Natural Parents and Marital Status
Whether a child's parents were married at the time of birth does not change the child's inheritance rights. When a person died without a will, every child is treated as the child of their natural parents for purposes of the intestate estate. Marital status does not matter.
For the purposes of intestate succession, a person is the child of that person's natural parents, regardless of their marital status. If this issue is in dispute the court shall establish that relationship under title 25, chapter 6, article 1.
A.R.S. § 14-2114(A)When parentage is disputed, courts resolve it using the probate process and family law procedures outlined in Title 25.
How Adoption Changes the Picture
Adoption creates a clean legal boundary. Once a child is adopted, they are treated as the child of their adoptive parents for inheritance. The legal connection to the natural parents is severed. This affects both community property and separate property rights.
There is one important exception. When a stepparent adopts a child, the relationship between the child and the non-adopting natural parent is not affected. The child can still inherit from or through that natural parent. This protects children in blended families from losing inheritance rights on one side when a stepparent adoption happens on the other.
Adoption of a child by the spouse of either natural parent has no effect on the relationship between the child and that natural parent or on the right of the child or a descendant of the child to inherit from or through the other natural parent.
A.R.S. § 14-2114(B)When a Natural Parent Cannot Inherit
Under probate law, a natural parent can only inherit from a deceased person who was their child if two conditions are met. The parent must have openly treated the child as their own. The parent must not have refused to support the child. This prevents a parent who abandoned or neglected a child from benefiting from the child's intestate estate.
This rule matters most when a person died intestate and the deceased had no spouse or children of their own. In that case, the estate could pass to parents. But if a natural parent failed to act as a parent, they are barred from inheriting. The probate process checks whether the parent-child relationship was genuine before awarding a share.