In the last blog, we discussed the definition of pretermitted children and covered some examples. A pretermitted child is a child unintentionally omitted from a parent’s will because of a parent’s unawareness of the child’s existence. A pretermitted child may be the biological child of a parent unaware of their birth. It may also be the adopted child of a parent. Generally, with adopted parents, it involves the case of a parent who attempted to legally adopt the child before executing their will or it may be that the adoptive parent was not legally able to adopt the child until they had already executed their will.
In addition to a biological child who was born before a parent drafted his or her will, a pretermitted child may be an adopted child. In many cases, a pretermitted adopted child’s adoption goes through after the parent drafts their will. Thus, a child unintentionally left out of their parent’s will receives a share of the estate based on the intestacy statute.
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