used method for establishing parentage in family law courts. It is the most accurate way to test for paternity, offering a 99.9 percent success rate.

In order to establish that a particular man is the father of her child, a mother simply needs to file a paternity lawsuit in family court. By court order, the father will need to appear in court and submit to a DNA blood test. With the conclusive results of the DNA test, the mother can then move forward to demand child support payments.

Single mothers who know their legal rights do not have to worry about trying to support their children without financial help from the father. If you need to establish paternity, don’t stop trying until you have legally proved who your child’s father is.