I can see situations where the legal father is aware he is not the biological father- and doesn’t care.
Perhaps he met and fell in love with the mother while she was pregnant, and genuinely wishes to build a family and raise the child as his. the bio-dad is absent, for whatever reason, and the father’s name would otherwise be blank.
Perhaps he knows of his wife’s infidelity and having forgiven her is just excited about the prospect of fatherhood, rather than wanting to get into who is the actual dad.
Why shouldn’t the man who wants to act as dad be able to be the legal dad?
If you’ve been a child’s father for several years, and the discovery that they aren’t your biological child makes you wish to sever all ties with the child you have loved and comforted and played with, well, then, certainly you are no sort of father.
I read a book* a few months ago that related an account in which a genetics researcher met someone else with the same (unusual) last name. He wondered if they were related, which led to a study in which he attempted to collect voluntary DNA samples from every person with that last name in that section of England. He got many genetic samples back from people he contacted.
It turns out that all of these people could be traced via genealogy records to just one original ancestor with that last name.
However, one interesting thing that came out of the study was the finding that up to 50% of the “descendants” were not actually related to the ancestor. More specifically, 50% of the descendants has genetic markers indicating they were descended from a common ancestor, and 50% of the “descendants” were not related at all. They were descendants of random other people other than their purported fathers.
The researcher calculated that such a large number of unrelated “descendants” could be explained by a false paternity rate of just 5-10% per generation, which he stated is historically typical.
*I can cite the actual book when I get home. All of the above is from memory; specific details may not be exact.
That is quite interesting, but I wonder out of those 50% that were not genetically related, how many had parents (particularly fathers) who were aware of this biological fact.
A man raising another man’s genetic child, and being on the birth certificate, taking legal responsibility and emotionally investing in said child, knowingly and willingly must happen at least as often (or close to) the rates of men getting “duped” into it.
Weather the children of such unions are aware of the genetic heritage is not really key (because we have established that children do not necessarily have the right to know ) because as we have also already established, it takes much more than contribution of genetic material to be a “father” or maybe I should say to be a Daddy.
I got pregnant with my son before I was married- shocking I know and I was extremely young (the father was not so young, but that is a different story for a different thread). Because of my young age it was often assumed that the baby didn’t really have a Daddy (he did) and I had more offers than I can remember from men who wanted to marry me, take responsibility for the baby or become the putative father without marrying me. There is nothing about me or my child that is so special to make men want to make that kind of legal commitment or to chain themselves to another man’s child for 18 years for no good reason. I have to believe that there are plenty of men out there who want children and feel (the same as I) that biology is so unimportant as to not matter in determining whether or not you are a parent.
Just to give closure to my story…I married the real Daddy before son was born, he raised and supported (financially and emotionally) his son and is still in the picture 21 years later and never questioned parentage or even considered the possibility that he may have been duped (he wasn’t).
Several people have said that they think a child should know their parents becasue of their ‘medical history’. Well just knowing your parents doesn’t give you the right to their medical history. That’s private and confidential, unless the parents chose to share it. And there are plenty of medical issues that parents might want to keep privileged from their children.
Yes, but adoption, foundlings, “children” who appear magically after an unmarried relative gets pregnant, and “volunteer sperm donors” as a way of dealing with male infertility have been common throughout history, too; and they’d all show the same (lack of) marker. None of these are really the case we’re discussing, where a mother deliberately makes a father believe he’s the biological parent of a child that he’s not. Note that I’m not arguing that it doesn’t happen; just that it’s not nearly common enough to warrant the sort of expensive, intrusive law that the OP is proposing.
What happens when(if) the biological father comes back into the picture? He never gave up his rights and that would cause even more of a whole mess of things.
I’m not seeing this as a right. Yes, it’s wrong to deceive your spouse and child, but I don’t see how this gets to be a fundamental right to the point where we need more laws and more tests to deal with this.
Training and hiring these people also costs money, and I’m not convinced this is any kind of a priority.
Something that can happen that many here are not taking into consideration is that; there exists the possibility, though minute that a young man might meet and fall in love with a young woman at a later date, get married, have a child and ----- find out later that they are of the same father. I’m no geneticists but there has to be some genetic concerns there.
In any case, I think whenever, and wherever possible and especially since many here have acknowledged that issues like this will probably be in the minority - the birth record ought to be a legal document that contains true statements. If a woman does not know who made her pregnant, then she does not know and society chucks it off as one of those exceptions to every rule or law.
