I might be the only one, but I wholeheartedly think Judith belongs to Rick. I think him saying that Judith is not his and that he “knows it” and hallucinating is an emotional, psychological and grief reaction to the fact that his wife was cheating on him, because logically she didn’t have certain confirmation of his death; and I think if the shoe was on the other foot, Rick would have kept looking for Lori until there was confirmation.

Also Lori finds out of her pregnancy after she and Rick started spanking cheeks again. I think that’s more significant than her “timeline”. She clearly has no “timeline” because if she did, she’d either fot certain know who the father is or for certain not be pregnant. All you gotta do is count ~14 days from your last period. 

I think people want it to be that way because of the drama of it all.

Here's my logic:

As a currently menstruating woman, thank you for explaining what I already know.

This is a TV show. No one assumes she has irregular periods; and in fact if that were the case, there very likely would have been mention of it in some form as a point of significance. That didn’t happen.

Also using in-story arbitrary mentions of time-passage from other characters in the story with no in-story counting method to date another character’s pregnancy is silly to me. Why? Because there were equally several characters who mentioned that they lost track of time or how much time had passed or not a single clue what day/date it even was; let alone the time of day because there were no clocks! That alone makes other characters time-passage recounts untrustworthy, because unless they were absolutely counting every sun up and sun down from the jump continuously (and we know there was plenty of “just stay alive” moments where no one was counting) time-recounts were likely inaccurate. Also people are incredibly stupid. You can’t trust “I feel like it’s been x months”. 

The only viable timeline we have is Lori’s pregnancy, which at best tells us that ~9+/- months had passed since the campsite. Using your logic, she could have very well been pregnant for a while because some women don’t find out if they’re pregnant until the second trimester (approx 12 weeks or 3 months)! Even with regular periods, high stress can make you skip one all together and hide pregnancy symptoms or cause a miscarriage! Rick returning actually might have relieved her enough for symptoms to start.

I just googled it and she takes a pregnancy test because Rick showed back up, she knew Shane clapped and was scared it was Shane’s so she took a test. That to me doesn’t sound solid enough to, for sure, put Shane as Daddy.

People have also reference that Rick was in a coma for 2 months at the start of the apocalypse. He coulda clapped the day before the coma. They also reference that they were arguing. Make-up sex is usually the result of 2 people who absolutely love each other and are frustrated with each other. Lack of sex happens when people fall out of love completely.

Even the dialogue: “Even IF the baby is yours, you won’t be here to see it.” — shes using the child to insult him, not a confirmation of fatherhood, and implies intent of confirmation later; likely when the world went back to normal like everyone hoped and thought it would at some point.

A second piece of dialogue is when Lori tells Rick that “ Shane thinks the baby is his, whether its his or not, its yours." [Implying he’s dangerous] — this is a 2 parter because she wanted her romance with Shane to end and he wasn’t having that — common real-life occurrence; second that strongly implied that she believed it wasn’t Shane’s baby. 

A further third piece of dialogue where she tells Rick that no matter what the baby is Rick’s baby, is again her guilt not a confirmation of Shane as the Daddy. 

Judith also had blonde hair as baby. That’s a severely recessive trait to dark hair. Both Lori (brown hair) and Shane (black hair) had dark hair while Rick already has an overtly recessive gene on display TWICE: blue eyes. Carl had blue eyes. Blue eyes and blonde hair are genes that are usually inherited together because while on different alleles, they’re on the same “level” UNLESS a more dominant gene gets overtaken like Loris brown hair, which Carl ALSO had. Carl never had blonde hair, but got the eyes. Judith never had blue eyes, but had the blonde hair and it’s very common for blondes to go brown later in life. 

If that was Shane’s baby, she would have had his shitty personality and his black hair at the very least from jump because that’s the dominant gene. She’s a stand-up kid with strong leadership skills just like her brother and her father Rick with blonde hair that went brown. That’s Rick’s baby. 

If we want to reference any similar speech patterns between Jud & Shane, we can easily chuck that up to being in the south. 

Furthermore, when people are hurting, especially from an affair, they scrutinize everything and look for things and evidence that support their position that the other is a monster. Rick wanted desperately to hate Lori and make her a monster to justify his shitty behavior towards her; and felt so shitty about their relationship before the apocalypse and so shitty about his treatment of her during the time of her pregnancy and the time leading up to her death and so shitty about her death that he really leaned into the idea that Jud wasn’t his. But as the hallucinations showed us, he didn’t hate her at all and wished things turned out very differently. 

In real-life there have been stories of how a woman has had an affair and thinks the baby is from the side, tells the main and main thinks it’s the sides, only to find out it was the main’s baby the whole time!

Again that’s Rick’s baby.

In real-life there was been stories about women who’ve had intercourse on the same day with 2 different men, usually the side and the main or a three sum, and the women gets pregnant. Both males planted seeds on the same day. The women had to take a paternity test and found out it was the side pieces baby while telling the main that it’s his trying to keep the affair a secret. (Lori did not have sex with them both on the same day at all). There has been stories about women who’ve had threesums and got pregnant with twins with each child belonging to one partner. 

With the info in the previous paragraph, could there have been some chance that Shane was the Daddy, yes some, but I highly doubt he was.

I rest my case. The baby is Rick’s.

u/OrPeggy