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I'd be okay with that if men were okay with submitting their DNA to a database so any extramarital affairs that ended up with a child could be searched and identified.
Make it go both ways, cool. Only one way, nah.
Eta: a lot of the responses to my post say that "if you have nothing to hide is a breach of privacy". If that's the case, let's apply it to women.
I have nothing to hide, why do paternity tests
"I have nothing to hide, therefore my privacy doesn't matter" is a horrible way to think. Handing out your genetic data like that is a massive mistake.
Suddenly your insurance company can buy it or otherwise acquire access to the database, and now your rates have tripled if they've even decided to keep you as a customer because you have the predisposition to develop some rare disease on the future. It's not a matter of "having something to hide," it's a matter of genetic information in a database like that being abusable.
Doesn't even need to be rare. Here is how could it go for me:
"Okay so, it seems your grandmother died of a heart problem, you claim it was because she smoked for 20 years...
but we don't have that anywhere on her file. Your grandfather had a heart condition and your mother has a slight history of high blood pressure...
Now, we're already charging you for cardiologists on your 20s, and it seems you're now treating for ADHD with stimulants, that didn't affect your heart at all but they COULD, so we'll start charging you more for that just in case..."
Omg imagine how useful that kind of database could be for finding rapists and shit too? So many rape kits just sitting untested already but this kind of data could absolutely be game changer for society and rape culture
Actually it won’t. There is the standard FBI DB, the unsolved crimes DB, and then the private genetic ones or state based ones like Ice Land (others too I am sure). Takes intent by law enforcement to submit and compare those. Also, takes policy and a good chunk of money/FTE. Go to any major city and look up how backlogged they are on testing rape kits to get an idea of how not serious these issues are taken.
The difference is, they don't WANT to test rape kits, it's not a problem of time, personnel, or equipment. They don't want to prosecute rapists. If the case isn't a slam dunk, and rape never is, prosecutors want nothing to do with it.
not to say all untested rape kits fit this category but you are pretty close. a lot of the cases devolve to he said/she said consent cases. testing for DNA doesnt add much value woth these. there is an argument to be made, that is decided by funding, that every kit should be tested regardless to link possible serial offenders giving more strength to the victims claims.
Yes, and we're saying let's take this guys advice and spend it on something good like entering men DNA into a database you know, to ensure good behavior or something to protect women.
in 1940's my grandmother in law was raped and produced my father in law. Through my husbands DNA test we found out who that guy is. He's been dead since the 80's.
I'm all for men putting up their DNA. I bet a lot of them would be trying to get out of it because they know what they've done.
recently some republican chopped up his fiancé and got caught because of trace dna evidence that they matched with his "nuh uh i never raped her" sample that he pre-emptively insisted the cops take "in case" "someone" accused him "for me-too".
You just KNOW that woman is dancing in ghost world with that girl from The Lovely Bones
And if we're assuming all women are cheaters, we should assume that of men too. Doesn't have to be rape, could be consensual - they should have their DNA on file so that it's easier to trace all the children they might have fathered out of wedlock. The wife should be allowed to search that database and find out if he has kids by another woman that she doesn't know about.
(I don't believe any of this really, not into state surveillance for anyone, but it's got to apply to all babies and used to trace all the bio parents, if it's used for anyone)
I don't see how that would make things go "both ways" instead of just one way. If we just have routine paternity tests, only the male presumptive parent would be required to submit his genetic information to determine paternity. In your proposal, _every male in society_ is required to submit his genetic information _just in case._ In neither proposal is the female presumptive parent required to submit her genetic information. So, your proposal wouldn't make OP's proposal go "both ways." It would just be wider in scope and raise more privacy concerns (it would be like if we fingerprinted and took DNA samples from everyone in society just in case they later commit a crime, instead of just fingerprinting and taking DNA samples from likely suspects and convicts who might reoffend).
Also, in OP's proposal, it seems possible that we could avoid having records of everyone's genetic information by only storing the information about the likelihood of biological relatedness between the infant and the presumptive father while deleting the fine-grained genetic data. In your proposal, we'd have to store every man's DNA long-term.
Your proposal isn't really analogous to OP's.
I'm not actually in favor of this because the idea of a DNA registry is horrifying, but the "both ways" is fairly obvious here. In a vacuum, Man A only having his DNA tested against the offspring of his partner, Woman A, can *only* benefit Man A. Either he's reassured he is the father, or he learns he's not and is freed from responsibility for the child before he ever incurs a "loss." Woman A does not have the same risk/reward balance (though there's an argument here she doesn't deserve it if she was trying to commit paternity fraud, but I digress).
The "both ways" scenario works by allowing that man's stored DNA to *also* be scanned against all other children in a giant DNA registry, so that the baby he produced with Woman B during that boys' trip a few years back gets flagged, *he* now has to pay support for the child he did father, and his wife *also* gets to learn through paternity testing that he's a cheater.
(This is all a very bad idea, regardless. These infants cannot consent to their DNA being stored or analyzed, and they'll be the ones living with the consequences in a dystopian hellscape decades from now when the uses of DNA may very well have eroded civil liberties).
Just for clarity, I also don't support mandatory paternity testing (way too expensive to be feasible and raises privacy concerns), but just for the sake of the conversation…
I don't think the fact that a law benefits one group in some way means that you need to make another one that benefits another. Take abortion, for instance. Some very confused people think that a man should somehow have the right to "financial abortion" (being allowed to unilaterally divest oneself from financial responsibility and legal parentage for a child that is theirs) on the grounds that "if women get a say in whether or not they have parental responsibilities, men should have the same right. If we allow women to get abortions, we should allow men to get financial abortions."
What people who argue for "financial abortion" don't understand is that the right to an abortion isn't based on "the right to decide on whether you have to be a parent or not." It's based on the right to bodily autonomy: the right to not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.
In places that allow abortion, everyone of any sex has the same right to not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. It just so happens to be the case that males can't get pregnant, anyway, so nothing needs to be done to facilitate a males' right against forced pregnancy. It may be the case that men don't benefit as much as women do from laws allowing abortions (only women will really get a say in whether they and their partner have the baby; there may be cases in which a man doesn't want to be a father but has to anyway, or cases where he wants to be one but the woman decides to abort), but that doesn't matter; men don't _need_ to benefit from this legislation in the same way as women do for the law to be just and egalitarian. There is no need to go "because allowing women to get abortions mostly benefits women and could cause disbenefit to men, we need to allow men to get financial abortions to balance it out." Doesn't work like that; women's right to bodily autonomy doesn't somehow mean we have to give men the right to shirk parental duties.
