As most family lawyers probably know, Virginia’s long-arm statute, Code §8.01-328.1(A)(8), provides for asserting paternity and child support jurisdiction over an out-of-state “person” who “conceived or fathered a child” in Virginia. Neither the circuit court nor the Court of Appeals had much trouble holding that this language did not apply to a case in which even the mother admits that both acts — the father’s impregnation of her by the sexual act, and the mother’s conception of the child by becoming pregnant — occurred in a foreign country. And the Court of Appeals goes on to say that even in the more interesting theoretical case of a “fathering” offshore and the actual blessed event of conception taking place only after the mother gets to the U.S., its decision would be the same. That’s because the General Assembly’s use of the term “fathered” clearly applies only to the male parent’s initial act, and not to the more passive thing that happens slightly later. The General Assembly, it says, used each individual word in a sense that is specific to the respective sexes.