No one has a right to their parents’ medical history, even if raised with their bio-parents. The parents have the right to privacy about their medical history, and if they don’t choose to share it with the kid, he/she has to ‘right’ to know their medical facts.
Let’s say I have a reason to wonder if either of my parents have ever dealt with depression. I can ask, but they can refuse to answer and say that it’s too personal. I have no right to their information.
So this kid has no right to his father’s medical history either.
I wonder, though. Does the kid have the right to support by his biological father? It seems that’s how child support works in this country. I’ve always been told that it’s not based on the needs of the child, but ability of the parent to pay.
But I would say it would only be moral to step in if you think the kid is being raised poorly. You aren’t avoiding responsibility, you are doing what’s best for the child. The results may be the same, but the motivation is different and he should not feel guilty.
The child already has two parents; he or she doesn’t need a third. Geoff is, at best, an emergency backup parent - he should be available to step into the breach if needed, but not until then.
The bio-dad should stay the hell out, unless invited in, BUT put aside $ and mementos for said child when child is of age and might find out and, this is important, move on with his life.
The marriage may or may not last. That is a hellova secret to carry around.
If the child is his and is told at a later date ( for whatever reason) he can at least have ‘something’ like mementos for the child and a provision in his will.
Kid could have been conceived by any other one night stand, or been a premature kid by Geoff. Regardless, it’s been “claimed” by Geoff, which under (at least) California law puts him on the hook for paternity, regardless of DNA. As long as the kid has two loving and financially-supportive parents, he’s in a fine place. And if Elise didn’t tell Chris about it back when it happened, she obviously doesn’t intend to pursue him for child support.
Are they? The only thing we know from the OP is that Elise and Geoff have had trouble in the past and that Elise is keeping secrets from him now.
I think that Chris should talk to Elise. That doesn’t mean disrupting her life or her marriage before he knows for sure but they’re friends. He should at least ask the questions and clear the air or he’ll always believe that the child is his. Her reaction will hopefully tell him a lot, both about the chances that the child is his and the current state of her marriage. Further decisions would be dependent upon that hypothetical reaction.
What’s written here, while seemingly similar, are wildly different in their intent and my advice.
Let’s say it’s the first and Chris wants to “at the very least” pay child support voluntarily. So Chris wants to do the right thing and kick in a couple hundred dollars a month towards diapers and books? How kind of him. Hey, you know what would be better than that? Geoff kicking in more than that to support the kid when he and Elise remain happily married. Basically Chris is willing to completely destroy a marriage and a child’s life on a DNA coinflip just so Chris can asage his guilt over the situation by cutting a check. How can that possibly be better than keeping your goddamned yap shut and accepting that the status quo?
Now, what if Chris honestly, truly wanted to be a part of the child’s life? That’s a bit different. I still believe it’s best to keep quiet but at least in this scenario Chris isn’t coming into the situation with his priorities above all else. He’s genuinely looking for what’s best for the kid.
I think here the best course is to sit down over coffee with Elise and basically say “Look, we’re both not stupid. We both can do basic math. Oh and the kid has my eyes. Where do we go from here?” Talk it out, see just how strong the marriage is, whether it can handle this additional information, and go from there.
Chris’ “right” to know does not trump the family’s “right” to peace and harmony.
If the kid’s future wife has a rare genetic disease in her family, then she needs to seek genetic counseling before conceiving, no matter *who *her partner is - people often don’t know who their biological parents are, even if they think they do, and doctors know this. Genes may stay hidden for more generations than even intact families have memories of. If just one partner has a known family history of something genetic, then both genomes should be investigated. And if neither the kid nor his future reproductive partner have this rare genetic disease present in their family but are in fact carriers, well then, fuck. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes.
Chris should go to the internet, figure out what his child support payments should be, and put that money into a bank account for the kid’s future. When the kid is ready to go to college or tradeschool or backpacking through Europe or make a downpayment on a house, “Uncle Chris” can hand him the passbook.
If the family is rolling in money and they don’t need his, Chris may donate those funds to Planned Parenthood or another organization working to reduce unwanted pregnancy.
I don’t know that this is the case. In many states, there is a strong presumption that the husband is the father of the child. Once a certain period of time has passed, then it is to late for that to change. If the Geoff has claimed the child as his, then Chris may be SOL. The child may never know Chris.
I think that at this point, Chris needs to step away. Depending on where the child is, all he may do is destroy the child’s family life, and he won’t be any closer to finding out if the child is his or getting any type of visitation rights.
That’s awfully convenient for Chris and Elise, since it’s not either of them that’s possibly getting screwed. It’s Geoff, who very well may believe that he has fathered a child, when he in fact has not. The notion that “biology is overrated,” as Sateryn76 put it, is ridiculous. The reason infidelity even occurs at all is because people care about the biological parenting of their offspring.
It’s not convenient for Chris at all. *He wants to be part of the kid’s life, if the kid is his child. *The OP is clear on that.
