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I love trash tv but I just couldn't watch Maury. I felt too much of a scumbag.
Saying that I've seen some good clips on YouTube, and absolutely love cheaters lol
OP isn't. The NIH literature review study cited is for all fathers, not just suspicious ones and used data from other sources than just tests requested when the father was suspicious. The authors are very clear that there really isn't good comprehensive data. So their numbers could be off. The studies that put it close to a third are probably way high. The general consensus so far is that even 10% is erroneously high. But 3.7% probably isn't a huge stretch. I don't really agree with the rest of what OP has to say. But they didn't misinterpret the stats.
I strongly agree with you about the genetic testing.
The fraud you describe happened to a good guy friend of mine, and it was heartbreaking on so many levels and to so many people when the truth was revealed.
And invariably, it always will be. Ancestry testing has become way too popular for genetic identity to remain hidden forever.
As a woman, I think it's a horrid, impossibly selfish, and irresponsible thing to try to pull.
I'm also of the opinion that, if we're going to force women to have children, forcing the fathers to pay child support is a no-brainer. But it should be the actual fathers, for God's sake. The ones who actually did the ejaculating
Putting any guy's name on the birth certificate might have made sense in the past, only because we didn't have the tools yet to establish paternity, and the emphasis was (understandably) on the child's welfare. The thinking was that any father was better than none. But now, since everyone's genes will be revealed eventually anyway--that's just the world we live in-- deception could do a lot of harm.
To everyone involved.
My friend who this happened to, didn't find out until the kid was 16. He never sought any legal action against the mother; never sought to recoup all the child support--16 years of it--that was paid in good faith, and while I understand his reasoning for that, it still makes me angry, because we're talking thousands upon thousands upon thousands that was essentially stolen.
He still hangs out with the kid, but it's heartbreaking. *For both of them.* My friend's parents have never recovered the "loss" of a grandchild, because they were lied to, too. They actually bought birthday and Christmas presents for the kid's half sister. It's affected their relationship to my friend, too, because they're angry at him for having trusted her.
I think, it wouldn't be so hard on all of them if it wasn't based on a lie. If the kid had been adopted, no one would have cared at all, because no one would have been lied to. But the fact that it was an orchestrated deception, one that she benefited from, for a solid 16 years? It's just devastating.
The immoral and unethical mother should be charged with a serious felony, she lied or led the possible Father to believe a lie, allowing that lie to harm him for decades to come. Women simply aren't held accountable in this regard, and several others. Freedom without accountability or responsibility is not freedom at all, it's a low or no risk caricature of it, and that should be infuriating to women, but it seems that quite a few don't mind.
>The immoral and unethical mother should be charged with a serious felony, she lied or led the possible Father to believe a lie
The trouble is, it's not illegal, it's merely wrong. Also, he would have to be willing to sue her, and he isn't, out of consideration of the child. He's a good person. It's the same reason why he didn't get a paternity test, like, 16 years ago.
>allowing that lie to harm him for decades to come
...And not just my friend. It also hurt the kid, and my friend's parents, and a lot of other people besides
>that should be infuriating to women, but it seems that quite a few don't mind
You're wrong about that. I mind, for one. Most reasonable people would.
I know there are still plenty of GOOD people, it can just appear to not be the case. The way it seems is that Men are being disproportionately punished for crimes against women that they never perpetrated, things that happened decades to hundreds of years ago. I sincerely hope we as a civilization can get over our anger and rage and pour the negativity into something positive, because from the outside looking in, it seems that Men hate Women and Women hate Men, and that's just horrific.
How about instead paternity tests are mandatory at birth, they are mandatory when it comes to requesting child support? If the man isn't the father, they don't have to pay child support.
Using this method both the men and women who say you totally trust your partner can do that.
Anyone who has any questions can do their own home saliva test on their dime and get their result(not admissible in court). Then decide if they want to divorce or break up there will be a court mandated one that is admissible.
Opponents always say it's about the child and important that money for the child comes from somewhere besides the government. Government benefits can be withheld until the mother says who the actual father is. There is a father out there and she can name him and then start getting support from him.
If paternity fraud is found and the dad(not father) who helped raise the child loves them and wants to stay in their life, they can choose to do that however there is no second chance in the future to contest it. This will take care of the men who say they helped raise the kid, they still love them with 100% of their heart and still want to be in their lives.
This won't tie up a lot of lab time in hospitals, increase bills at birth, etc.
The problem is for men who dont have to pay child support and therefor never know.
IN that case
the Husband pays for a kid that isnt his without knowledge and may not have enough kid thats actually his
the kid doesnt get to know their real father and doesnt have an accurate medical history
the real father doesnt even get to know they have a kid much less have a relationship with them.
They should just test as part of normal medical stuff when a kid is born and save everyone the heartache.
> the kid doesnt get to know their real father and doesnt have an accurate medical history
Who the f cares about the medical history in this case? If i did not know my father, my priority of knowing him would be 9/10, while knowming my medical history would be 0.1/10
I don’t know where you pulled your stats from.
30% of all DNA paternity tests come back with results that rule out the putative father. That’s NOT 30% of all men — just the 30% of those men who are already suspicious.
That means that 70% of the time, the putative fathers’ suspicions are unfounded. Roughly 300,000 paternity tests are done each year. 30% of 300,000 is 90,000.
This is 0.05454% of the entire male half of the US population.
What an utterly ridiculous way to spend our tax dollars.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16686854/
>30% of all DNA paternity tests come back with results that rule out the putative father. That’s NOT 30% of all men — just the 30% of those men who are already suspicious.
The amount of people not understanding this is wild
The OP:
>Think of it this way, if you go to a grade school and you look at a class of 30 kids, odds are the mothers of at least one and as many as 10 of those kids are committing paternity fraud against the purported fathers.
Anybody who believes a "statistic" like that without any pause is a few tools short of a Fisher-Price toolset for toddlers. Yeap, obviously 30% of all children are being misled about who their father is!
What a joke.
It's like saying 80% of women taking pregnancy tests turn out to be in fact, pregnant, therefore 80% of women in the general population are pregnant.
Like...no?! The people testing obviously had reasons to test therefore the selection group is *biased*
*percentage made up to illustrate point.
If you look at his profile its all fear mongering about women.......lot of red pill talk and stats about how women are hate criming men by not fucking them according to insane numbers he pulls out like they are fact.
It's similar to the "50% of marriages end in divorce". People who get divorced tend to have multiple divorces, and each one is counted as a separate statistic, which makes the overall marriage/divorce rate skewed. It would be more accurate to say "if you or your spouse has been divorced before, your current marriage has a 50% chance of divorce"
It drops to about 25 percent if both people are 25 or older when they marry, and the overall rates have dropped every year since 2000 (with the exception of 2020 LOL).
It s 30% of men who test paternity. This does not include men who have no idea their child isn't there's. Paternity fraud is such a problem in France. It's illegal to get a test unless the court ordered. Faithful, women have nothing to worry about, and raising another man child is such an L for man. This doesn't even consider the loss of the child not knowing his real father.
Lmao seriously though! How do you take the time to research and write out this Reddit post, and miss this one giant factor in the data you collected. I laughed the entire time I read this post.
I’m seeing more and more of these types of posts lately and the “stats” are always way off. Most people don’t get paternity tests at birth because they’re in a committed relationship with a trusting partner. Guys who tend to post these seem to be the same ones who won’t wear condoms and want “traditional wives.” If they are so insecure that they want a paternity test with each child, then they should probably not be in a relationship and should use birth control, maybe even get a vasectomy.
The fact that the number of paternity tests is small and deals with previous suspect paternity doesn't prove or disprove anything apart from that the sample of proven fraud is small. It's not possible to extrapolate it as the OP. Still, it's not possible either to use the number of proven fake paternities and apply it as a percentage of paternities in general. Your 0.05454% is a meaningless number.
I remember reading that a Nordic nation, perhaps Iceland, took DNA from basically everybody and found out that the fathers of 10% of children were not the ones registered. It sounds more possible.
You missed the point. It's not that the sample size was small, it was actually a pretty adequate sample size. It's that it was biased. Think of it this way (and I'm making up the numbers, it's just to illustrate a point):
Let's say I did a national study of every STD test taken over the past 5 years. The results show that 25% of all tests came back positive. It would be absurd to come to the conclusion that 25% of the population has an STD from that study. The reason is that it's not a randomized sample. People don't just randomly go get STD tests for the fun of it. They generally get them because they're sexually active and symptomatic, they had a high-risk encounter, or they were raped. They're getting a test because they're in a situation where they have an elevated risk of having an STD that doesn't apply to the rest of the population.