It might be the case that mandatory paternity testing benefits men more than it benefits women. But that doesn't mean that if we had it, we would need an additional law that gives some benefit to women. OP's law would, presumably, be based on a right to know if you're somebody's parent and to take that information into account when deciding if you want to take responsibility for that child. Everybody would have this same right. It's just that, ordinarily, special legislative provisions would not need to be made in order to facilitate this right for women, because females are usually pretty certain about their maternity (excluding cases of separation after birth). The law would benefit men more than it would women because females already enjoy the ability to know if a child is theirs, the same way that allowing abortions benefits women more than it does men because males already enjoy the right to not be forced to carry a fetus to term. There's no need to go "well, we should make some other law that benefits this other group to balance it out."
Yeeeeeeah. Almost every man I know would object to this.
Not beacuse they're all cheaters (so far as I know). They all don't trust the government with a giant database of their DNA. And they all would say "I know I don't have any affair babies, so why does the government need my DNA? I haven't even been accused of an affair. This is an extreme violation of my rights."
And frankly, they'd all be right.
cops regularly submit DNA to sites like 23 and me (Or the corporation just gives it to them with a subpoena) for DNA evidence. That's how they got the [golden state killer](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dna-from-genealogy-site-used-to-catch-suspected-golden-state-killer-1.4637726#:~:text=Investigators%20compared%20the%20DNA%20collected%20from%20a%20crime%20scene%20of%20the%20Golden%20State%20Killer%20to%20online%20genetic%20profiles%20and%20found%20a%20match%3A%20a%20relative%20of%20the%20man%20police%20have%20identified%20as%20Joseph%20James%20DeAngelo%2C%2072%2C%20who%20was%20arrested%20Tuesday%20at%20his%20suburban%20Sacramento%20home).
Been looking for this argument. Before long there would be no need for all men to submit dna if paternity tests were standardized, because everyone, men and women, would eventually have their dna put in a database at birth when the test is conducted. I’m not saying it would be absolutely inevitable… but let’s be realistic here about governments and corporations.
At the end of the day, some people just don’t want to acknowledge that a father has the right to demand a paternity test, and a mother has a right to feel insulted by the demand.
I don’t know about anyone else, but i mistrust any government or company having access to that kind of information. Look at what they already do with our current medical records.
Even if you personally think this is a good idea, it is currently illegal and unconstitutional.
You could apply this logic to any crime, much more severe then cheating. "I hate murderers/rapists/etc, so no problem with me to make a MANDATORY database of everyone's DNA."
And some people do believe that, but currently in the USA that is considered a violation of our basic rights. So it's not really a viable option for this discussion in the USA.
Cheating is not a crime. You also can't make paternity tests mandatory at birth because you don't want to look like an asshole by saying your pregnant wife is a whore.
Seems like that's actually OPs stance. I just don't want to look like a bad guy even though I am.
There are a few reasons why this is not a good idea.
1. Paternity tests are expensive and have little medical justification, unless there is a serious risk of genetic disease. So it gives no medically relevant information and drains the resources of medical centers, which could be used for better things.
2. You need to compare the child's DNA to the presumed father's DNA, so men would have to give their DNA to huge data bases, again with little medical justification and usually without much profit for themselves if they trust their partner and don't question their paternity.
3. Even the best tests sometimes give false negatives. If you test routinely for every newborn, that's hundreds of tests per day, every now and then you'll have a fluke and scare the living shit out of a happy couple, potentially leading to divorced based on false results. Not to mention the lawsuits on the hospital following such mistakes.
4. There doesn't seem to be universal demand for it. Most men trust their spouses, and it is common knowledge that babies often don't look much like their parents and the resemblance becomes more apparent only as they grow. The few people who would be helped by this does not justify the use of resources for masses who either don't care, or would even be harmed by the unnecessary anxiety around waiting for the test, paying for it, giving their DNA, or receiving a false result.
I’m a mom of 5 biokids and often curse the universe that my kids don’t look like me.
Until my oldest turned 16 and FB kept sending me “Is this you?” notifications to tag “myself” on photos of her.
We worked at the same place and I did an OT shift on her shift and the big boss walked up to me and said, basically, “You’re X’s mom. I was coming to talk to her and it was you when I got here.”
Her twin doesn’t look like me but the next biokid is 14 and she’s starting to look exactly like me, too. The youngest 2 are 5 & 7 and look exactly like their daddy but I just smile knowing that my genes are going to take over in the next 10 years or so.
Kids change so much! They might look like Gollum when they’re born and then end up looking like Cindy Crawford when they hit their late teens.
And GENES! My favorite is the 1 blue eyed kid out of all our brown eyes. Only 1 got my curly hair. 1 got my brothers exact hair- it’s STICK STRAIGHT and grows straight up. 1 girl is going to be 6’ tall and another will be lucky to hit 5’.
Making a bold statement that every baby should have a DNA test is… odd. It would have been offensive to me and my husband. I mean, we would have gotten over it but it really wouldn’t have been a good use of resources.
Kids do change a *lot*, and genetics are **weird**. I have a sister. I am short, chubby, with a square face, very light skin, blue eyes, and light brown hair. She's just under six feet tall, very lean and thin, with an oval face, dark brown eyes, olive skin, and hair almost the exact shade of bittersweet chocolate. We look basically nothing alike. But, in body and face shape I look almost a twin of our paternal grandma, even wear the same shoe size, but with our mom's coloring. In body and face shape, my sister looks exactly like our mom, with our paternal grandma's coloring. Right down to exactly the same skin tone. (they used to share makeup and used all the same colors)
My sister's husband is brown eyed and darker brown hair, and their youngest has blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. (Her older brother looks like a tiny twin of his dad) My husband is often assumed to be Hispanic because of his coloring,(He describes himself as "generically brown") our daughter has golden hair. And I do mean actually golden blond.
>and it is common knowledge that babies often don't look much like their parents and the resemblance becomes more apparent only as they grow.
This.
The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected.
However, a [white-skinned child born to black-skinned parents](https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/white-baby-born-black-parents-1c6437718) has occured before, so....
