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Notes -
The German supreme court has ruled in favor of a biological father who was denied legal fatherhood due to the current German law:
While this is obviously a good move, I am kind of disappointed in the state of German civil law with regard to gender in it.
A proposed system by me:
I am a fan of legal genderblindness. Unless there is a solid reason to put an if-branch in a computer program because you have to treat different cases differently, try to get away with staying as general and abstract as you can. This has the additional advantage that you don't have to think about corner cases: if you can stick to "riding animal" instead of explicitly having a branch for "horse" and "donkey", it is likely that your code will be well-behaved when the unexpected llama comes along, as well as being shorter and more elegant.
Now some might claim that there are important biological categorical differences between people with different biological capabilities with regard to procreation, but I don't the any reason for an if condition here.
Of course the biological paternity of a child will be in question a lot more often than the biological maternity, but why treat that case specially? After all, the maternity could be in question in case of IVF, and what is good for the gander is likely good for the goose. Just call it "rules for the determination of biological parenthood" and be done with it.
Taboo the words father and mother. A child has two legal parents. In most cases, anyone who contributed at least 35% of the DNA to a child is a legal parent. (+exception for sperm and egg donations).
Whenever a child has a single legal parent, the single parent can have a contract with an adult human conferring parenthood to them. This can happen before implantation. Whenever a child has no parents, a court of law can appoint one or preferably two with their mutual consent.
In the case the two parents separate (or just for the heck of it), either one can assign a partner who has a close relationship to the child as a co-parent. In the case of separation, child support, primary care and visitation rights are determined by a court of law with no regard to any gender identities of the parents.
Parenthood can be renounced at birth, or after initial notification of the parent. (This is already the case for women who give birth, except from my understanding these babies become orphans and no effort is made to determine their father.) Unless the parents contract to exclude that possibility. Later, parenthood can be transferred to third parties with the consent of both parents.
Children older than five get to veto any changes in (co-)parenthood, all changes in (co-)parenthood get reviewed by the court.
Whenever a parent finds out to their surprise that they are not a biological parent they can unilaterally renounce parenthood. They can claim back alimony or damages from the other parent for some time if that other parent intentionally or negligently mislead them about their biological parenthood. (The silly rule in Germany is that the non-father who paid has a claim against the biological father, not against the partner they paid alimony to.)
Anyone convicted of stealing DNA against the consens of the donor (e.g. cutting open used condoms, breaking into fertility clinics, cloning somatic cells), causing an impregnation through deception during sex ('stealthing', lying about being on birth control, etc) or implanting a fertilized egg into a surrogacy without their consent loses all their parental rights and goes directly to jail and is on the hook for child support. If the guilty party is carrying the pregnancy then the victim can force them to undergo an abortion using the normal time limits, otherwise it is up to the pregnant person (as usual). Of course, proving any of this will be typically hard in many cases.
This could cover all the intricacies of parenthood law without ever referring to the sex of a parent, be robust in the face of new fertility technologies (cloning, CRISPR, artificial wombs, whatever). It would also be less discriminatory with regard to gender and be a boon to LGBTI parents. (Suppose that the new partner of the mother in the court case was cis-female. Could she have been become the legal father of the child? Under my rules, she could become a co-parent.) You would think that something like this (More gender equality! Gender is just a social construct! Makes life easier for LGBTI!) would obviously be a woke cause, but as it would strengthen the rights of cis-het males (by removing a present discrimination), so of course they will not go for it.
The US's nonprofit Uniform Law Commission has developed a Uniform Parentage Act, which many states have adopted in some form. You may want to use it as a starting point.
What I really like about it is the Bayesian reasoning for parenthood. They even thought of identical twins. (Of course, requiring posterior odds of 0.99 with prior odds of 0.5 will mean a lot of false positives. Especially as most labs will probably not say "ok, p=0.98, so that is a negative", but instead do more tests to get over 0.99. Or it might be that modern genetic tests have much higher predictive power and this is moot.)
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