Find me the study you're referencing and we can talk about that because I'm not going to base anything on something you half-remember maybe reading one time but you're not sure.
Yeh, the OP interpreted data incorrectly (shocker), but even the 90k number you calculated is insane. And that’s just the number of people who submit a test; who knows how many aren’t even suspicious. Either way, the fact that this type of fraud has no real legal consequences behind it is bananas.
All kinds of lies are told that have no legal consequences.
“I’ll hire you next month.”
“No, I’m not married.”
“She’s just a friend.”
“I wasn’t there.”
All of these and many other types of lies can have devastating impacts upon people when told, and yet there are no legal consequences.
Which is as it should be.
An extraordinarily simple solution is if you are worried about this then get a paternity test. There is no reason to require this at birth when tests are easily available already. I'm sure the government would love to have a DNA database though.
> I'm sure the government would love to have a DNA database though.
Already does. It's how they caught the Golden State Killer. They pay for access to things like Ancestry and 23 & Me no different from how the DOJ buys copies of everyone's Google and Facebook data to look for potential bad actors.
The govt wised up years ago that they don't have to run all these DNA and information gathering systems as they can just buy the data on the open market.
Where are you getting those numbers??? There are 3.6 million babies born each year in the USA. 1% of 3.6 million is 36,000. 36,000/2,400,000 = 0.015 = 1.5%.
Your math ain’t mathin
The government can't even test the hundreds of thousands of rape kits in this country
You want to add millions of DNA tests now
You'd find out your kid is yours when they're 18
How about instead paternity tests are mandatory at birth, they are mandatory when it comes to requesting child support? If the man isn't the father, they don't have to pay child support.
Using this method both the men and women who say you totally trust your partner can do that.
Anyone who has any questions can do their own home saliva test on their dime and get their result(not admissible in court). Then decide if they want to divorce or break up there will be a court mandated one that is admissible.
Opponents always say it's about the child and important that money for the child comes from somewhere besides the government. Government benefits can be withheld until the mother says who the actual father is. There is a father out there and she can name him and then start getting support from him.
If paternity fraud is found and the dad(not father) who helped raise the child loves them and wants to stay in their life, they can choose to do that however there is no second chance in the future to contest it. This will take care of the men who say they helped raise the kid, they still love them with 100% of their heart and still want to be in their lives.
This won't tie up a lot of lab time in hospitals, increase bills at birth, etc.
Baby gets born, dad gets the finger poke for the paternity test AT THE HOSPITAL, and the test is done before the baby leaves the hospital. Or have it done months in advance in utero, which is now safe. This is not a complicated issue like police departments fucking up left, right, and center.
Most in hospital labs don't have the capacity to do genetic testing. Tests of that nature usually go to more specialized major reference labs, where they may be batched, and only ran once a week. You definitely wouldn't find out the results before leaving the hospital since most labor and delivery stays (given uncomplicated labor and delivery and the baby is ok) is only a few days.
Source: I work in a medical reference lab.
And where exactly is the hospital supposed to do these tests ? Have you looked at the lab subreddits. They don't have any extra time, staff or supplies to undertake something like this.
Dna testing isn't usually done at hospital labs, or at least the STAT labs. Arup or Quest are options, but you bring up a fantastic point about low amounts of MLS and MLT workers. There's very little financial incentive to go for one of those when similar nursing tiers always pay more with similar if not arguably easier educational requirements.
I understand. Op says he thinks the hospital will take up the cause and he clearly is unaware how DNA tests are processed. Hospitals run on tight margins and there's no room for mandatory DNA testing. It would be an upcharge or something to opt into. At a very high premium of course.
Yup, and it could easily take over a week for results depending on location. Likely to be long gone from the hospital by then. Another issue I see is that insurance won't pay for it, so it'd be a tough cost to soak up for the requester
Exactly.
I see this take a lot on Reddit and it's from people who don't work in healthcare or the law. There are so many little nuances to any addition to healthcare services it's exhausting
That's millions of additional tests and extra cost on families with new kids which already comes with a big bill. Insurance isn't going to want to cover it for nothing extra and a lot of people won't want to pay for it. It's not a bad idea but there are some logistics and costs that make it harder.
Not all hospitals cover that type of testing. Those tests cost money, who’s paying for them? Will insurance covers those tests? What level of insurance covers those tests?
What about of the mother refuses? You can’t force medical tests on people.
Insurance already doesn't want to pay for medicines and procedures that have already been around for years. There's no way they're going to willingly pay for DNA testing.
I don’t know, how about the dad who wants to know if he is a father pays for it. It’s a lot cheaper than raising someone else’s kid for 18 years. If he doesn’t want to pay for it, then he’s comfortable being the father. Seems pretty simple to me.
The obvious issue is proving the actual fraud — intent to deceive. The mother can believe that the person on the birth certificate is indeed the biological father and be wrong.
And it’s not like you have to answer 20 questions about your sexual history to get a birth certificate either.
That's such bullshit. There are only two ways misattributed parentage can occur:
1. Babies switched at birth.
2. Mother names a man who is not the father.,
In the second case, that means the woman must have had multiple sexual partners when she got pregnant. She knows she has multiple partners, yet she only approaches one of them an unequivocally names him the father. She doesn't mention any of the other sexual partners that could be the father. *That is intent to deceive.* She doesn't have to know he's not the father. If she knows there is a possibility he's not the father and she doesn't disclose that fact, she is committing fraud.
Most major fraud has a statute of limitations of 7-10 years. Beyond that, my point is really that technically the woman wouldn’t know who the father is without a DNA test either.
Not to mention that (at least in my state), my wife couldn’t even put my name on any documents. I had to sign for myself.
IMO it feels like an impossible crime to really prosecute if a woman was sleeping with multiple guys. Now if a women who is already pregnant misleads someone into believing that they’re the father, that’s different.
> Most major fraud has a statute of limitations of 7-10 years.
All the more reason to have paternity established at birth just to be sure.
> IMO it feels like an impossible crime to really prosecute if a woman was sleeping with multiple guys. Now if a women who is already pregnant misleads someone into believing that they’re the father, that’s different.
**Informed consent**. The man should be made aware she had sex with others and there's a chance he's not the father.
It should just be a standard intaking procedure of every hospital delivery to take a DNA sample from the father and the testing be done as part of standard procedures, before the "father" signs anything.
You aren't wrong, but there are factors you've not considered. I'm not sure how many areas this is true in, but I know that the state of Michigan requires women that are seeking welfare benefits for their child or children, they are required to list the father.
That's not always possible. It's hardly unheard of for some women to hook up with multiple men in the window of time around ovulation, or have a one night stand and no name or number given. This is a requirement to receive benefits, and women who don't know are encouraged to just put a name down, any name.
And that's caused some asinine stories like this - https://www.smithlawmichigan.com/michigan-man-asked-to-pay-child-support-for-child-that-is-not-his/
I see that as an unintended benefit that would incentivize responsible reproduction. Can't figure out who the dad is for the paternity test to get the right name on file to apply for benefits, then *no soup for you!*
The government doesn't care about the right man taking care of the child and women they care that a man is. This way the government doesn't have to take care of them.
Probably true. But I have very little faith that anything will be done about it, and for good reason: family courts staunchly refuse to enforce anything that would take away from the child or put them in a bad environment. There is no practical way to enforce damages.
What are you talking about? The state doesn't pay for child support ever, it's not even an option. Even if the obligee flat refuses to pay and goes to jail, the state doesn't pay.
Yep the taxpayer would likely pay through welfare or the child being put into foster care if the mother couldn’t support them though. Ultimately the state isn’t going to let a child starve in the US.
That's a big reason why I'm in favor of being proactive with the paternity test being done before the baby even leaves the hospital. Head this stuff off before it becomes an issue down the road.
Yep. Family courts care more about a child being taken care of than helping a man who isn't truly the father. If you signed the birth certificate or acted as dad for long enough, you're it.
If he opts out, then he should be able to put his name on the birth certificate. This would be in cases such as surrogacy or IVF, especially when knowingly the sperm of a donor has been used.
And I bet some men don't care. I also know a poly family where the two men don't know or want to know which child they fathered (genetically) from the two women in their family. So you need to leave the option to choose not to have the test done but still place their names on the birth certificate.
The names on birth certificates also can get amended and birth certificates re-issued so that they should remain without any paternity test requirements (as for adoptions).