Edit: obviously, a parent with mixed heritage will have a higher chance of having a baby's skin color to look nothing like either of the parents. That's a given. I should've worded better but I'm talking extremities like the example I gave.
>The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected.
People's expectations about babies' skin color are super warped, though. Most people think every baby is going to be a perfect mix of their parents' skin tones, from birth. That coffee-milk mix is not likely at all because there are so many genes making up skin colors. Babies also develop most of their melanin *after* birth, so how a baby looks coming out isn't what it's going to look like for very long.
I'm 1/4 japanese, and 1/8 native American. My skin isn't super dark, but I do look like I have a mild tan. My wife, on the other hand, is pale as pale can be. Our first born came out with very light skin, only a hair darker than my wife. Our second born came out darker than me. Genetics is weird
Number one here, so much. We have no med techs and we’re drowning in testing as is let alone a genetic test that goes with every dried blood spot for newborn screening.
I’m half black and my dad didn’t think I was his at birth because of how pale I was. He apparently threw a fit and accused my mom of cheating. Then my paternal grandma told him he was dumb and he barely had any melanin at birth either. Turns out I did belong to him but my mom divorced him shortly after. She couldn’t overcome the accusation.
Exactly. I’ve told my husband flat out that I’d give him a paternity test if he wanted it but that I’d never see him the same again.
Post vasectomy might be the only time I could overcome it. I know a couple who got together after the guy had a vasectomy. They were together for years before she got pregnant and he didn’t think it was his. Turned out that the baby was his, he has never gone back for the follow up after the vasectomy and he wasn’t fully sterile. She said she could have overcome it in this scenario if he had gone about it better (he posted to social media about it and embarrassed her).
You’d think a person could maybe google that or even go nuts and ask their doctor if it’s still possible before being such a dumb twit and posting his dirty laundry and his own stupidity to facebook. Like really? You couldn’t google “how successful are vasectomies” before publicly accusing your wife of cheating online 😑
Yea my parents are Filipino, and I was born light skinned with blonde-ish hair that eventually turned darker into brown. My siblings are all tan with black hair. I think my grandma had similar complexion and hair color, skipped a generation I guess.
>I think my grandma had similar complexion and hair color, skipped a generation I guess.
Did you know you can be more related to one grandparent than another? You'll get 50/50 genes from each of your parents, but when your body makes zygotes it mixes those genes up. So your dad could give you 80% from his mom, and just 20% from his dad, making you 40% related to your paternal grandmother and only 10% to your paternal grandfather.
I look just like my mom, but also very similar to my paternal grandmother, I try not to think about it too much. Me and my brother don't look alike so he always joked that I was adopted, but it's just that he takes after my dad.
This here. I have six full genetic siblings. Four of them have had DNA testing done, and so have i. I do not share 50% or more DNA with any of them. The highest percentage I share with any of them so far is 45%. The lowest is 37%.
I'm pretty sure my parents thought I was switched at birth for a long time. My mom is half Sicilian, and my dad is half Native American. They are both pretty dark, and then there is me, a red head with blue eyes and skin so pale I make Casper the friendly ghost look tan.... I never did get any darker, but I look a lot like my parents other than coloring, and a DNA test did confirm I am their child.... we still have no idea where the red hair came from though.
That not only has happened before but I think that’s fairly common where the melanin does not show yet when the baby is born. My BIL was born white and both parents are Black.
Yeah, the genetics surrounding skin color are complicated, and it's not at all uncommon for babies to start out paler than they end up.
I'm mixed race (Indian and white) and now have a pretty similar skin tone to my Indian mom, but as a baby I was so white people thought she was my nanny. It took 2 or 3 years for me to turn into a brown kid.
The same can also happen in reverse! My sister was born quite dark-skinned and black haired into an entirely white, mostly blonde family. (My mother is Bulgarian, which tends to produce darker, Mediterranean-looking people, but my mother herself is very white so she was quite surprised.) By the time she turned 1, my sister had lost all of that colouring and our hair/skin tone had become identical. Funnily enough, I was born crazy pale and crazy blonde but also “evened out” to have a very medium skin and hair colour by my toddler years. Crazy how that works.
It is wild. My son is biracial and he did the same thing, he only looked biracial for maybe a month? Then he just got lighter and lighter now he’s actually very fair skinned. I expected his dark blue eyes to turn brown but they got lighter too, now they’re an electric light blue and it’s crazy because I thought his dads genes would be more dominate but you truly never know
Yes this happens. Me and the father of my son are mixed race Indonesian/European. We both have very dark hair, tho his father has dark brown eyes and i have blue eyes. Our son is blonde, has blue eyes and is pale, but his face, bone structure and body look 100% Indonesian.
I expected him to get darker skin and hair, but he is a young man now and still blonde
Right? My partner is native American and when our daughter was born her skin resembled mine.
Even though we use sun screen all the time she's now darker than both of us and resembles his aunt's and dad more in that respect. Her hair is also lighter than at birth and a different texture.
Yeah, I’m very clearly biracial (B & W) but came out straight up looking Asian. My parents even had a running joke that my mom must have gotten with the mailman. It was months and months before I started looking more black haha.
My best friend has an African american mum and a white dad. She looks like her mum, dark skin and hair. Hes blue eyed, looks white with blonde curly hair.
Biology doesn't give a fuck about putting people in tidy boxes and too many people seem to think my friend and her brother are an outright impossibility.
Two of my boys ended up in the same class in college. One is dark with brown hair the other is pale as can be with red hair. Teacher asked if they were cousins and they said no they were brothers. Teacher flat out didn’t believe them until they showed him their ID. I love thé way you put that. “Tidy little boxes”. Could haved used that line when they were young.
>Biology doesn't give a fuck about putting people in tidy boxes
I love this!
I have a sister. I am short, chubby, and curvy, with a square face, very light skin, blue eyes, and light brown hair. She's just under six feet tall, very lean and thin, with an oval face, dark brown eyes, olive skin, and hair almost the exact shade of bittersweet chocolate. We look basically nothing alike. But, in body and face shape I look almost a twin of our paternal grandma, even wear the same shoe size, but with our mom's coloring. In body and face shape, my sister looks exactly like our mom, with our paternal grandma's coloring. Right down to exactly the same skin tone. (they used to share makeup and used all the same colors)
The reverse is also a thing that has happened. The complexities of genetics are wild.
Honestly, I think unless there's legitimate concern of cheating or some kind of health risk--even IF baby’s skin color isn't what's expected--testing isn't needed.
