I need to hear some other people’s thoughts on this, apologies if it’s long but I want to give some context if possible. I’m 36 weeks with my second baby, and unlike with my first, I’m not married to her father. I need to decide what her last name will be and I’m not sure what I want or if I should even put her father on her birth certificate when the time comes. First off, my first born has my ex-husband’s last name which I never changed mine to; I’ve always had my maiden name but named our daughter after him because I did intend to change my last name when we eventually had a ceremony. My second is an unintentional pregnancy and her father and I lived together for a couple months because we wanted to give it a shot, but I moved out and we broke up over that about 2 months ago. We won’t be getting married and he doesn’t really want to have custody of our baby. She’ll be on my health insurance and I’ll basically be raising her on my own like I am with my first daughter since her father sees her once or twice a month and hasn’t paid child support in the 2 years we haven’t been together. With her, custody and everything is set out in our divorce paperwork so I don’t have to worry about him doing anything stupid legally. So, I’m pretty sure I want to give this baby my last name to make things less complicated and maybe just leave him off the birth certificate, but he says that she won’t feel like his kid if she doesn’t have his last name. There is a moral question for me of if it’s right to leave him off of it because he should have parental rights if he wants to right? My family says that if he shows the ability and desire to be a dad then he should, but they don’t think he has. I moved out because he started drinking again after he had stopped because we were having this baby together and we agreed we didn’t want drinking around the kids. He then decided to break up with me. He said he wanted there to be no drinking around the house and while the the kids were there more than me, he wanted it out completely like not even a beer or two on the weekend whereas I’m more relaxed about it (but I don’t have a problem with drinking so there’s that.) He didn’t really see my daughter as a factor in that I guess though I had told him before that she was the reason I was finally able to leave my ex, or maybe he just thought once I was moved in with him I wasn’t going anywhere since I was pregnant and pretty dependent on outside help. I did try to get him to stop and go back to AA like he was before I moved in, and I made it perfectly clear from the beginning of our relationship that drinking was one huge factor in my divorce and I wasn’t going to be with him long term if he had a serious problem with it and wouldn’t take the steps to stop. Probably a doomed relationship from the beginning but I didn’t know how serious his addiction was in the beginning and then we got accidentally pregnant 4/5 months into our relationship. He also has a 12 year old daughter from a brief previous relationship when he was a teenager that he hasn’t raised and whom he has only met once when she was a little toddler. His reasoning for not being a part of her life is complicated, first he didn’t want to have her in the first place and asked her mom to have an abortion because he wasn’t ready, second his relationship with her mother was literally like a month long, and third she demanded a lot from him right from the very beginning that he couldn’t provide being only 17 (she was 21 and had 1 kid already). He has never seen his daughter as his daughter except by blood and I guess I’m just worried that that’s going to be the case with my baby and so why would I want to give her his last name anyway. I’m also not sure about the issue of child support and what I should do with that situation either. On the one hand I don’t want to take money from him or in his words have him “be a paycheck” (though he makes 92k a year and would be fine) but on the other I wouldn’t be having this baby if he hadn’t told me that he was in this 100%, plus it’s his kid anyway he should help pay for the things she needs growing up like school stuff and braces and all that. This is all very confusing for me and I never thought I would be in this situation. One day I’m 19 and engaged planning on being a housewife for 10 years while I raise my babies, the next I’m 27 working retail with no degree living with my mom and having my second kid with a second baby daddy. But it’s better than being stuck in an abusive marriage with an alcoholic narcissist or in a loveless forced relationship with a different alcoholic!