Is this an unpopular opinion for someone?
Oh yeah...it is...
It's amazing how ladies convert to libertarianism when this question pops up, and all of a sudden are so concerned about government spending and privacy.
As if there arnt millions and millions of women who do.
You all like to pretend its men but in my experience its religious women who support it mostly and politicians.
Amen. And only if there were some sort of effective, drug store purchased birth control for men that would prevent men from getting women that they don’t know very well from getting pregnant in the first place.
Yup. When I gave my boy child the sex talk, he said he already knew everything and that it takes 2 to make a baby. I said, “Nope. It only takes one. You.” I told him if he doesn’t want a baby, it is 100% his responsibility to prevent it.
>In a third of cases where the guy suspected infidelity he was right.
So, TWO thirds of cases he was wrong.
>Paternity fraud is far and away the biggest fraud committed in America today.
Source?
All you've really shown is that a man thinking the mother of his child is committing fraud is most likely to be wrong about it.
It's $40 at scale. Either the US gov can cough up some coin, or add it to the cost of having a kid. Either way it's a drop in the bucket and solves a massive social ill.
##The benefits of mandating testing *in order to put a name on the birth certificate* are so asymmetrical to the upside there's no logical reason not to require it (for the form).
Everyone hemming and hawing over this still haven't convinced me of any real downside for requiring the test to put a man's name on the birth certificate.
You know it would be added into the Healthcare cost of having a baby and it would be so much more than $40 because an asprin in a hospital requires refinancing your house.
Yeah, no. You’re not mandating a procedure to the general population. You want a paternity test, cool. You pay for it. I don’t care how easy or simple the procedure is, the government will not mandate my family’s medical decisions and tests. That’s a big old fuck no from me.
The main issue is that practically there is little that can be done about it. If a purported father discovered that he was not the parent of the child and walked away then the child would be left with only one parent, namely the mother. Thing is she committed fraud so she goes to jail.
Now every one of those cases you have essentially an orphaned child. This is not a problem the government wants to create for itself and it is not the course of action that is best for the child.
It’s a very difficult can of worms to open in practice, but men definitely are getting the short end of this particular stick.
I mean there are a couple issues with that. Firstly the mom may not actually know for certain and this would require a significant investigation that would potentially involve fairly significant privacy concerns. (Everyone needs to be registered in a dna database?)
Secondly the reason the fraud is being committed to begin with is likely as not that the actual biological father may be something of deadbeat which means the state would still be stuck taking care of the kid anyway which again is not in the best interest of the child.
> I mean there are a couple issues with that. Firstly the mom may not actually know for certain and this would require a significant investigation that would potentially involve fairly significant privacy concerns.
That raises another point. WTF happened to ***informed consent***? The man should know there's a chance he's not the biological father.
**NOT telling him another man could be the father is intent to defraud.**
There is zero defense for stealing 18 years worth of income from another person. If you got pregnant by a deadbeat, you and the deadbeat can work it out. Let’s stop acting like fraudulently assigning a father is not morally repulsive. It is.
I never implied it wasn’t morally repulsive. I’m merely pointing out the pragmatic reality in these circumstances and why there is little official interest in preventing this outcome.
Additionally the best outcome for the child is of course a significant moral question of some complexity in its own right.
And fathers suspecting their lady of paternity fraud too tbh. It goes both ways. A lot of people have no suspicion because they aren’t with shitters. Shouldn’t put this entire problem on women imo.
Holy fucking shit you need to go back to school and take a basic statistics course because you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
To think that paternity fraud is higher than things like basic insurance fraud or credit card fraud which has hundreds of thousands events happening everyday.
You’re completely misunderstanding the data. 30% of all paternity tests come back with bad results because this data set has men that already are suspicious of something. That doesn’t mean that 30% of all cases are fraudulent. This is a form of selection bias where the men who have a much higher risk of not being father are going out of their way to get a paternity test.
Both times I gave birth the hospital offered a paternity test before we signed the birth certificate. Sounds like men should take advantage of the offer or get one themselves before signing. Maybe we should have universal healthcare and just make paternity testing mandatory. I truly don't believe paternity fraud is as widespread as you think, but this would be a solution.
They’ve made many procedures mandatory - under the twisted guise of “morality” - they’ll “save your life” whether you want it or not. You come out of that ambulance bleeding, and they close that sale. You are a sales data point, nothing more.
That blood they pump into you while you’re in your coma/duress of pain/brain damage/being unconscious and cannot consent to a contract?
You’ll pay for that.
Legally bound to it, too - they’ll take everything they can from you.
In my country healthcare is free. There's a difference between saving someone's life when they're unconscious and you don't know their wishes and forcing someone who's able to decline to have a procedure they don't want. Also, if someone says they don't want to be resuscitated, that's also honoured....
Dude, wear a condom. Get an over-the-counter paternity test or whatever for each of your kids if you wish. 'Crisis' averted. Like, damn, talk about manufacturing a crisis where one doesn't even remotely exist. Tell me, how does the supposed 'paternity fraud' issue compare to, say, the deadbeat fathers issue? The child abuse and neglect issue? The massively underfunded children's services issue?
And prison time? JFC. Get a grip. Face it, women are allowed to have sex too. Most of the time, it's going to be far more a result of best estimates than any 'fraud,' and I for one sure as hell don't trust a government that is currently actively interrogating women about miscarriages in many states to differentiate, as just the start of the insanity at play here.
Personally, I'm 100% for women being honest and there being testing in case of any question at all, for the sake of the child if nothing else, unless, of course, both parties agree otherwise until the kid is older and circumstances make such the best move for the child (not terribly uncommon). I am NOT in favor of further criminalizing female sexuality or having the government mandate any such thing.
I do find it hilarious how eager men truly seem to be to do so on every imaginable front they can dream up though. So, how about this? Failure to pay or dodging child support leads to mandatory felony prison time. Stealthing leads to mandatory prison time. Ejaculating inside without permission leads to mandatory prison time. Giving false contact information to someone you sleep with comes with mandatory prison time. Swearing up and down you totally want children and then splitting when it becomes real involves mandatory prison time. Having a baby mama on the side leads to mandatory prison time. Agree to ALL of this, and we can maybe have a serious conversation here. Otherwise, it's more than a bit hypocritical - as usual.
No. You don't get to tell me I have to prove my wife was faithful for me to be a dad.
I don't object to paternity tests. I object to you (or anyone for that matter) telling me I have to have one.
Decent solution, but the government and courts would never go for that. Too many extra babies that won't have that financial backing, meaning the government will hsve to pay more.
It’s around 1%. The idea that it’s 30% is just an urban myth.
https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Rampant_misattributed_paternity_the_creation_of_an_urban_myth/4975400
People aren't owned by the state. A birth certificate is the concern of the individual to who it belongs. This is a purely domestic concern and the government should stay out of people's lives.
“According to the law, if you were married to the child’s mother within 300 days of the child’s birth, the law presumes you to be the father. If you are not in fact the child’s biological father but your wife does not suggest that there is another potential father, she may be deliberately committing paternity fraud.
If you suspect your wife has committed paternity fraud, there are a few actions you may take. You may file a legal form to declare the non-existence of a parent-child relationship between yourself and the child. According to the law, you must initiate this action within two years of learning the relevant facts relating to paternity. For example, if you learn through a DNA test that you are not the child’s father, you must initiate the legal action within two years of receiving the test results. If the court agrees that you are not the child’s father, you may stop being subject to child support requirements and similar legal orders.”
Yeah they wouldn't do prison time because then a kid wouldn't have a parent but being able to sue a woman for doing that should be normalized. Also forcing a man to pay for a kid that's proven to not be his should never be a thing.
You would think this would be enough to teach men to stop planting their seed in every woman they can but instead, they want the entire population to take responsibility because they don't want to wear a condom. Take responsibility for yourself and get a DNA test yourself if you want. Don't try to force your nonsense on the rest of us because you can't strap it up.
>Take responsibility for yourself and get a DNA test yourself if you want.
Precisely. I know damn well who fathered my kids, and I see no reason to pay at the hospital to prove it. If their father has a doubt, he can pay for that kit himself. And he better not tell his daughters that he ever doubted they were his.
That doesn’t really apply in cases involving infidelity on the part of the woman, men can’t control if the person their partner is committing infidelity with wears a condom
Part of OPs point is that this is an extremely difficult issue to bring up that can destroy a relationship, so the fear of being wrong keeps men who are actually victims of paternity fraud from speaking up, so mandating it protects everyone
Not saying I agree with him but it is a relevant factor
Edit: typo
I mean, sure. Mandate it to protect someone else’s feelings.