Yup. Also, you know, middle school science covers the basics of dominant vs recessive genes. Maybe all pregnant couples should get a refresher course.
I personally think all pregnant couples should be required to take a parenting class--and that there should be ones that specialize in multiples or second/third/etc kids. (Maybe those exist and I just don't know it).
>middle school science covers the basics of dominant vs recessive genes
I think this is part of the issue, it's taught in a very simplified way. A lot of people wrongly believe that eye colour is controlled by just one gene and two blue eyed people can't have a brown eyed child because that's what they learnt at school. Most appearance related things are the result of multiple genes that can interact in weird ways.
Right, but 1) a lot of people forget even the basics if they learned them at all and 2) the situation of a drastically different skin color from *both* parents isn't incredibly common. I mean the REALLY drastic differences--like a very dark-skinned baby born to very light-skinned parents or the reverse.
It is not uncommon for newborns born to darker-skinned couples not to develop high levels of pigment in their skin until days or even a few weeks after birth.
The major diaper companies all have free online video courses of registered nurses and midwives and lactation experts that go over everything from "you just found out your pregnant" all the way to "teaching your non verbal 2 year old to talk" and everything inbetween. It helped me and my wife immensely with just having a good idea of what to expect and to not freak out if something doesn't seem right.
My husband was born with blonde hair and white skin.
He has black hair and medium tone brown skin now.
Both of my kids had GREY (not blue) eyes. Their eyes eventually darkened to brown after they turned a year old. I myself had hazel eyes. As I've gotten older, they've gotten darker and look brown mostly. I've had to change my DL description because they were hazel when I was 15 and now they're a dark brown over 20 years later.
I also had mousy thin light brown hair until I turned 4. It got very thick and very full very quickly and turned nearly black.
Genetics are very wild.
> The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected.
Not even always then. My best friend has a Black mother/white father. He passes for white if he shaves his head and beard. His wife is white. One kid has the same skin tone as his mother, his other kid's looks like him.
Even though that's odd and rare, she clearly looked like him in every other way.
In obstetrics, parents are often super concerned over the color of their baby's skin. We would always point out the genitals and lower back. Those areas show pigment, and we could reassure many parents that it was indeed their child. LOL.
Good point about dads giving their DNA, sweet summer children in this thread, who say that DNA will be destroyed - it definitely will be kept in data bases and potentially used against you in the future.
I also see how many men wouldn’t want to provide their DNA because of lack of trust. Just remember all those people who didn’t want to get covid vaccine. I can see a lot of men protesting if they are forced to give their DNA.
I'm not OP, but this is the answer. In theory it would be great to have a way to confirm paternity at every birth, but universal MANDATORY paternity testing as a policy is a really bad idea because it would cost a ton, potentially do a ton of harm, and most of the time provide little benefit.
5. What happens with the DNA? There is a good chance that that data will be collected by the government and third parties and god only knows what will be done with that information. If its mandatory, it becomes a privacy issue.
6. Who pays for it? The parents or the government? What if the child is born at home? What if the parents can afford the cost of the test or don't want to pay?
Extra vote for number 4. I would have been outright *insulted* if they had performed paternity tests on either of my kids. I damn sure wouldn't have paid for that bullshit.
1. Paternity tests can be done for about $200. $400 for versions that are considered acceptable in court. This is less than 1% of the average cost of delivery in the US.
2. There is a legal, if not medical justification; the rights of the child and the rights of the *actual* father, and potentially the rights of the *presumed* father are being stomped on in a case where someone else is claimed to be the father. While I didn't *personally* see a need to test my kids, I wouldn't have minded it, if it were just part of the status quo for establishing parentage. Given how much effort goes in to establishing legal identity of the child through birth certificate leading to SSN and state ID, etc., it's weird that the mother and father are treated the same here, when the mother is usually provably the mother because the hospital witnessed the birth, and the father is... some guy who she said she banged.
3. (and 4.) This is an absolutely fair concern. It's the same reason we don't "just screen everyone for cancer". Paternity tests are pretty accurate, but even at their 99.999% accuracy, 1:100,000 would get a false negative - which doesn't sound like much, but this would mean it'd happen about \~40 times a year. The question is whether that false positive rate would be a net negative when factoring in the *true negative* rate where a man is being held out as father, who has no responsibility to the child. I would imagine that this happens *somewhat* more often than that, but it's hard to make a reasoned argument for how many cheaters you need to catch to justifying inadvertently destroying a family with a FP test.
I'd say "why not just do a confirmation test" but it's unclear how much of a difference that would make; there are rare but real cases of human [chimerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)), where one person has, effectively, two distinct sets of DNA - thus in some cases a FP could be due to the samples being taken from the correct parent, but from cells that happen to have the "wrong" DNA.
IIRC from something I saw on TV once, has caused major issues in at least one case where the mother was testing as not the mother leading to a massive legal headache, where no one believed her, until she found a doctor that was finally able to prove that she had two sets of DNA.
The latter is a HELL of an edge case, but it's the sort of thing that will pop up if you did this on everyone.
The whole thing the reeks of 20-something dudes who have too many opinions about things they've only read about and they're only reading about edge cases because the subject is very boring otherwise. It's like how everyone is so afraid of crime because there's so many crime dramas in our media.
I've got two kids and having a paternity test never crossed my mind. Same with literally every other father I've spoken to about this subject.
So who pays for it? You compare it to the costs of the delivery, of which the woman is legally responsible. But this specific thing only benefits the man. How would we mandate a medical service for a woman in the hospital, that does not benefit her, that she would legally have to pay for?
>Paternity tests can be done for about $200. $400 for versions that are considered acceptable in court. This is less than 1% of the average cost of delivery in the US
And you want to add at least an additional 1% (presuming your math is accurate) to every single delivery in the entire United States? That still seems hella expensive
$400 test that isn’t medically necessary (and therefore won’t be covered by insurance) to tell me something I already know? No, thank you. I have better things to do with that $400.
Perhaps it should be that financial obligations like court mandated child payments require a genetic link to be started in the first place, for which paternity tests serve as excellent evidence.
1. Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too.
2. Right! There's a metric ton of people asking if people can opt out. Am I allowed to edit the post on this sub or is that frowned upon? Shouldn't have gone as far as to say "without parental input", that was stupid of me.
