A man divorced his wife 6 years after the birth of their twin sons. He pays child support and has some visitation rights. 10 years later, she takes him to family court to get the payments increased and to reduce his access time.
He (having always had suspicions), gets a DNA test, and finds that the twins are not his biological children.
She claims not to remember anything about the twins natural father, citing "no memory of an extramarital affair preceding their birth, which she attributes to the medication she was taking at the time.”
The judgement of the court? He must continue to pay child support, for the children that are not his own.
This is clearly a complicated case. For debate:
Is this a just verdict? if so, why?
If not, what verdict would you have given?
Bear in mind that family courts must keep the welfare of the children uppermost, and not penalize them for decisions or actions that were out of their control.
Remember that the court cannot go after the biological father, because his identity is unknown. Also, if the mother is penalized financially, then the children suffer.
I’m not sure what I think. But I can sort of see why they might want the father to keep paying. Is parenthood/fatherhood just about genetics, or is it more than that? That is, I’d like to think that if when I was ten years old, my own parents suddenly found out that I was switched in the hospital that they wouldn’t have stopped loving and supporting me. Perhaps they wouldn’t be parents genetically but in every other sense of the word, they would be. I have a hard time thinking highly of a father who suddenly decides these kids who he’s parented for ten years aren’t his just because they aren’t related to him, but at the same time, I do see that the deception aspect is so wrong.
They’re his kids. They’re just not his biological kids. He was living in the same house with them, acting as their dad, for six years, and he’s continued to maintain them and have visitation with them as their dad for ten more years after that.
Seems like an open and shut case, really.
(deliberately not commenting on whether or not the ex-wife is being a dick for trying to reduce his access to his kids, and whether this is contributing to his wish to disown them - not enough info for meaningful input)
If the ex-husband wanted to question their paternity, he should have done so when they were born, or at latest, during divorce proceedings. The legal precedent in nearly all these situations is the husband of the mother is considered the father for all legal purposes, especially after he has taken on the responsibilities of fatherhood and created an emotional bond with the children. To decree otherwise opens an enormous can of worms that would most likely end with mandatory DNA testing of all children.
Is it fair to him? Hell, no. But the children deserve the support of their parents, and because they are children, their needs are paramount. It’s tragic that the children in this case are much more likely to receive financial support than they are emotional support. I think the emotional support is more important than the financial.
To me, it seems like an absolutely disgusting precedent to set. He is being punished by the court for the consequences of a betrayal in which he was the victim.
The precedent’s been set a long time before this particular case. He’s been acting as a parent to these kids for ten years now, six of those while living with them. That establishes a responsibility above and beyond any genetic link to the kids.
Look at it this way: what if the genetic test revealed that the kids weren’t related to either of them, and that they’d somehow been switched at birth in the hospital? Would that justify the mother throwing them into the street? No, because she’s taken the responsibility of raising these kids already, and she can’t just set that down. Same for the father. As another poster said, if he had doubts about their paternity, the time to raise them was at their birth, not ten years later.
That said, in cases like this, I think that after the children turn eighteen, the mother should be liable for all the money paid into child support, plus interest, paid back to the father.
I’m not sure about Canadian law but this is a not a wildly uncommon situation where a cuckolded man pays child support for his non-biological children. If your name is on the “daddy” line of the hospital’s paperwork when the babies come of of the chute you are pretty much boned.
I don’t know if you can make a sustainable claim right at birth if the children are obviously not yours, but in most cases the kids are presumed to be your responsibility and the state will go to extra-ordinary lengths to enforce this as it is the general legal assumption that it’s more important socially etc. to have a wallet for the kids regardless of what “who’s your daddy” scams the mother has pulled.
Questions of legal responsibility aside, does this guy feel nothing at all for these kids after 16 years as their father? Is he really that cold that he can just tell them, “you’re not mine. Fuck you?”