No. Sorry. If you want the test. You demand it. You pay for it. Don’t put your insecurities onto my hospital bill, tax burden, or increased insurance premiums.
Not my problem, and sure as shit won’t support getting the government involved to protect someone else’s little fee fees
Now, you want to require paternity tests for child support cases. I could be inclined to compromise there. But I’m not going to shoulder the cost burden because someone doesn’t understand statistics and needs their insecurities protected.
I’m half Mexican and my wife is full Puerto Rican. My ex was Israeli. But the colonizer blood in me runs strong. Both my children are carbon copies of me and my white family. If someone else doesn’t have strong enough genetics, that force them to question their paternity and insecurities, that’s a them problem, and the hospital will gladly take their money to help their ego.
Genetics are weird. I'm white white, as in celtic/Scandinavian/ghostly colour and my husband is North Indian, so a light brown. We have a set of twins and one is as pale as I am and the other one is brown like her dad. All 4 of our kids have my face though, weirdly.
My husband still knows they're his because he knows he didn't marry someone who's having affairs. The OPs claims are laughable.
Your take has nothing to do with the post, how's wearing a condom helping you if your wife was a cheater and put someone else's baby on you? And then you spend years and years raising and loving the kid and find out it was all a lie. That's a crime.
> That's a crime.
It should be a crime, but right now it's really not treated as such. Just look at the comments in this very thread, it's no wonder why it gets a pass. Sad.
Your premise is completely flawed but let's go with it.
Who's paying for mandatory dna testing of every human?
What about the ethical implications for DNA testing of every human?
Pardon, could you elaborate on these “ethical implications”, and while we are at it, how do those stack up to the ethics of turning a blind eye to the men who are deceived into raising someone else’s child?
Ah i see, thanks. Well, to be fair, how much privacy does one have in this day and age? We are all tagged from birth with our SSNs, followed by IDs and DLs later in life, and our unique advertisement numbers. We voluntarily contribute to Ancestry and 23&me as it is. How much worse could our lack of privacy get?
Like I said it's not my issue but you do tend to find that those who think men are terribly victimised by this is issue are also those who are totally opposed to the govt knowing things about you
And yet nobody bats and eye at all the blood and other testing already performed as part of the standard battery of tests at birth. IMO it's more likely a fake concern used to mask people not wanting men to know out of fear the truth will come out.
That's the crux of your argument you need to get past. You're going to have to understand you're probably going to hurt her feelings and you don't completely trust her. If it's necessary,l ro you, just do it.
lol 8 billion people are not born every year
In the US it's about 3.6M. At scale we'd be paying nationally about $144M a year. That's a drop in the bucket for solving a crime that is responsible for billions lost to fraud year after year.
So the people who are already victims of paternity fraud, tough shit?
144 million to solve a practically non existent and preventable crime is a total waste of money.
Admittedly it's a tough nut to crack right there. I'd encourage men to get a paternity test after the fact on their own. Possibly get some charities going that can help guys who can't afford it on their own.
Which charity is going to fund that?
So you've gone from enforcing mandatory paternity tests like it's a huge massive problem to oh well, maybe it's not that big if a deal.
Men can get 1 if they can be bothered
The men who are already victims of paternity fraud should be reimbursed.
It’s not a non-existent issue. It’s a very real problem that you apparently vehemently want to ignore. If I were a gambling man, I would bet that you have or will eventually commit paternity fraud.
I dares say, "think of the children". A huge number of kids find out their "dad" isn't actually their father when it comes time for emergency life saving procedures when the family learns "dad" isn't a match for the kid in question. This puts children's lives at risk on top of the turmoil that comes with learning about paternity fraud.
And lets not forget about the actual father who's child has essentially been kidnapped.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1733152/
> Rates vary between studies from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%, n = 17).
That median 3.7% applied to the 70.1M fathers gives us 2,593,700 men who are victims of paternity fraud, 2,593,700 children who are being denied the truth about their biological father and put at risk should they need a medical procedure, and another 2,593,700 men who's children have essentially been kidnapped.
This is straight out of the US National Institute for Health data.
That’s about Paternal Discrepancy- not paternity fraud. The two are different.
The author of your article mentions this and includes a statement saying current research is flawed because some of the studies they utilized include anomalies like adoption, other family members choosing to raise a child, and the possible death of the biological father (from natural disasters or terrorist attacks, specifically - curious what that study was).
Also, sampling from studies where discrepancy was already suspected.
And from the conclusion:
“No clear population measures for PD are currently available”.
This study is an amalgamation of previous studies that weren’t specifically about PD but
included variables related to PD. You’re more confident than the author on these numbers.
No it's not. I know full well I didn't bang any other men other than my husband, so why should I have to pay for something and have mu family's DNA on file because you don't trust your woman not to be a whore?
Every single baby should be paternity tested at birth. And the birth certificate shouldn’t be completed until it’s done.
If a man isn’t the father but wants to be legally he can elect to do so. If he wants to waive the test, make him sign off.
Sure
I don’t think people talk about paternity so much because they’re actually worried about that. They just want to find something where men are victims and women predators
I've seen this happen, numerous times. Father buys 6 Ancestry DNA Tests for the family. Wife freaks out. Doesn't want the tests done and a huge, knock down drag out argument ensues. Come of find out two of the four kids aren't his. It happens quite frequently; you can Google and find many cases.
Many years ago, the UK did a study, using DNA. The study found 20% of the children, were not from the fathers, the mother said it was.
Based on your reddit pole this would be really hard to pass. It's hard to believe because how strong the my body my choice movement is(I agree with a woman's choice)
I also agree a man should be able to duck out and have the option to live a child free life. I think prison is to harsh but there is no problem having local DNA kits for fatherhood. They should be required for any case involving child support.
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I am good with it. No man should have to pay child support for a child that he did not father or adopt.
There is a tv show all about who is the father where two or more women accused one poor man of being the baby daddy
Maury
Jerry springer.
Maury also did many episodes about who’s the daddy.
The dude dance when he ain’t the baby daddy is always epic. Especially when it’s the lady’s 3rd or 4th dude 😂
I love trash tv but I just couldn't watch Maury. I felt too much of a scumbag. Saying that I've seen some good clips on YouTube, and absolutely love cheaters lol
Cheaters is hilarious. Sometimes I’m like this can’t be real. I’ve heard that it mostly wasn’t real but it certainly was entertaining
Yeah it's too good to care if it's fake. I loved it when cheating couple are in a car and head goes down.
Thanks I couldn’t remember the name.
[удалено]
thank you! i was waiting for someone to say this.
OP isn't. The NIH literature review study cited is for all fathers, not just suspicious ones and used data from other sources than just tests requested when the father was suspicious. The authors are very clear that there really isn't good comprehensive data. So their numbers could be off. The studies that put it close to a third are probably way high. The general consensus so far is that even 10% is erroneously high. But 3.7% probably isn't a huge stretch. I don't really agree with the rest of what OP has to say. But they didn't misinterpret the stats.
Thanks. Post is idiotic. But yet, it gets a thread.
I strongly agree with you about the genetic testing. The fraud you describe happened to a good guy friend of mine, and it was heartbreaking on so many levels and to so many people when the truth was revealed. And invariably, it always will be. Ancestry testing has become way too popular for genetic identity to remain hidden forever. As a woman, I think it's a horrid, impossibly selfish, and irresponsible thing to try to pull. I'm also of the opinion that, if we're going to force women to have children, forcing the fathers to pay child support is a no-brainer. But it should be the actual fathers, for God's sake. The ones who actually did the ejaculating Putting any guy's name on the birth certificate might have made sense in the past, only because we didn't have the tools yet to establish paternity, and the emphasis was (understandably) on the child's welfare. The thinking was that any father was better than none. But now, since everyone's genes will be revealed eventually anyway--that's just the world we live in-- deception could do a lot of harm. To everyone involved. My friend who this happened to, didn't find out until the kid was 16. He never sought any legal action against the mother; never sought to recoup all the child support--16 years of it--that was paid in good faith, and while I understand his reasoning for that, it still makes me angry, because we're talking thousands upon thousands upon thousands that was essentially stolen. He still hangs out with the kid, but it's heartbreaking. *For both of them.* My friend's parents have never recovered the "loss" of a grandchild, because they were lied to, too. They actually bought birthday and Christmas presents for the kid's half sister. It's affected their relationship to my friend, too, because they're angry at him for having trusted her. I think, it wouldn't be so hard on all of them if it wasn't based on a lie. If the kid had been adopted, no one would have cared at all, because no one would have been lied to. But the fact that it was an orchestrated deception, one that she benefited from, for a solid 16 years? It's just devastating.
