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S.D. Codified Laws § 25-6-1

Child born to unmarried mother--Acknowledgment by father--Effect

Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case In Re the Termination of Parental Rights Over Boy K. (1996)

Most recently applied in In Re JDMC (October 2007)

Source: SDC 1939, § 14.0408; SL 2025, ch 108, § 1.

How often courts cite this section

1976198019902000200720
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

If the biological mother of a child is not married to the father of the child at the time of the conception or birth of the child, or at any time between conception and birth of the child, the father becomes an acknowledged father of the child and adopts the child only by:

(1) Openly holding out the child as the father's own by receiving the child into the father's household;

(2) Voluntarily contributing to the financial support of the child; or

(3) Voluntarily contributing to the daily supervision, protection, education, and care of the child.

Following a father's adoption of a child pursuant to this section, the child is deemed for all purposes to be the child of the father from the time of the child's birth. No other provision of law relating to adoption shall apply.

Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.