My mother used to work in a hospital as a nurse in the early 80s. She tells me at the time there was no real way to determine if someone was the father of a baby or not.
She said there were ways to tell if the man was NOT the father, for instance use of blood types, but while you could eliminate the possiblity of a person being the father of a child you could not prove someone was the father.
Around what year did we begin to have the ability to test DNA so you could prove the idenification of the father of a baby for sure. Or was my mother wrong?
Genetic fingerprinting was invented by Sir Alec Jeffreys in 1985, and Colin Pitchfork was the first person arrested and convicted on DNA evidence in 1987.
And if unmarried, whoever she named, unless he could prove that he couldn’t be the father.
This is still the case today, BTW, in most jurisdictions. The blood tests and DNA tests were scientific advancements in their time that disproved a paternity that was assumed. And today, if a court decides that a child may be adversely affected by the termination of a parental relationship, the results of a DNA test will not matter - the man will still need to pay child support for some number of years.
Exactly. If you have already been deemed the legal father of a child, a DNA test that proves you are not the genetic father does not mean you are no longer the legal father. After all, it is very common for the legal parents of a child not to be the genetic parents, due to adoption and so forth. So generally you have only a limited time to dispute paternity, and if you don’t dispute paternity before that time limit you are the legal father regardless of genetics.
Another factor is economic. Such DNA tests may have become possible in the 1980s, but they were very expensive. They might have been reasonable for a government trying a very important criminal case, or a millionaire foiling a woman trying to milk him for child support, but not necessarily so for a middle or lower-class alleged father. That changed in about 1998 with the development of the PCR process, which made it much, much easier to amplify DNA samples, and therefore much, much cheaper than it was previously to do all sorts of genetic tests.