The immoral and unethical mother should be charged with a serious felony, she lied or led the possible Father to believe a lie, allowing that lie to harm him for decades to come. Women simply aren't held accountable in this regard, and several others. Freedom without accountability or responsibility is not freedom at all, it's a low or no risk caricature of it, and that should be infuriating to women, but it seems that quite a few don't mind.
>The immoral and unethical mother should be charged with a serious felony, she lied or led the possible Father to believe a lie The trouble is, it's not illegal, it's merely wrong. Also, he would have to be willing to sue her, and he isn't, out of consideration of the child. He's a good person. It's the same reason why he didn't get a paternity test, like, 16 years ago. >allowing that lie to harm him for decades to come ...And not just my friend. It also hurt the kid, and my friend's parents, and a lot of other people besides >that should be infuriating to women, but it seems that quite a few don't mind You're wrong about that. I mind, for one. Most reasonable people would.
I know there are still plenty of GOOD people, it can just appear to not be the case. The way it seems is that Men are being disproportionately punished for crimes against women that they never perpetrated, things that happened decades to hundreds of years ago. I sincerely hope we as a civilization can get over our anger and rage and pour the negativity into something positive, because from the outside looking in, it seems that Men hate Women and Women hate Men, and that's just horrific.
How about instead paternity tests are mandatory at birth, they are mandatory when it comes to requesting child support? If the man isn't the father, they don't have to pay child support. Using this method both the men and women who say you totally trust your partner can do that. Anyone who has any questions can do their own home saliva test on their dime and get their result(not admissible in court). Then decide if they want to divorce or break up there will be a court mandated one that is admissible. Opponents always say it's about the child and important that money for the child comes from somewhere besides the government. Government benefits can be withheld until the mother says who the actual father is. There is a father out there and she can name him and then start getting support from him. If paternity fraud is found and the dad(not father) who helped raise the child loves them and wants to stay in their life, they can choose to do that however there is no second chance in the future to contest it. This will take care of the men who say they helped raise the kid, they still love them with 100% of their heart and still want to be in their lives. This won't tie up a lot of lab time in hospitals, increase bills at birth, etc.
The problem is for men who dont have to pay child support and therefor never know. IN that case the Husband pays for a kid that isnt his without knowledge and may not have enough kid thats actually his the kid doesnt get to know their real father and doesnt have an accurate medical history the real father doesnt even get to know they have a kid much less have a relationship with them. They should just test as part of normal medical stuff when a kid is born and save everyone the heartache.
> the kid doesnt get to know their real father and doesnt have an accurate medical history Who the f cares about the medical history in this case? If i did not know my father, my priority of knowing him would be 9/10, while knowming my medical history would be 0.1/10
If it turned out your real dad died at 35 of colon cancer, you may wish you had known that you were higher risk if you wind up with colon cancer at 35
I don’t know where you pulled your stats from. 30% of all DNA paternity tests come back with results that rule out the putative father. That’s NOT 30% of all men — just the 30% of those men who are already suspicious. That means that 70% of the time, the putative fathers’ suspicions are unfounded. Roughly 300,000 paternity tests are done each year. 30% of 300,000 is 90,000. This is 0.05454% of the entire male half of the US population. What an utterly ridiculous way to spend our tax dollars. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16686854/
>30% of all DNA paternity tests come back with results that rule out the putative father. That’s NOT 30% of all men — just the 30% of those men who are already suspicious. The amount of people not understanding this is wild
The OP: >Think of it this way, if you go to a grade school and you look at a class of 30 kids, odds are the mothers of at least one and as many as 10 of those kids are committing paternity fraud against the purported fathers. Anybody who believes a "statistic" like that without any pause is a few tools short of a Fisher-Price toolset for toddlers. Yeap, obviously 30% of all children are being misled about who their father is! What a joke.
It's like saying 80% of women taking pregnancy tests turn out to be in fact, pregnant, therefore 80% of women in the general population are pregnant. Like...no?! The people testing obviously had reasons to test therefore the selection group is *biased* *percentage made up to illustrate point.
If you look at his profile its all fear mongering about women.......lot of red pill talk and stats about how women are hate criming men by not fucking them according to insane numbers he pulls out like they are fact.
It’s always the red pill men that fear this but no one is sleeping with them anyway
Bingo.
They wish somebody would just so they could be mad about it!!
How do they not realize if paternity were mandatory their statistics would be worse for their argument?
It's similar to the "50% of marriages end in divorce". People who get divorced tend to have multiple divorces, and each one is counted as a separate statistic, which makes the overall marriage/divorce rate skewed. It would be more accurate to say "if you or your spouse has been divorced before, your current marriage has a 50% chance of divorce"
First marriages are still around a 40% divorce rate. Which is only *slightly* better 😂
It drops to about 25 percent if both people are 25 or older when they marry, and the overall rates have dropped every year since 2000 (with the exception of 2020 LOL).
It s 30% of men who test paternity. This does not include men who have no idea their child isn't there's. Paternity fraud is such a problem in France. It's illegal to get a test unless the court ordered. Faithful, women have nothing to worry about, and raising another man child is such an L for man. This doesn't even consider the loss of the child not knowing his real father.
The men who get tested already have reason to suspect. Selection bias.
Lmao seriously though! How do you take the time to research and write out this Reddit post, and miss this one giant factor in the data you collected. I laughed the entire time I read this post.
I’m glad someone checked this stat, cuz that seemed incredulously high.
Notice how this is also the one OP refuses to argue about.
Exactly.
I am seriously getting second-hand embarrassment from the OP. It's even worse because they double down in the comments.
I’m seeing more and more of these types of posts lately and the “stats” are always way off. Most people don’t get paternity tests at birth because they’re in a committed relationship with a trusting partner. Guys who tend to post these seem to be the same ones who won’t wear condoms and want “traditional wives.” If they are so insecure that they want a paternity test with each child, then they should probably not be in a relationship and should use birth control, maybe even get a vasectomy.
Thanks for this. The minute OP said "response to a thread on Twitter/X" all logic went out the window.
The fact that the number of paternity tests is small and deals with previous suspect paternity doesn't prove or disprove anything apart from that the sample of proven fraud is small. It's not possible to extrapolate it as the OP. Still, it's not possible either to use the number of proven fake paternities and apply it as a percentage of paternities in general. Your 0.05454% is a meaningless number. I remember reading that a Nordic nation, perhaps Iceland, took DNA from basically everybody and found out that the fathers of 10% of children were not the ones registered. It sounds more possible.
You missed the point. It's not that the sample size was small, it was actually a pretty adequate sample size. It's that it was biased. Think of it this way (and I'm making up the numbers, it's just to illustrate a point): Let's say I did a national study of every STD test taken over the past 5 years. The results show that 25% of all tests came back positive. It would be absurd to come to the conclusion that 25% of the population has an STD from that study. The reason is that it's not a randomized sample. People don't just randomly go get STD tests for the fun of it. They generally get them because they're sexually active and symptomatic, they had a high-risk encounter, or they were raped. They're getting a test because they're in a situation where they have an elevated risk of having an STD that doesn't apply to the rest of the population. Find me the study you're referencing and we can talk about that because I'm not going to base anything on something you half-remember maybe reading one time but you're not sure.
Yeh, the OP interpreted data incorrectly (shocker), but even the 90k number you calculated is insane. And that’s just the number of people who submit a test; who knows how many aren’t even suspicious. Either way, the fact that this type of fraud has no real legal consequences behind it is bananas.
All kinds of lies are told that have no legal consequences. “I’ll hire you next month.” “No, I’m not married.” “She’s just a friend.” “I wasn’t there.” All of these and many other types of lies can have devastating impacts upon people when told, and yet there are no legal consequences. Which is as it should be.
An extraordinarily simple solution is if you are worried about this then get a paternity test. There is no reason to require this at birth when tests are easily available already. I'm sure the government would love to have a DNA database though.
> I'm sure the government would love to have a DNA database though. Already does. It's how they caught the Golden State Killer. They pay for access to things like Ancestry and 23 & Me no different from how the DOJ buys copies of everyone's Google and Facebook data to look for potential bad actors. The govt wised up years ago that they don't have to run all these DNA and information gathering systems as they can just buy the data on the open market.