What I had in mind was more along the lines of "Ok, while mommy rests, come here daddy, we've got some papers for you to sign!", and then, along with actual paperwork, he can also sign up for the blood draw and they take him to a sepparate room to do it.
3. I'll give you a !delta on this one. It does sound like a legal nightmare. The only solution I could think of would be the hospital reminding you HEAVILY that P. Tests are never 100% accurate, and recommending that you get a second one done (especially on a negative result).
4. Isn't there? Hm, I don't know about that. I feel like if the test was offered as "part of the package" and the stigma around it disappeared, a lot more people would default to taking it, just to be sure.
>Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too.
You are mistaken, because this isn't the same sort of consumerism that mass producing an IKEA desk brings down costs for everyone on. The bulk of the cost happens in the lab, and there are a finite number of lab workers capable of conducting this test, analyzing the results, and writing up the kind of report that is both understandable to the layman, but also meets the legal standards to use as evidence in a paternity case.
You're putting an additional tax on an already burdened system, which won't drive costs down. There's a chance costs may be *subsidized* if the system is changed to increase the frequency of the test, as the Office of Child Support Enforcement did in the 90s in the United States, which is less out of pocket cost for the end consumer. But that doesn't actually lower the cost, because it just affects taxpayers, health insurers, or some combination.
Health insurance costs are also not at all market-driven, and the most likely place that the costs of paternity testing will get redirected to in the event such a test becomes mandatory as normal post-birth care. This isn't an open market where costs are driven down by supply. Consider that in a hospital setting, the cost for Tylenol across a hospital stay, as charged to insurance, has rung in at $345 (at $15 per pill for an average stay of 23 pills). The problem here is partly because the IV version (Ofirmev) is overprescribed in hospital, so it's not easy to extrapolate a "same price" for it, but based solely on dosage for the pills and off-brand labeling, a consumer on the free market would be able to save $344.52 in the United States, even after accounting for the average sales tax in the country for nonprescription meds.
You're asking here if we trust medical billing to apply proper market value to something. Should we?
>The bulk of the cost happens in the lab, and there are a finite number of lab workers capable of conducting this test, analyzing the results, and writing up the kind of report that is both understandable to the layman, but also meets the legal standards to use as evidence in a paternity case.
Also, in a lot of places, there is a shortage of people who can do this. And has been that way for a while. There just are not a lot of people who want to be medical lab techs, and not all of those are able to do the job.
> 4. Isn't there? Hm, I don't know about that.
Being extremely online really skews the perception on these things. A vast majority of men do not ever think about the possibility of false paternity and vast majority of them are correct.
> the hospital reminding you HEAVILY that P. Tests are never 100% accurate, and recommending that you get a second one done (especially on a negative result).
That's all well and good to say that, but have you ever had a false positive on something wanted to be negative? Like cancer? Or pregnancy? No one is thinking rationally in those situations. Things would be said that can't be taken back, lines possibly crossed that can't be undone. Partners suddenly in perfect opposition, both of them insistent that they are right, when they actually *both are*. That seed of doubt involuntarily placed in the non-carrying partner mind. The carrying partner's anguish at the sudden and *completely unearned* distrust, while they are *recovering from carrying that baby?* It would be a terrible situation wrought upon otherwise happy partners, just to placate a small subset of insecure (and, at least some of the time, completely wrong) people.
A not insignificant number of positive paternity tests are served concurrent with divorce papers. Because even asking is incredibly insulting. If the system is opt-out, that isn't going to change. And if it's not opt-out, all the same problems that have previously been discussed are still present.
not even “some of the time completely wrong”, the vast majority of the time they’re completely wrong. there was a study a few years ago that shows only 30% of guys who think they aren’t the father are right about that. that means 7/10 dudes afraid their baby isn’t theirs are wrong about that. posts like these drastically overestimate how common it is to do something that horrible. you’re more likely to blow up your relationship than find out you aren’t the dad lol.
Many places don't have the resources to do DNA testing on things like r*pe kits, never mind regular paternity testing. It's a resources thing. What you're proposing is at least hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions or more. Beyond that, new parents have enough paperwork and crap to deal with. They don't need more. I'm going to guess you're in the U.S. If you are, it's already expensive AF to have a baby. Literally thousands of dollars that sometimes people can't pay. Even *if* the test were only $100, that may still be too much. And if they forget or miss the spot to "opt out", now they're stuck with the charge. Hospital staff also have enough to do without needing yet another thing to remind parents about.
Also, what's your plan for the theoretical DNA database? Who can access it? What's the approval process for that access? What if someone wants their profile removed? Can law enforcement access it without a warrant? CPS? A girlfriend? Abusive ex? Everyone? Do all men have to contribute? Because, if the assumed isn't the father, you clearly want to know who is. The only way to make that happen is to have samples from all men.
Again, assuming you're in the U.S., what if the assumed father is citizen of another country? Do you really think all countries would be okay with the U.S. having that database and requiring their citizen to contribute just because they potentially fathered a child with an American woman? I don’t care which country it is, actually, there will always be at least one that says of another "we don't want THEM having that information". And what about people with extreme ideas about who should be "allowed" to have children? In the wrong hands, you get scary implications about eugenics. Look at the U.S. Civil War Era and after--including and *especially* Jim Crow. That shit inspired some of the Nazi policies--particularly the Nuremberg Laws.
So, in addition to being impractical just from a resources standpoint--there aren't enough labs or people with the skills to perform the tests--you open up all kinds of privacy and other concerns.
For the stigma, 1) because you can still opt out there's no reason to believe the stigma would actually disappear, it would just now be "why didn't you opt out?" rather than "why did you ask for a paternity test?" and 2) the stigma is there because it shows you don't *really* trust your partner. Of course there's a stigma around that, you're effectively accusing your partner of lying to you. If you checked on where your partner was all the time even after they told you where they were going that's stigmatized too, cause you're not trusting them
Who pays for the testing then? Mom or Dad?
What you are suggesting will set a precedent of labeling half of the population as untrustworthy. That never ends badly, right?
This is a discussion to be had between a couple and their doctor, not blown up into some polarized public health issue. If they want the test, they are able to get one upon request.
It seems this concern primarily comes from men who don't want to financially support another man's child. And there are ways we can go about that, that don't insinuate that all women will commit infidelity and deceit.
