Should paternity tests be mandatory at birth?
How DNA Testing Is Changing Fatherhood - NYTimes.com
Experts say that 2% of married men are unknowingly not the father of their children, and the rate is much higher for unmarried men.
This article is heartbreaking and enraging all at once. The issue here is muddled and our law has no coherent way to deal with it. Some states will make the mislead father pay support, others won't. There is no easy way or right way to solve this. It's impossible to respect the rights of the fathers and the welfare of the children at the same time.
As genetic testing gets easier and cheaper, who knows what other effects it'll have on our culture.
Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a subset of tests — those that are admissible in court and thus require an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their cheeks and that of their putative child’s and mail the samples to a lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right. Yet as troubled as many of them might be by that news, they are even more stunned to discover that many judges find it irrelevant. State statutes and case law vary widely, but most judges conclude that these men must continue to raise their children — or at least pay support — no matter what their DNA says. The scientific advance that was supposed to offer clarity instead reveals just how murky society’s notions of fatherhood actually are.
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THERE IS A STRONG cultural imperative that a man should never abandon his offspring: that a man who impregnates a woman should be responsible for their child, and that a man who acted as a child’s father should continue to nurture her. But what is the cultural standard when those roles are filled by two different men? Judges, legislators and policy makers have floundered trying to reconcile the issues — a tangle of sex, money, science, betrayal, abandonment and the competing interests of the child, the biological parents, the nonbiological father and the state itself. No matter how they decide, the collateral damage is high because fairness for one party inadvertently violates fairness for another.
The challenge is to settle on principles that help answer the riddle of who is the father in each distinct and gut-wrenching situation. In most states, paternity decisions are governed by centuries-old English common law, the presumptions of which hold sway, whether or not they’re codified: a child born in a marriage is presumed the product of that union unless the husband was impotent, sterile or beyond “the four seas” when his wife conceived. The aim was to avoid “bastardy” and to preserve family stability — or at least the appearance of it.