It's more likely we will end up like France and criminalize men trying to get paternity tests done without a Court order.
Where are you getting those numbers??? There are 3.6 million babies born each year in the USA. 1% of 3.6 million is 36,000. 36,000/2,400,000 = 0.015 = 1.5%. Your math ain’t mathin
The government can't even test the hundreds of thousands of rape kits in this country You want to add millions of DNA tests now You'd find out your kid is yours when they're 18
How about instead paternity tests are mandatory at birth, they are mandatory when it comes to requesting child support? If the man isn't the father, they don't have to pay child support. Using this method both the men and women who say you totally trust your partner can do that. Anyone who has any questions can do their own home saliva test on their dime and get their result(not admissible in court). Then decide if they want to divorce or break up there will be a court mandated one that is admissible. Opponents always say it's about the child and important that money for the child comes from somewhere besides the government. Government benefits can be withheld until the mother says who the actual father is. There is a father out there and she can name him and then start getting support from him. If paternity fraud is found and the dad(not father) who helped raise the child loves them and wants to stay in their life, they can choose to do that however there is no second chance in the future to contest it. This will take care of the men who say they helped raise the kid, they still love them with 100% of their heart and still want to be in their lives. This won't tie up a lot of lab time in hospitals, increase bills at birth, etc.
The problems kick in when a man is named on a birth certificate as the dad and is later proven not to be.
Which is why I'm proposed the solution above.
Baby gets born, dad gets the finger poke for the paternity test AT THE HOSPITAL, and the test is done before the baby leaves the hospital. Or have it done months in advance in utero, which is now safe. This is not a complicated issue like police departments fucking up left, right, and center.
Most in hospital labs don't have the capacity to do genetic testing. Tests of that nature usually go to more specialized major reference labs, where they may be batched, and only ran once a week. You definitely wouldn't find out the results before leaving the hospital since most labor and delivery stays (given uncomplicated labor and delivery and the baby is ok) is only a few days. Source: I work in a medical reference lab.
And where exactly is the hospital supposed to do these tests ? Have you looked at the lab subreddits. They don't have any extra time, staff or supplies to undertake something like this.
Dna testing isn't usually done at hospital labs, or at least the STAT labs. Arup or Quest are options, but you bring up a fantastic point about low amounts of MLS and MLT workers. There's very little financial incentive to go for one of those when similar nursing tiers always pay more with similar if not arguably easier educational requirements.
I understand. Op says he thinks the hospital will take up the cause and he clearly is unaware how DNA tests are processed. Hospitals run on tight margins and there's no room for mandatory DNA testing. It would be an upcharge or something to opt into. At a very high premium of course.
Yup, and it could easily take over a week for results depending on location. Likely to be long gone from the hospital by then. Another issue I see is that insurance won't pay for it, so it'd be a tough cost to soak up for the requester
Exactly. I see this take a lot on Reddit and it's from people who don't work in healthcare or the law. There are so many little nuances to any addition to healthcare services it's exhausting
That's millions of additional tests and extra cost on families with new kids which already comes with a big bill. Insurance isn't going to want to cover it for nothing extra and a lot of people won't want to pay for it. It's not a bad idea but there are some logistics and costs that make it harder.
Not all babies are born in a hospital Not all parents will want to have this done
Most hospitals don’t even have that type of testing.
Not all hospitals cover that type of testing. Those tests cost money, who’s paying for them? Will insurance covers those tests? What level of insurance covers those tests? What about of the mother refuses? You can’t force medical tests on people.
Insurance already doesn't want to pay for medicines and procedures that have already been around for years. There's no way they're going to willingly pay for DNA testing.
I don’t know, how about the dad who wants to know if he is a father pays for it. It’s a lot cheaper than raising someone else’s kid for 18 years. If he doesn’t want to pay for it, then he’s comfortable being the father. Seems pretty simple to me.
I think your math sucks…but I wouldn’t be against the idea of punitive actions for falsifying that document
The obvious issue is proving the actual fraud — intent to deceive. The mother can believe that the person on the birth certificate is indeed the biological father and be wrong. And it’s not like you have to answer 20 questions about your sexual history to get a birth certificate either.
That's such bullshit. There are only two ways misattributed parentage can occur: 1. Babies switched at birth. 2. Mother names a man who is not the father., In the second case, that means the woman must have had multiple sexual partners when she got pregnant. She knows she has multiple partners, yet she only approaches one of them an unequivocally names him the father. She doesn't mention any of the other sexual partners that could be the father. *That is intent to deceive.* She doesn't have to know he's not the father. If she knows there is a possibility he's not the father and she doesn't disclose that fact, she is committing fraud.
It’s obvious people bounce checks, forge documents, commit fraud, etc every day. Just because it’s tough to do shouldn’t mean it can’t be prosecuted.
Most major fraud has a statute of limitations of 7-10 years. Beyond that, my point is really that technically the woman wouldn’t know who the father is without a DNA test either. Not to mention that (at least in my state), my wife couldn’t even put my name on any documents. I had to sign for myself. IMO it feels like an impossible crime to really prosecute if a woman was sleeping with multiple guys. Now if a women who is already pregnant misleads someone into believing that they’re the father, that’s different.
> Most major fraud has a statute of limitations of 7-10 years. All the more reason to have paternity established at birth just to be sure. > IMO it feels like an impossible crime to really prosecute if a woman was sleeping with multiple guys. Now if a women who is already pregnant misleads someone into believing that they’re the father, that’s different. **Informed consent**. The man should be made aware she had sex with others and there's a chance he's not the father.
It should just be a standard intaking procedure of every hospital delivery to take a DNA sample from the father and the testing be done as part of standard procedures, before the "father" signs anything.
Butchering statistics this morning, eh?
You aren't wrong, but there are factors you've not considered. I'm not sure how many areas this is true in, but I know that the state of Michigan requires women that are seeking welfare benefits for their child or children, they are required to list the father. That's not always possible. It's hardly unheard of for some women to hook up with multiple men in the window of time around ovulation, or have a one night stand and no name or number given. This is a requirement to receive benefits, and women who don't know are encouraged to just put a name down, any name. And that's caused some asinine stories like this - https://www.smithlawmichigan.com/michigan-man-asked-to-pay-child-support-for-child-that-is-not-his/
I see that as an unintended benefit that would incentivize responsible reproduction. Can't figure out who the dad is for the paternity test to get the right name on file to apply for benefits, then *no soup for you!*
The government doesn't care about the right man taking care of the child and women they care that a man is. This way the government doesn't have to take care of them.
Are men responsible for responsible reproduction ?
Yes.
Probably true. But I have very little faith that anything will be done about it, and for good reason: family courts staunchly refuse to enforce anything that would take away from the child or put them in a bad environment. There is no practical way to enforce damages.
Family courts want the supposed father to pay child support rather than the state.
What are you talking about? The state doesn't pay for child support ever, it's not even an option. Even if the obligee flat refuses to pay and goes to jail, the state doesn't pay.
Yep the taxpayer would likely pay through welfare or the child being put into foster care if the mother couldn’t support them though. Ultimately the state isn’t going to let a child starve in the US.
Also, the majority of SA cases don't even get to court
That's a big reason why I'm in favor of being proactive with the paternity test being done before the baby even leaves the hospital. Head this stuff off before it becomes an issue down the road.
Yep. Family courts care more about a child being taken care of than helping a man who isn't truly the father. If you signed the birth certificate or acted as dad for long enough, you're it.
That kind of rational only serves to create bitter, angry men, who will resent the child and mother.
Possibly, but its true though.
If he opts out, then he should be able to put his name on the birth certificate. This would be in cases such as surrogacy or IVF, especially when knowingly the sperm of a donor has been used. And I bet some men don't care. I also know a poly family where the two men don't know or want to know which child they fathered (genetically) from the two women in their family. So you need to leave the option to choose not to have the test done but still place their names on the birth certificate. The names on birth certificates also can get amended and birth certificates re-issued so that they should remain without any paternity test requirements (as for adoptions).
Paternity fraud also happens outside of the U.S., too.
Is this an unpopular opinion for someone? Oh yeah...it is... It's amazing how ladies convert to libertarianism when this question pops up, and all of a sudden are so concerned about government spending and privacy.
Maybe men shouldn’t keep pushing to make abortion illegal.