I just cannot see that it would be that difficult to collect DNA samples of a child and mother, hold them as part of the record of birth, and if there is a father present, do the same for him. It establishes a child’s parentage. If she names a father and he’s not present, then a state can use its database to track him down to establish paternity and for financial support if need be, never mind the family medical history part of it - There are hereditary diseases that are part of a family’s lineage which when known can help a child understand an illness perhaps.
For two siblings to have a kid? IS it that big a deal, genetically? Also, the likelihood of it happening is, as you admit, so low. Couldn’t we just pretty much say, “Sucks to be you, but oh well” for that kind of situation? It seems like so far–the occasional sibling getting married aside–the system is working.
I’d be more concerned that they would each win the lottery and get hit by lightning on the same day.
The bottom line is that you are discussing something that is uncommon, and I see no reason to test parents who agree that a child is theirs. If you have a contested divorce or paternity issue, we can already do DNA tests to deal with it, and it costs a lot less than testing everyone.
There’s just something wrong with that IMO. That child has a father somewhere, and as far as I’m concerned Texas is is not doing right by that child in not determining who it is. A child born in a situation like that has part of their story missing.
But what’s the alternative? That the woman puts down whomever she feels like it? Or in the case where she honestly has no clue, the state tests everyone in the country for this one kid?
From what I understand, she believed that he was cheating on her and during a heated argument, to get back at him, she disclosed that she had cheated on him too, and since he had always wondered about his daughter being a “bit different” from his other children, he decided to check it out. Things began to unravel from there.
That’s as much as I know, but it just seems to me that there has to be a way for society or a state to make sure that the information on a document of birth is true. That’s all. All I could think of was a DNA test at the time of birth to confirm parentage.
I believe this to be so remote and so rare as to not even be a consideration. If that is the primary concern (which I realize it isn’t) then it would just as easy to legislate mandatory DNA tests before marriage which would not prevent a thing in the cases of out-of-wedlock children but would be just as effective as mandatory DNA at birth.
It does not factor in the situations where both the mother and the putative father know that he is not the genetic father but wants to take the responsibility of legal fatherhood anyway. I do not believe that to be a rare situation at all. It is probably much more common than any of us are aware.
This is an abhorrent idea! How exactly would the state track the biological father down through its database? Are you suggesting that every male be forced to submit DNA samples to the state “just in case”?
The way the system works (well!) right now is that if I were unmarried and to have a child and name some random man as the father, then I (or he) would have to request state intervention to prove paternity (usually by filing for public assistance or by filing for child support). The man then can claim parentage (acknowledge paternity) or contest it and request a DNA test (usually just a matter of ignoring the papers or filing some sort of answer to the contrary). If that man is then deemed the father through DNA, he is responsible for the costs of the tests as well as his other paternal obligations. If he is found through DNA to not be the father then I would be responsible to the state for the costs of the test (waived I believe if one is on public assistance) and I could name someone else to be tested until the proper genetic father is found.
How exactly would requiring the mother’s and child’s DNA at birth improve upon that? If the mother doesn’t want the father found or doesn’t want the child to know, then they still wouldn’t even with DNA tests (Mom either would claim “I don’t know” or would find an exemption).
It really doesn’t make sense to do this at all as it would not improve anything.
As far as hereditary diseases go…well that’s a gamble we all take. Either the child has inherited the disease or has not and knowing that your father carried the gene for the disease is of little use once you have it.
But in the twists and turns of the conversation, you never did respond to my question…which is fine if you don’t want to, but I am hoping you just overlooked it: How do the parents now know that the husband is not the biological father of the 12 year old? You said earlier that neither mother nor father knew, so how did they find out? Did they already do a DNA test? If so, why? What was the expected outcome of doing such a thing to an innocent child?
ETA: You answered the questions as I was typing, thanks; please disregard that last paragraph.
And it’s a bad thing that somebody finds out they are defrauded early rather than latter? It’s tue that guys have been afraid for thousands of years that the kid they are raising migh not be theirs. That’s why things like honor killing, purdah, virginity fetishes, double standards, etc., evolved. I would advise any man who has the slightest hair width thread of doubt over a baby’s paternity to not sign anything without a DNA test.
That’s fine. If a woman I slept with told me that I was the father of her baby, I’d get a paternity test before I signed anything.
But the thing is, the government doesn’t care who the biological father of the child is. There is no state interest in determining the sperm donor. The state’s interest is in making sure that the baby has a legal father. And the legal father isn’t determined by who the sperm donor was. If a woman is married, her husband is the legal father of any children she bears. And if that husband doesn’t want to be named the legal father, he has to go to court to dispute paternity. And obviously this law was written before there was such a thing as DNA testing.