That boggles me. I have three daughters. I love them more than anything in this world. If, hypothetically (and this would never happen, but just for the sake of argument), I were to find out one day that any or all of those girls were not really mine, it would change the way I felt about my wife, but there’s no possible way it could change how I feel about my children. I coud no more just walk away and wash my hands of them than I could cut my own arms off. How does this guy live with himself? How unfeeling can a guy be?
After ten years of being under her control, it’s quite possible that those children have been raised to hate him. And having limited access to them for so long will do a good job of wearing away any emotional bonds he ever had anyway. It’s not the same situation.
If there’s a lesson I’d take from this, it’s “don’t trust your wife”. Don’t assume she’s telling the truth about paternity; she can lie, and YOU will suffer for it not her. Laws and legal rulings like this practically demand distrust.
So you would always test your kids paternity at birth regardless of how good your marital/SO relationship is? Living in the real world world for just a sec do you have any idea how this would come off to a faithful, loving wife?
Which is one reason I think it’s a bad law. You are given the choice of alienating your wife if she IS “faithful and loving”; or leaving yourself vulnerable to exploitation if she’s not. Whenever cases like these come up, one of the first things people defending the system say is “well, you should’ve gotten them tested when they were born !” Laws like this, and the attitudes behind them, make trust stupid.
Well… we all have to take chances in this life, if I had a wife who gave every evidence of being faithful and loving I would take the chance that she was as she appeared. Living life in constant state of anxious paranoia that someone is going to get something over on you is not (IMO) a useful lifestyle.
I have asked this question of my brother. He just went through this, not twins but 2 kids. One of them turned out not to be his. He completely disowned the kid after raising him for 13 years. Told the kid to his face he is not his and he will not care for him anymore, ever. It does boggle.
In some cases if the man feels intensely betrayed and the woman has moved on to another relationship where the children have what amounts to an onsite defacto father figure in her new SO, and for reason of distance, machinations by the mother to effectively limit visitation, or other circumstances that limit father-child interaction this can happen.
Naive expectation of sentiment aside for better or worse there is nothing “magic” in a father-child relationship if the father does not maintain a fairly close relationship with the child. If there is (for whatever reason) father-child separation for a considerable length of time fathers can essentially become emotional strangers to their children, and if this happens the normal sense of parental obligation often withers.
This scenario happens all the time. If a child is out of their father’s daily lives the presence of an emotional bond can diminish to the vanishing point especially if there is another "dad in the picture.
It’s like what Ronald Reagan supposedly said: “Trust, but verify”
Besides, the wife doesn’t need to know.
As far as the OP goes, it’s a tough question, but I think that “duped dads” should be able to get some relief from the court. If the court terminates the ex-husband’s rights and responsibilities, it seems to me that the children are basically no worse off than if he’d never been married to the mother in the first place.
Perhaps there should be a time limit for denying paternity.
Oh, yeah, that’ll go down real good, good luck keeping it a secret… Bear in mind, in many jurisdictions (including the one I write from) any dispute of paternity* for the effect of severing legal obligation *has to be done within a very, very narrow window of time from birth, with no second chances, sometimes as little as the first 30 days from when you’re entered as father on the certificate. In most cases that’s when it is extremely unlikely that information about what the newborn is being tested for will be witheld from both parents.
But what has been said before is right – all the long-established law and precedent is that at a certain point, it becomes too late to sever **legal **parental obligation regardless of what the factual data says.
Assuming that the paternity test confirms that the apparently loving, faithful wife really is loving and faithful (which most women are), how would she find out about it?
A test can be easily accomplished within a week or two using a hundred dollar home paternity test, available at most drug stores. All that’s needed is a genetic sample from the child and the putative father.
That’s largely correct, but somewhat irrelevant, since the issue for discussion is whether the law is right or not. At the time those laws evolved, there were no DNA tests. Further, law regarding marriage, sexual relations, and family relations were very different from now.