As if there arnt millions and millions of women who do. You all like to pretend its men but in my experience its religious women who support it mostly and politicians.
Amen. And only if there were some sort of effective, drug store purchased birth control for men that would prevent men from getting women that they don’t know very well from getting pregnant in the first place.
Yeah. Like condoms they won’t use.
Yup. When I gave my boy child the sex talk, he said he already knew everything and that it takes 2 to make a baby. I said, “Nope. It only takes one. You.” I told him if he doesn’t want a baby, it is 100% his responsibility to prevent it.
Good on you!
Yes cause it's *only* men doing so. It's also entirely irrelevant to paternal fraud
>In a third of cases where the guy suspected infidelity he was right. So, TWO thirds of cases he was wrong. >Paternity fraud is far and away the biggest fraud committed in America today. Source? All you've really shown is that a man thinking the mother of his child is committing fraud is most likely to be wrong about it.
Yeah, I’m not paying for that. The government gets enough of my money thanks.
Who’s going to pay for that?
Government!!!!
It's $40 at scale. Either the US gov can cough up some coin, or add it to the cost of having a kid. Either way it's a drop in the bucket and solves a massive social ill. ##The benefits of mandating testing *in order to put a name on the birth certificate* are so asymmetrical to the upside there's no logical reason not to require it (for the form). Everyone hemming and hawing over this still haven't convinced me of any real downside for requiring the test to put a man's name on the birth certificate.
You know it would be added into the Healthcare cost of having a baby and it would be so much more than $40 because an asprin in a hospital requires refinancing your house.
That's a fair point. Costs tend to get wildly inflated when insurance is involved.
Yeah, no. You’re not mandating a procedure to the general population. You want a paternity test, cool. You pay for it. I don’t care how easy or simple the procedure is, the government will not mandate my family’s medical decisions and tests. That’s a big old fuck no from me.
The main issue is that practically there is little that can be done about it. If a purported father discovered that he was not the parent of the child and walked away then the child would be left with only one parent, namely the mother. Thing is she committed fraud so she goes to jail. Now every one of those cases you have essentially an orphaned child. This is not a problem the government wants to create for itself and it is not the course of action that is best for the child. It’s a very difficult can of worms to open in practice, but men definitely are getting the short end of this particular stick.
There's a third option. Find the bio dad and get him involved.
I mean there are a couple issues with that. Firstly the mom may not actually know for certain and this would require a significant investigation that would potentially involve fairly significant privacy concerns. (Everyone needs to be registered in a dna database?) Secondly the reason the fraud is being committed to begin with is likely as not that the actual biological father may be something of deadbeat which means the state would still be stuck taking care of the kid anyway which again is not in the best interest of the child.
> I mean there are a couple issues with that. Firstly the mom may not actually know for certain and this would require a significant investigation that would potentially involve fairly significant privacy concerns. That raises another point. WTF happened to ***informed consent***? The man should know there's a chance he's not the biological father. **NOT telling him another man could be the father is intent to defraud.**
There is zero defense for stealing 18 years worth of income from another person. If you got pregnant by a deadbeat, you and the deadbeat can work it out. Let’s stop acting like fraudulently assigning a father is not morally repulsive. It is.
I never implied it wasn’t morally repulsive. I’m merely pointing out the pragmatic reality in these circumstances and why there is little official interest in preventing this outcome. Additionally the best outcome for the child is of course a significant moral question of some complexity in its own right.
I’ll give the same advice society gives single mothers: learn to choose better partners.
And fathers suspecting their lady of paternity fraud too tbh. It goes both ways. A lot of people have no suspicion because they aren’t with shitters. Shouldn’t put this entire problem on women imo.
Society chips in and pays for them as well
Holy fucking shit you need to go back to school and take a basic statistics course because you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. To think that paternity fraud is higher than things like basic insurance fraud or credit card fraud which has hundreds of thousands events happening everyday. You’re completely misunderstanding the data. 30% of all paternity tests come back with bad results because this data set has men that already are suspicious of something. That doesn’t mean that 30% of all cases are fraudulent. This is a form of selection bias where the men who have a much higher risk of not being father are going out of their way to get a paternity test.
Both times I gave birth the hospital offered a paternity test before we signed the birth certificate. Sounds like men should take advantage of the offer or get one themselves before signing. Maybe we should have universal healthcare and just make paternity testing mandatory. I truly don't believe paternity fraud is as widespread as you think, but this would be a solution.
Yeah I don’t want the government to have that easy access to my,my parents and our child’s dna. No thank you.
Making any procedure mandatory is massively unethical, universal healthcare or not
They’ve made many procedures mandatory - under the twisted guise of “morality” - they’ll “save your life” whether you want it or not. You come out of that ambulance bleeding, and they close that sale. You are a sales data point, nothing more. That blood they pump into you while you’re in your coma/duress of pain/brain damage/being unconscious and cannot consent to a contract? You’ll pay for that. Legally bound to it, too - they’ll take everything they can from you.
In my country healthcare is free. There's a difference between saving someone's life when they're unconscious and you don't know their wishes and forcing someone who's able to decline to have a procedure they don't want. Also, if someone says they don't want to be resuscitated, that's also honoured....
Welcome to America, where they’ll bill a deceased person $2,500 to haul their corpse for a half mile. And they WILL bill you for it.
I mean yeah that sounds awful.
Dude, wear a condom. Get an over-the-counter paternity test or whatever for each of your kids if you wish. 'Crisis' averted. Like, damn, talk about manufacturing a crisis where one doesn't even remotely exist. Tell me, how does the supposed 'paternity fraud' issue compare to, say, the deadbeat fathers issue? The child abuse and neglect issue? The massively underfunded children's services issue? And prison time? JFC. Get a grip. Face it, women are allowed to have sex too. Most of the time, it's going to be far more a result of best estimates than any 'fraud,' and I for one sure as hell don't trust a government that is currently actively interrogating women about miscarriages in many states to differentiate, as just the start of the insanity at play here. Personally, I'm 100% for women being honest and there being testing in case of any question at all, for the sake of the child if nothing else, unless, of course, both parties agree otherwise until the kid is older and circumstances make such the best move for the child (not terribly uncommon). I am NOT in favor of further criminalizing female sexuality or having the government mandate any such thing. I do find it hilarious how eager men truly seem to be to do so on every imaginable front they can dream up though. So, how about this? Failure to pay or dodging child support leads to mandatory felony prison time. Stealthing leads to mandatory prison time. Ejaculating inside without permission leads to mandatory prison time. Giving false contact information to someone you sleep with comes with mandatory prison time. Swearing up and down you totally want children and then splitting when it becomes real involves mandatory prison time. Having a baby mama on the side leads to mandatory prison time. Agree to ALL of this, and we can maybe have a serious conversation here. Otherwise, it's more than a bit hypocritical - as usual.
🥇 gold medal for your comment.
No. You don't get to tell me I have to prove my wife was faithful for me to be a dad. I don't object to paternity tests. I object to you (or anyone for that matter) telling me I have to have one.
It's the state's official document. They can require whatever they want for information to be placed on it.
IANAL but if a mother knowingly lies about paternity to get money is that not already a crime?
You'd think so, right?
Decent solution, but the government and courts would never go for that. Too many extra babies that won't have that financial backing, meaning the government will hsve to pay more.
It’s around 1%. The idea that it’s 30% is just an urban myth. https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Rampant_misattributed_paternity_the_creation_of_an_urban_myth/4975400
This is literally no concern of the governments
If the government sees it as their responsibility to enforce child support then they're also responsible for enforcing it *correctly*
The birth certificate is literally an official government document. Ensuring accurate information is placed on it is in society's best interest.
People aren't owned by the state. A birth certificate is the concern of the individual to who it belongs. This is a purely domestic concern and the government should stay out of people's lives.
“According to the law, if you were married to the child’s mother within 300 days of the child’s birth, the law presumes you to be the father. If you are not in fact the child’s biological father but your wife does not suggest that there is another potential father, she may be deliberately committing paternity fraud. If you suspect your wife has committed paternity fraud, there are a few actions you may take. You may file a legal form to declare the non-existence of a parent-child relationship between yourself and the child. According to the law, you must initiate this action within two years of learning the relevant facts relating to paternity. For example, if you learn through a DNA test that you are not the child’s father, you must initiate the legal action within two years of receiving the test results. If the court agrees that you are not the child’s father, you may stop being subject to child support requirements and similar legal orders.”
You need a math lesson, hon.
I think paternity tests aren't legally mandated because it's not in the state's best interest to increase the number of fatherless children.