May have not. Chris doesn’t know that Geoff isn’t the father. All he knows is that, 9 months or so before the child was born, he had sex with Elise. He doesn’t know what Elise has told Geoff; he doesn’t know if Elise was ovulating; he doesn’t know if Geoff knows about the affair. He knows, by my count, four things:
That he loves Elise.
That Elise chose her husband over him.
That it’s conceivable that he supplied the lucky sperm cell.
That Geoff is considering the child his own.
(bolding mine)
I took Sateryn76 to mean that a child’s father is the man who acts as a father to him or her: the man who changes diapers, gets up for late-night feedings, held the mother’s hand in the delivery room, and so forth. As it stands, Geoff has invested much, much more in the child’s life than Chris has. And some men willingly and knowingly raise children to whom they are no biological relation. My favorite uncle, for instance, was not related to his wife’s firstborn son, who nevertheless thought of him as his father and was always treated as in no way different than the other RhymerCousins.
The sentence I bolded doesn’t make sense; you seem to be using infidelity in an idiosyncratic way. Infidelity is the act of having sex with someone other than the person you are in a relationship with. Did you mean the reason the concept of bastardy exists is that people care about the biological parenting of their offspring, or something else entirely?
In your OP, you said a big motivating factor for Chris is his sense of moral responsibility. If we throw out the window the idea that it’s the right thing to take responsibility for one’s children, his desire to be in his child’s life will be significantly lessened, though by no means eliminated. Of course he would also like to see his children, but the sense of responsibility is one of the main motivating factors here.
I get your point about may, but we should remember the evolutionary psychology behind female infidelity. Women who cheat mostly cheat on their partners in order to get them to raise children that aren’t their own. I’m not talking about what they consciously think about–I know that women don’t consciously think “I want to have Chris’s biological child, but have Geoff raise it, so I’ll have sex with Chris and not tell Geoff.” But that is the underlying evolutionary psychology, and that’s why women are far more likely to cheat when they’re ovulating. The mere fact that she cheated at all means she was more likely to be ovulating.
I realize some men choose to raise children that are not their biological children, and I praise them for that, but adoption is considered a back-up plan for a reason: it’s almost nobody’s first choice. Adopted children are far more likely to be abused than are non-adopted children. We have to admit to ourselves that the “lucky sperm cell” is not something trivial.
Now, I don’t really know what’s the right thing to do here, but it seemed to me that Geoff’s legitimate concerns were being trivialized in this discussion, and that’s what I was bringing up.
Evolutionary psychology is a crock of rancid camel dung.
That being said, I think Chris should keep his suspicions to himself. The price for him to satisfy his curiosity is too high. Getting pushy about it would almost certainly screw up the kid’s life.
Yes, it is clear but, like you, I don’t give a shit. His wanting to be in the kid’s life at the likely expense of the kid, the kid’s mother, the kid’s *real *“real” father and their entire family dynamic tell me that he’s a selfish git.
Now, can he ask Elise, pretty please, if he can be in the kid’s life in some peripheral role? Sure. Like I said earlier, “Uncle Chris” isn’t out of the question. But he better watch his actions and tongue and make decisions in the best interest of the child, not himself…y’know, like a parent is supposed to do.
So what? It’s still not convenient for him to stay the bleep out of the situation; it’s going to be painful for him. It’s going to require him to put what’s best for another person ahead of what he himself desires.
As Robert B. Parker wrote: You can’t be honorable when it’s easy; only when it’s hard. As someone else said, a big clue to the answer to any moral quandary is that the right choice is rarely what you want to do in the first place.
While I’m ordinarily a proponent of EP, I think it’s a mistake to invoke it as you are. For one thing, women don’t cheat only, or even mostly, in order to get their partners to play the cuckoo; if so, you’d not see them leaving their partners for their lovers. And even if what you assert were the case, we don’t know what Elise’s motives are in any way; the OP speaks only to Chris’s feeling in that area. And there’s no reason to think that Geoff isn’t a fine father candidate.
I don’t think it was that Geoff’s concerns are being trivialized; it’s that Chris quite literally cannot act on Geoff’s behalf. He isn’t Geoff; he is not Geoff’s friend; he does not know what Geoff does or does not know. He can, however, reasonably conclude that he will cause hardship to Elise’s marriage if he tries to get a DNA test done, with no certainty that doing so will reveal that he’s the child’s father.
And, of course, there’s the issue of love. As I’ve written before hereabouts, love is the state of mind in which the well-being of another person is essential to the lover’s peace of mind. If Chris loves Elise, he will man up and do what is best for her.
I don’t watch nighttime soap operas, unless you count Gilmore Girls. There is a sacred story that explains why.
Well, I’d not go that far. He can think that he ought to do something, but unless he actually does something, he hasn’t proved himself selfish.
I think that is very dangerous (emotionally speaking) to Chris and to Elise both. And perilous for her marriage.