But the logic of the law is compelling. We have a societal interest in making sure that every child has a legal mother and a legal father. We have no societal interest in mandating that the legal mother and legal father are also the genetic mother and genetic father.
If a child wants to know if their legal parents are their genetic parents, let the child pay for their own DNA testing when they grow up. But those parents have no legal obligation to provide a DNA sample to their child.
As for the contention that a child needs accurate biological parentage for medical reasons, well, pretty soon there’s not going to be much need for that. The child can just get a DNA test done that determines whether they carry any worrisome alleles. Who cares whether your great-grandfather had a tendency towards heart disease, when you can just get a scan to see if YOU have a tendency towards heart disease. The genetics of your ancestors becomes irrelevant if we can test your genetics directly.
And as for the insistence that the birth certificate not contain any inaccurate information, well, the birth certificate is not a scientific document. It is a legal document. Therefore it should accurately name the legal parents of the child. And for a married woman, the legal father of her children is her husband, regardless of the sperm donor. In cases where the mother is unmarried, the legal father is the person who acknowledges paternity. Or, if no one man voluntarily steps forward to claim paternity, a DNA test should be conducted for the man the mother names as the father.
It seems to me that the law as it stands works well, and should not be changed. If a husband doesn’t want his wife sleeping around and getting pregnant by other men, that’s his responsibility, not the governments.
Assuming the family isn’t inbred already, the odds of that being a genetic problem are only very slightly higher than for “unrelated” spouses (in reality, all humans are related to some degree, and unless you have people from opposite sides of the planet and maximally different ethnic groups marrying, your parents probably were cousins of some sort, though more distant than second or third degree).
As long as it seldom happens, and it’s not happening in inbred populations, no, this isn’t really going to impact society, and probably not anyone in the family, either.
There are documented instances of human beings where most of their bodies has a different genome than their gonads, meaning a DNA test would say that person is NOT the parent of his/her biological child but rather an aunt or uncle. It’s called chimerism. Once thought to be either impossible or extraordinarily rare, DNA testing has revealed that it occurs more often than anyone supposed in the past. Probably the best known case was that of Lydia Fairchild who lost custody of her biological children (the exact opposite of your stated desired outcome) as a result of DNA testing. A woman named Karen Keegan was found to be a chimera during routine medical testing for a kidney transplant. The 30-40 “true hermaphrodites” in medical literature also are likely to be chimeras, and I remember reading of one such case in a peer-reviewed medical journal that was definitely determined to be a case of chimerism (the child also had two distinctly different skin colors as well).
So, while your proposed suggestion may clear up the issue of biological parentage in some cases it will actually confuse it in others. The real world is a messy place.
We are also rapidly developing the technology to test directly for specific genes. For an example, in my family there is a history of an autosomal dominant genetic disorder that screws up the body’s ability to process cholesterol. I am told that there is now a test for the specific gene involved. On the other hand, a simple blood test - which is much cheaper and simpler - will tell you who is and isn’t affected in my family (those who don’t have the gene have normal cholesterol levels. Those who have the bad gene have incredibly high levels of cholesterol. It’s such a sharp difference even medically uneducated lay people can see the difference). So, while there may be a few instances where knowing one’s genetic history would be of use, in a vast majority of instances routine medical testing would do just as well, and if someone is suffering from a particularly peculiar disorder there are more and more direct genetic tests available.
In any case, none of the above would apply if an individual has a new, spontaneous mutation - and such mutations most certainly do occur. For gene-based disorders that destroy fertility that is, in fact, the ONLY way they would appear, as new mutations. In such a case, knowing the parents’ genomes really doesn’t help.
In sum - I fully support DNA testing available to anyone who wants it, and certainly support it when it would help resolve a legal dispute, but blanket, universal testing is going to cause as much trouble as it resolves, and it doesn’t seem a cost-effective use of resources. So I’m going to come down as “opposed”.
Indeed, because I have been acquainted with lots of infertility patients, I have known lots of babies born by the use of donor egg or sperm. They are well aware that the person listed as mother or father on the birth certificate is not the genetic mother or father.
and I was extremely young (the father was not so young, but that is a different story for a different thread). Because of my young age it was often assumed that the baby didn’t really have a Daddy (he did) and I had more offers than I can remember from men who wanted to marry me, take responsibility for the baby or become the putative father without marrying me. There is nothing about me or my child that is so special to make men want to make that kind of legal commitment or to chain themselves to another man’s child for 18 years for no good reason. I have to believe that there are plenty of men out there who want children and feel (the same as I) that biology is so unimportant as to not matter in determining whether or not you are a parent.