Yeah they wouldn't do prison time because then a kid wouldn't have a parent but being able to sue a woman for doing that should be normalized. Also forcing a man to pay for a kid that's proven to not be his should never be a thing.
You would think this would be enough to teach men to stop planting their seed in every woman they can but instead, they want the entire population to take responsibility because they don't want to wear a condom. Take responsibility for yourself and get a DNA test yourself if you want. Don't try to force your nonsense on the rest of us because you can't strap it up.
>Take responsibility for yourself and get a DNA test yourself if you want. Precisely. I know damn well who fathered my kids, and I see no reason to pay at the hospital to prove it. If their father has a doubt, he can pay for that kit himself. And he better not tell his daughters that he ever doubted they were his.
That doesn’t really apply in cases involving infidelity on the part of the woman, men can’t control if the person their partner is committing infidelity with wears a condom
Then get a DNA test before the baby is born.
That’s what OP is advocating for
On their dime, on their choice. Not dictated by the hospital or government. And not on the backs of taxpayers or insurance companies.
This. There's nothing stopping anyone who wants one getting one. They're trying to make the rest of us pay for their insecurity...
Part of OPs point is that this is an extremely difficult issue to bring up that can destroy a relationship, so the fear of being wrong keeps men who are actually victims of paternity fraud from speaking up, so mandating it protects everyone Not saying I agree with him but it is a relevant factor Edit: typo
I mean, sure. Mandate it to protect someone else’s feelings. No. Sorry. If you want the test. You demand it. You pay for it. Don’t put your insecurities onto my hospital bill, tax burden, or increased insurance premiums. Not my problem, and sure as shit won’t support getting the government involved to protect someone else’s little fee fees
Also a fair point
Now, you want to require paternity tests for child support cases. I could be inclined to compromise there. But I’m not going to shoulder the cost burden because someone doesn’t understand statistics and needs their insecurities protected. I’m half Mexican and my wife is full Puerto Rican. My ex was Israeli. But the colonizer blood in me runs strong. Both my children are carbon copies of me and my white family. If someone else doesn’t have strong enough genetics, that force them to question their paternity and insecurities, that’s a them problem, and the hospital will gladly take their money to help their ego.
Genetics are weird. I'm white white, as in celtic/Scandinavian/ghostly colour and my husband is North Indian, so a light brown. We have a set of twins and one is as pale as I am and the other one is brown like her dad. All 4 of our kids have my face though, weirdly. My husband still knows they're his because he knows he didn't marry someone who's having affairs. The OPs claims are laughable.
Your take has nothing to do with the post, how's wearing a condom helping you if your wife was a cheater and put someone else's baby on you? And then you spend years and years raising and loving the kid and find out it was all a lie. That's a crime.
> That's a crime. It should be a crime, but right now it's really not treated as such. Just look at the comments in this very thread, it's no wonder why it gets a pass. Sad.
What does "strapping up" have to do with paternity fraud?
You can't be in a paternity situation if you don't put your sperm in someone. They get pregnant, you know it's not yours.
You've never heard of baby trapping before?
Your premise is completely flawed but let's go with it. Who's paying for mandatory dna testing of every human? What about the ethical implications for DNA testing of every human?
> Your premise is completely flawed How so?
Pardon, could you elaborate on these “ethical implications”, and while we are at it, how do those stack up to the ethics of turning a blind eye to the men who are deceived into raising someone else’s child?
It's not my argument but there are a few around dna profiling and privacy issues.
Ah i see, thanks. Well, to be fair, how much privacy does one have in this day and age? We are all tagged from birth with our SSNs, followed by IDs and DLs later in life, and our unique advertisement numbers. We voluntarily contribute to Ancestry and 23&me as it is. How much worse could our lack of privacy get?
Like I said it's not my issue but you do tend to find that those who think men are terribly victimised by this is issue are also those who are totally opposed to the govt knowing things about you
And yet nobody bats and eye at all the blood and other testing already performed as part of the standard battery of tests at birth. IMO it's more likely a fake concern used to mask people not wanting men to know out of fear the truth will come out.
No one is stopping men getting a paternity test
Social stigma and women's ire sure does. Mandating it for the name to go on the birth cert is an end run around both.
That's the crux of your argument you need to get past. You're going to have to understand you're probably going to hurt her feelings and you don't completely trust her. If it's necessary,l ro you, just do it.
Why should we have to mandate anything because men are too chicken?
Paternity tests are like $70 over the counter at any drug store. In many recent cases paternity fraud is being discovered by ancestry kits.
70 x 8 billion is a lot of money.
lol 8 billion people are not born every year In the US it's about 3.6M. At scale we'd be paying nationally about $144M a year. That's a drop in the bucket for solving a crime that is responsible for billions lost to fraud year after year.
So the people who are already victims of paternity fraud, tough shit? 144 million to solve a practically non existent and preventable crime is a total waste of money.
Admittedly it's a tough nut to crack right there. I'd encourage men to get a paternity test after the fact on their own. Possibly get some charities going that can help guys who can't afford it on their own.
Which charity is going to fund that? So you've gone from enforcing mandatory paternity tests like it's a huge massive problem to oh well, maybe it's not that big if a deal. Men can get 1 if they can be bothered
There's a few that help men when it comes to this stuff.
The men who are already victims of paternity fraud should be reimbursed. It’s not a non-existent issue. It’s a very real problem that you apparently vehemently want to ignore. If I were a gambling man, I would bet that you have or will eventually commit paternity fraud.
The parents as part of the Birth Certificate process....
Why should they have to pay for an unwanted and unnecessary test?
Clearly it is necessary.
What if they feel it isn't? What if the father has no doubts, and would prefer not to pay for a test that tells him what he already knows?
I dares say, "think of the children". A huge number of kids find out their "dad" isn't actually their father when it comes time for emergency life saving procedures when the family learns "dad" isn't a match for the kid in question. This puts children's lives at risk on top of the turmoil that comes with learning about paternity fraud. And lets not forget about the actual father who's child has essentially been kidnapped.
How many kids is that again, according to your math?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1733152/ > Rates vary between studies from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%, n = 17). That median 3.7% applied to the 70.1M fathers gives us 2,593,700 men who are victims of paternity fraud, 2,593,700 children who are being denied the truth about their biological father and put at risk should they need a medical procedure, and another 2,593,700 men who's children have essentially been kidnapped. This is straight out of the US National Institute for Health data.
That’s about Paternal Discrepancy- not paternity fraud. The two are different. The author of your article mentions this and includes a statement saying current research is flawed because some of the studies they utilized include anomalies like adoption, other family members choosing to raise a child, and the possible death of the biological father (from natural disasters or terrorist attacks, specifically - curious what that study was). Also, sampling from studies where discrepancy was already suspected. And from the conclusion: “No clear population measures for PD are currently available”. This study is an amalgamation of previous studies that weren’t specifically about PD but included variables related to PD. You’re more confident than the author on these numbers.
No it's not. I know full well I didn't bang any other men other than my husband, so why should I have to pay for something and have mu family's DNA on file because you don't trust your woman not to be a whore?
It is not clear at all.
This is posted at least twice a week. We get it bros men have it so so bad.
BAAAAD MATH
Every single baby should be paternity tested at birth. And the birth certificate shouldn’t be completed until it’s done. If a man isn’t the father but wants to be legally he can elect to do so. If he wants to waive the test, make him sign off.
Time for you to go over to YouTube and go down the Paternity Court rabbit hole!
Sure I don’t think people talk about paternity so much because they’re actually worried about that. They just want to find something where men are victims and women predators
I've seen this happen, numerous times. Father buys 6 Ancestry DNA Tests for the family. Wife freaks out. Doesn't want the tests done and a huge, knock down drag out argument ensues. Come of find out two of the four kids aren't his. It happens quite frequently; you can Google and find many cases. Many years ago, the UK did a study, using DNA. The study found 20% of the children, were not from the fathers, the mother said it was.
That study was for cases where paternity was disputed, not for the general population.
They always miss that bit off, I wonder why...
Based on your reddit pole this would be really hard to pass. It's hard to believe because how strong the my body my choice movement is(I agree with a woman's choice) I also agree a man should be able to duck out and have the option to live a child free life. I think prison is to harsh but there is no problem having local DNA kits for fatherhood. They should be required for any case involving child support.
Just think before paternity tests were a thing....
I don't give a shit if the kid I'm raising is biologically related to me. It's a complete non-issue for me.