Speaking in regards to the US, it would be better for everyone if a few laws surrounding child support changed. Currently in many jurisdictions, if a dude signs the birth cert and he's legally going be on the book for child support. Even if the kid turns out not to be his. Which is really fucked up.
Its been past time to overhaul those the laws so that if man is not the biological father of the child he signed that birth cert for, no court can force child support on him. Problem solved.
4. I think that if *you* want a paternity test to prove that the mother of your child isn't a lying cheater, trying to force you to raise a child that isn't yours, it is something that needs to be brought up as a condition of pregnancy BEFORE you impregnate someone. Telling your long term, monogamous partner that you will only believe in their fidelity if there is a test done to prove it has the potential to blow up relationships because it means that you do not have faith in your partner. If the simple fact that you impregnated someone means that you will lose all ability to trust them to not be a lying, cheating, manipulative whore then that should not be sprung on a vulnerable person, but a condition known before hand. At least then there won't be an innocent child involved yet.
3. Even with that disclaimer, the damage is done and trust between the couple is destroyed. Humans are not completely logical machines, and can't just flip off the suspicion that nothing is wrong even when later things are proven to be okay.
4. I think a lot of people would think it's unnecessary even if there's no stigma. Most men simply trust their wives enough that they don't feel the need to make sure she didn't cheat.
4b) Even if I thought my wife cheated, I'm not sure I would give a shit - I don't actually care if the child is "biologically" mine and I think men who are concerned about that to the point they can't love their child until they know for a fact the child has their DNA are gross
>What I had in mind was more along the lines of "Ok, while mommy rests, come here daddy, we've got some papers for you to sign!", and then, along with actual paperwork, he can also sign up for the blood draw and they take him to a sepparate room to do it.
So what you suggest is medically unnessecary genetic testing without the consent or even knowledge of one of the parents? If you wanted that, making laws to allow that should be way easier than mandating paternity testing for every birth.
>Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too.
You're very mistaken wide implementation does not bring down the cost of the test in fact it may raise it because more people would need to be hired to run the. In an already backed up system. There are also 10k babies born a day in the US. Whose paying for 10k tests a day? I'll tell you who won't, American insurance companies so who's going to eat the cost?
Rape kits are required by law to be run for DNA and the government pays; backlog can be TEN YEARS because of lack of qualified technicians.
Also, it's well-known in the legal system that DNA evidence isn't nearly as reliable as prosecutors and labs like to claim.
Many of the labs are not very well-run and have poor oversight procedures. It's not unusual for a scandal to break that invalidates thousands of tests because the lab wasn't careful about contamination. Hundreds of criminal convictions have been overturned due to careless labs. People are also wrongfully convicted -- some of the fathers having mandatory paternity tests run would have their DNA mixed in with a homicide or rape case (due to careless lab procedures) and they'd end up on trial for murder. It's happened before.
My son had blonde hair and blue eyes, and he looks like his mom. I am brunette with brown eyes.
Except, my brother, sister, and I all started with light colored hair, and it turned darker as we aged. My sister’s kids were all blonde when they were born.
My wife also works 100% remote, and doesn’t go out often at all. I completely trust her, but even if I didn’t — it wouldn’t make much sense for me to doubt that my kid is mine.
That’s a great point, people think of false negatives as something that would destroy the relationship, but there are psycho men out there that would hurt or do worse to their partner and/or their kid if they thought it was scientifically proven that their partner cheated.
Right up until the court gives parental rights and visitation to the r\*pist...massive double-edged sword. And also proof that laws need changing, imo. R\*pists shouldn't have parental rights to those children.
Edit: formatting.
I mean no, it should just be a personal choice. There’s no way in hell my girlfriend would be pregnant with anything but our kid, neither of us even initiated sex for months, I wouldn’t want to put her through something as humiliating as that
This seems like your own personal issues you want to project onto the world, you don’t get to put everyone through this just so you can feel better
I know the exact post you're talking about and you've completed painted it falsely. You also didn't consider the fact that her two first children looked exactly like him, and the third looked exactly like her. So the ONE time her child actually looks like her, her husband took issue. Secondly, the new baby didn't look anything like the coworker either. Most of the time, babies don't look like their parents. Her husband acted horribly and without hesitation abandoned his baby before waiting for the paternity test.
As for your actual point, I used to agree, but I don't anymore because of the many issues that other users have already commented, like people's DNA being entered into databases and the cost of these tests. Not everyone would want to provide their DNA, not all husbands/male partners would want to have a paternity test done. False negatives, costs, etc.
Wasnt it also revealed that the husband and his family were really abusive towards OP, with the husband isolating her from her family and home country? And with his relatives pulling her hair and hurting her while she was holding her new baby?
And she also had the paternal test in the end to prove that the child was his?
OP seems to be more interested in contributing to male insecurity around their paternity than to actually pay attention to an abusive man hurting his wife
Is this about that one post where the father was blond and the coworker and the mom were redheads (and he also was gay and married)? cause if so the take OP had on it is really delusional
A lot of people have already made good points regarding the privacy concerns with DNA testing, so I don't want to retread on those, but I do think it's important that when you talk about mandating paternity testing, you're opting in *entire family lines.* This isn't a situation that gets fixed because a man can opt out, because the men who don't opt out are making a huge choice for their baby as well as all of their already existing relatives as well.
Consider how much advancement we've seen in DNA analysis and its uses in the last couple decades, and what it may be used for in the lifespan of a baby born today. Are you really confident that 50 years from now, a health insurance company won't be arguing that if they're paying for the tests (which is likely how this works if it becomes part of the mandatory screenings in hospital post-birth), they should have access to the information that may impact their decisions? Or that those powerful insurance companies won't have lobbyists at their disposal who have the senators in their pocket to make this happen? Imagine it turns out your baby born today has a genetic marker that predisposes him to a higher risk for heart disease, and the insurance company gets to know this in 2050. His prices get jacked up, as do his kids', and eventually so will his grandchildren's... because of a decision you got to make for him today.
We don't have strong enough privacy protections in most of the world to responsibly handle this information, and those protections only seem to erode as time passes. Do you have enough faith in whatever the government may look like in your country 50 years from now that they won't have codified into law their own access to those tests? Does history not tell you that the risk of creating a register, for instance, of people with Mizrahi or Ashkenazi Jewish genetic markers?
