Six-year-olds can vote and drink alcohol? They can make medical decisions for themselves? They can have sex legally? (Yeah, I know where that’ll go.) Maybe I should tell my seven-year-old that he doesn’t have to get his shots; he’s got the right to say no. Oh, wait. He doesn’t. He has to get them.
I’m going to ask again. What business is it of the state’s? What you’re going on about are decisions that the parent(s) should make.
At any rate, the individuals involved are entitled to privacy. It’s not a document that sits in a dusty file cabinet in a basement somewhere. It’s a document that is used quite often for everything from school enrollment to enrollment in soccer and other extracurricular activities. What business is it of my local school district or the coordinator of my local kids’ soccer program who my son’s biological parents are?
For the record, I agree that John Edwards behaved in a morally and ethically reprehensible manner. But this is between him and his daughter’s mother. The government has no business getting in the middle of that.
The OP might not have been inspired by his wife’s proclivities, which you have described with such eloquence.
He could be thinking about his mother.
And, to clarify, that I was referring to birth certificates.
I can imagine a person invoking this right (to know the names of their biological parents) if the government had this knowledge and for some reason was concealing it. File a freedom-of-information-act request and such. How do you compel another citizen to divulge information, though? Child says “I have a right to know.” Mother says “I don’t know/I’m not telling.” Then what? Throw Mom in jail for civil rights violations? If it’s a right, then the State is obliged to act on the child’s behalf. What, if any, are the limits on State action? Interrogating/imprisoning the mother? Compulsory genetic screening of likely fathers? Statewide searches?
Hypothetically, let’s say a pregnant refugee washes up on shore in Florida, gives birth, and dies. Maybe she’s from Cuba, maybe Haiti… who knows? She has no papers with her. The newborn, by virtue of being born on U.S. soil, is a citizen. If that citizen has a right to have correct names entered on a birth certificate, how much time and effort is the state obliged to expend investigating?
Out of curiosity, what would be entered on a birth certificate in a case like that? It’s clearly not a case of a state protecting the mother’s identity by choosing not to aggressively investigate.
Don’t bother – in past threads, Cesario has indeed supported these exact positions.
Broomstick – several people have asked the OP about rape, and I have yet to see him respond. (If he did, I missed it)
Guin, I know our friend Cesario has taken this rather, um, unpopular stand. I just couldn’t let it go unchallenged.
And with both sides heard from, I’m going to direct discussion of a child’s other rights (drinking and so on) to another thread.
To get married in Wisconsin, you need to present one of those… and that’s just the start of things…
I guess this thread will end up like all the others I participate in, where I never get a simple question answered!
I think the only practical effect of a law which tried to force women to name the bio father with pain of legal punishment, would be to drive up the abortion rate.
Which wouldn’t bother me any but somehow I doubt the OP would be happy with it.
I work for a lab that does parentage testing. The worst case we ever had was one in which the child was sixteen years old, and absolutely determined not to allow the test. I don’t know why the adults were insistent on having it done. The alleged father told us (and her) time and again that he would always think of himself as her dad, it wasn’t a money issue, they just wanted to know.
The child would refuse the cheek swab, the mom would take her outside and bring her back ten minutes later, “She’s ready now.” Behind her, the girl was shaking her head no.
Another trick she had was to dash into the bathroom as we approached, and guzzle water out of the sink in an effort to rinse away the cells from her inner cheeks.
Another time, she said she wanted to do the swab herself, but wanted us all to leave the room. When we wouldn’t go, she turned her back for a moment and pretended to use the swab.
Eventually, we got a specimen and a result. The next day, the alleged father requested another test, saying that the girl had taken a piece of gum from her sister’s mouth and chewed it before the appointment in order to sabotage the test. I told him that it wouldn’t have worked, but he obviously didn’t believe me. The mother then called and said she wanted us to take a blood sample. At that point, envisioning a scene in which we would have to wrestle the kid down and sit on her head, I let them know that we would be unable to serve them any further.
A pointless anecdote, but there’s at least one person out there who has absolutely no interest in knowing who her father is.
First, a woman with multiple sex partners may not know.
In any case: How are you going to compel a true answer? And are you sure that’s a good idea? Let’s say you get Wonder Woman’s Lariat of Truth & use it on every woman. The married women who admits that the baby might not be her husband’s is then in danger of violence from her cuckold while in a weakened state.
This is silly.
I can see where a paternity test might be useful in a situation like the one Dung Beetle had. ISTR something about this at an estate planning seminar I attended a few years ago. One of the attorneys who presented at the seminar was of the opinion that a paternity test was a good idea in some scenarios, such as a woman who becomes pregnant through assisted reproduction, to verify that the woman’s husband is the child’s biological father. The rationale is that it’s better to have conclusive proof before it becomes an issue during probate. Then the lawyer went into this long, convoluted case study about clients of hers who needed to have both maternity and paternity testing done; the couple had hired a surrogate to carry the child and there needed to be absolute proof that the couple were the child’s biological parents. Ah, gotta love the problems of the rich…
The long and short of it is that it’s still none of the state’s business who the actual biological parents are.
Your examples make it sound reasonable but are there truly issues regarding inheritance rights of children born of fertility treatments and/or unconventional conception? That is more of an argument (to me) that the LEGAL father should remain the father, period, end of story rather than mucking about in DNA.
What if a couple used donor sperm? Is that child no longer an heir? What if there were donor eggs involved? Does the child lose claim to the mother’s estate but now have a claim on the egg donor’s?
Inheritance rights are a big reason we need legal fathers and legal mothers, but not, that I can see, a reason to document DNA parents for every child or any child that already has legal parents.
I didn’t say that it needs to be done for every child, just that there may be circumstances where a paternity test is desirable. It’s also not a question of codified inheritance rights, but some families have traditions that property or certain heirlooms pass down to blood descendants. So the paternity test would be a good idea to establish once and for all that John Brown-Smythe V is the biological son of John Brown-Smythe IV.
To you and I, it doesn’t matter who the father of John Brown-Smythe V is, but then, the rich are different from us. 
So you mean that “the rich” (or at least some) might use a sperm donor if the father is infertile, but that child would be (or might be) looked down upon as not-blood and thus family tradition would dictate certain heirlooms (let’s say the ones passed to the first born son) might skip him for that reason?
I know it is not you personally advocating this, but…wow. That poor kid! Again, it makes a good case for not determining biological parentage and perhaps of not allowing “the rich” to use donors or surrogates in the case of infertility.
Not just the rich - I have met two families where adopted children were forever treated as semi-welcome (at best strangers), and where the products of assisted reproduction considered of question humanity. Both families utterly poor and ignorant as rocks.
But in such cases there is actually no inheritance to speak of, and no money for paternity tests.
How very sad! I wish we could legislate that people must love/accept/cherish their children.
That’s the problem - even if the parents involved view the children as their children the rest of the family doesn’t view those children as their children.