Crucially, parental status—filiation in the civil law or parentage in the common law—is a legal construct and must be established. It does not arise, unmediated, from brute facts such as siring a child or giving birth. It is to be expected, then, as in the case of other legal constructs, that there will often be a gap between a parent-like state of fact and filiation or parentage as a matter of law.