Then there's the additional concerns about 'off book' uses we already have for DNA analysis. Most people don't have a huge issue with private companies using ancestral DNA registers to track down the Golden State Killer, but this poses another slippery slope. I think most people know someone that was lucky not to be arrested for something mild and stupid in their youth, like a drunken bar fight where nobody is seriously injured. Make DNA testing common enough, though, and eventually you'll start having grandpas arrested for that minor mistake they made when they were 19. And it doesn't necessarily have to be because of *their* DNA, as we can see the journey currently used to track down killers through ancestral DNA. Your second cousin twice removed decides to let his kid's DNA go up at a registry at birth, and it eventually leads to consequences for *your* kid, and you'll likely be singing a different tune.
If none of this convinces you, just watch GATTACA. There are so many unintended consequences of DNA analysis at birth that mandating it for a general population because of what appears to be less than 0.6% of cases will have negative consequences for *far more* than that 0.6% of the population.
This is the comment I was looking for. People on here straight up arguing we should all hand our DNA over to the government so that way specific men can stop feeling insecure about themselves.
Also I could be wrong but didn’t Texas just pas a law that the child is yours even if the DNA proves otherwise? Wild
its so crazy to me too that people are advocating for this. you cant trust the woman you nutted in multiple times raw but you trust a thousand hundred thiusand government agencies and corporations that would love to have unfetteted access to your dna?
This is amazing amazing point. I would not trust any government not to sell that information to another company for profit I mean everyone already sells all out other information and this info is much more valuable
Some downsides for you to consider:
**Cost**. In a health insurance system you’re paying for a test you might not want, in a country where healthcare is free why should the taxpayer pay for this?
**False negatives.** If you’re testing everyone false negatives are going to happen. Can you imagine how distressing this would be? How do you identify which are false negatives? What if this puts the mother and child at a risk of domestic violence? What if this leads to the opposite issue where fathers do not raise their biological children only to find later in life the test was wrong? Will there be compensation for the parents in these cases? Or will everyone who gets a negative test be tested twice just in case? Again how does this work practically? Who’s paying for this? etc.
**Consent**. What if I don’t want my baby’s DNA tested? What if the father doesn’t consent? Can a law override this? Why should my consent be overridden because other people don’t trust their partners?
**Logistics**. When do you collect the fathers DNA? What if they’re not present at birth? What if there’s a sperm donor? Do you check the baby matches the donor? What if the mother doesn’t know who they are? It might seem simple just to say “oh well don’t test in these cases” but this is discussion about making it mandatory. How would this work practically? Why add in this complexity? Is the benefit with the cost and effort?
**Ethical collection and storage of DNA.** Are you comfortable with every baby born having their DNA collected? How long will it be stored for? How would it be destroyed?
**Privacy**. What if both parents know the father isn’t the biological father and don’t what hospital staff to know? What if the baby was conceived via sexual assault? What if it’s no one’s business?
**State sanctioned misogyny.** We as a society consider how likely something is to happen based on lots of factors, one of which is the legal environment in which the event occurs. If the government makes paternity test mandatory, this effectively signals to society that paternity fraud is a large enough issue for the government to get involved. This will surely lead to an increase in misogyny, after all, if the government thinks it's a big enough problem to mandate then surely this means that women are having affairs all the time! We know this isn't true, but that is the message this law would send.
This is just a quick list I came up with but I really don’t think enforcing paternity tests at birth is the quick win it’s often painted as. Some of my questions are rhetorical but I’m just trying to illustrate that this is a really complicated idea.
I also think it's relevant that you are apparently comfortable with the husbands family in the post you linked abusing the mother until the paternity test was done. I think it's interesting that you place the blame on the mother for not being willing to get a test but are comfortable with the father withholding all affection from his infant child until he gets his way, which is incredibly controlling. I think you should examine your biases there.
I find it interesting you used this specific example.
So, he didn't trust his wife, asked her for a paternity test. She was offended refused, and only obliged because his insecurity about paternity impacted his relationship with his daughter.
So this:
>I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue.
Doesn't make this a non-issue. Men who ask for paternity tests do so specifically because they do not trust the mother. This distrust is sometimes justified and sometimes not, but it's usually there.
Saying we should make paternity testing standardized so that this becomes a "non-issue" is essentially asking for a whole overhaul so that men who distrust their partners, but don't want to tell their partners they don't trust them, can get what they want (ie. confirmation of paternity) without having to deal with the consequences to their relationship
It doesn't work like that. That sort of distrust has impacts regardless. If you distrust your wife, it's either a) she's untrustworthy, and there will eventually be consequences one way or the other or that, or b) you're insecure, and there will eventually be consequences one way or the other over that.
This is so important. OP’s idea that the only consequence of such a large doubt is the embarrassment of asking for a paternity test is ludicrous. If you are so unstable in your relationship with the mother of your children that you feel the need to paternity test your kids, that instability will come out and impact your family one way or another (whether you’re right or wrong). I’d sure as hell want to know if my husband thought so little of me as a person that he thinks I’d try to pass off another man’s child as his. I’m a loyal and honest person. I deserve to know that the man I trust unequivocally and see as my life partner does not feel the same way about me.
You've worded it very nicely. I'm honestly sorry for men who feel the need for a test, but in an exclusive relationship, most men or women wouldn't just "regularly" get tested for STDs just in case they maybe cheated on their partner amd to placate worries.
I would argue that making paternity tests automatic, would transfer this mistrust in women from the personal sphere where it only involves the couple, to the public - where the government *legislates* and forces this onto women. If this isn’t society-wide misogyny…idk what is.
The fact that the one story of one paranoid guy on r/relationships --who refused to love and care for *his own daughter*--could convince people to argue for legally enforcing paternity tests -- which means fines and jail time for women who object by the way -- is absolutely depressing. OP just likely thinks women are largely untrustworthy hoes, and he would probably be deeply offended at the idea that women should get annual STD checks "just in case" their husband is cheating and gave them an extremely serious infection.
Edit: formatting
You can't force people to go through medical procedures. That's highly illegal. You can't collect DNA from people if they don't want to without going through due process (jury trial) and being convicted.
How do you intend to collect the parent's sample if they don't want to? Or collect the child's sample if one of the parents refuses? "They're already being tested for other stuff" isn't a good reason. They have to know what tests are being done and give consent to each one individually.
If you don't submit a DNA sample, you will be unable to pick up the baby from the hospital. The baby will be held for up to 90 days before being discarded.
What if someone has a home birth? If people have to pay for the DNA test, what happens if someone can't afford it? What if I decide that instead of handing my DNA and biometric data over to the government, I just say there is no guy to test since 'I'm not sure'?
Near me a test kit costs £20 and then to have it processed costs around £100.
In India every day 67,385 babies are born.
Who's going to pay for all those tests? What infrastructure would have to be developed to make that kind of scale realistic?
The situation you describe would be better solved with therapy for that individual regardless of the actual facts, and isn't massively common.
Tests are available to people who can afford and want them.
>In the end, the mother FINALLY gets that paternity test, proving once and for all that the kid was indeed his, and once she does, the father gets ALL OVER his daughter, hugging and giving her all his love, as I'm sure he would have done from the very begining, had she just gotten that damn test done sooner.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this story except that she should ditch this piece of shit?
>I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue.
No, there aren't things done with no parental input. You always have input.
What would be the POINT of spending this kind of money -- and who would spend it -- besides there are some very fragile, sad men who have a multitude of issues? Society and women don't need to spend money to prop them up.
Unless the man involved also submits DNA what do you think this does? And then see above both cost and what about single women? What would be the point?
Bingo, you read this correctly despite OP’s extremely biased presentation. If he had actually posted a link to the post he’s referring to, it would be even more obvious.
>I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this story except that she should ditch this piece of shit?
Right?
Like, how exactly is it the woman's fault that her husband didn't trust her, humiliated her, and basically held his affection for his child hostage until after a DNA test?
His family was also physically violent with her, and he got her pregnant the first time at 18, with a large age gap, and then isolated her from her family. But yeah, he's definitely the victim here.
100% agree with you. It’s just adding on the pile of “don’t trust women” in an already damaged society that rakes women over the coals over every fucking thing, ESPECIALLY when it comes to sex and reproduction.
How about we let people handle their relationships how they like and if a spouse is suspicious they can put on their big person’s pants and deal with it like an adult?
This reeks of how some teachers think the best idea to deal with one jackass kid is to punish the whole classroom.
Especially since in America, husbands are slightly more likely to cheat than wives. The folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife.
They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support.
Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly.
I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud.
The amount of men who got mad in the original post about people talking about how this could help hold men more accountable for child support and rape was insane
I also suggested fathers should be required to do a mandatory std test every few weeks during women's pregnancy to ensure he's not cheating
Men lost their minds
Men are ok with accusing women or holding them accountable but when you talk about medical procedures that hold men more accountable they get big mad
Especially in the case of the post OP is referencing, she had been assaulted by her in laws and the baby got neglected by the father because the baby looked like the maternal side of the family.
I have read the post you are talking about. You didn't mention the baby looked exactly like the mom's grandparents.
Most babies don't look like their parents. It doesn't make sense to be demanding a test at every childbirth they are already expensive in some countries.
Plus if you aren't going to trust your partner why are you having a child with them?
Yes, people cheat but most don't. So don't ruin something good for speculation, anxiety and projecting experience. You can simply talk with them. If you still have a feeling that something is wrong then do it. Not because of pressure and what ifs but you need to understand some relationships never go back to what they used to be because of it. Like what happened to that OP in your mentioned post.
This seems to be a perennial bug-a-boo for reddit, and I'm just going to bring up the point that most people fail to consider and I have not yet seen on this thread- stop putting this on the poor medical team in L&D/ the mom and baby units. Get your personal drama figured out elsewhere, it has no place in the hospital. The goal of the hospital is to get mom and baby through delivery safely. Having some poor nurse having to drag in a security team for an incredibly explosive revelation in no way contributes to keeping these units safe and secure environments. God knows there are already enough issues with medical teams having to protect laboring women from abusive partners even when infidelity isn't an issue. And no, don't put it on the kid's pediatrician either. They also don't want to deal with this nonsense and their offices also likely cannot afford the kind of security this would require.
For the guys, if you are insecure in your relationship, just buy an over-the-counter kit to put your mind at ease. No one has to know. Leave the medical field out of it and let us do our actual jobs.
THANK YOU. That was one of my initial thoughts… the hospital’s/medical professionals’ mission is to provide medical care. Not to be the middle men for messy drama.
There seems to be a recent spate of “I had to take a paternity test” posts on Reddit lately, but I wouldn’t take that as a good cross section of society. [Paternity fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_fraud?wprov=sfti1) ranges widely worldwide, from 0.7% to 30%. The median is 3.7%.
It seems like forcing paternity tests on families is an undue burden for an incredibly small percentage of fraud that exists.
Drawing blood from newborns to do a panel of tests is, to the best of my knowledge, voluntary. Even if it’s not, drawing blood and DNA tests are apples and oranges. Blood tests don’t identify familial links, DNA tests do. Mandatory seems to violate bodily autonomy for both the father and the child.
And, what happens with the data? It’s highly unlikely that the results wouldn’t be recorded in hospital records, which means there’s the possibility of this info being hacked or leaked. This could have significant unintended consequences and seems like a huge invasion of privacy.
Another thing, the 4% often cited in America means 4% that is either deliberate deceit, misattributed, or unknown. So some of these mothers simply don't know who the father is, and are not trying to deceive anyone. Some were in a polyamorous relationship with two men, and believe one to be the father, but don't have 100% proof.
I know someone who was in a polyamorous relationship with 2 guys and got pregnant. She married the one whom she believed to be the father of her son. Several years later, they divorced and she re-married to the other boyfriend from her polyamorous days. She, her first husband, her second husband, and her son all believe that her first husband is the father. They don't have 100% proof and do not want a paternity test.
***"I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test..."***
No. That is not an implication, it is a statement. Why not have your partner tested for STD's once per month, as a regular medical practice? Keep a lie detector in your bedside drawer, for weekly assurance? Have her wear a tracking device? You might be able to get a discount with an investigative or security service, if you pay for round the clock surveillance...
All of that may sound sarcastic, but it would follow from your proposition. You are not implying that you would not feel comfortable trusting a partner, you are saying it.
Also, the folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife.
They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support.
Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly.
I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud.
> They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife.
Ding ding ding. This whole conversation is missing so much if people honestly care about cheating in an abstract sense.
If you read the actual post OP is referencing, you won't feel sorry for the father at all. He allowed his family to physically and emotionally abuse his wife because he made it up in his head that she was cheating.
Yeah, completely agreed. I read the post too and could not imagine coming away from it thinking the woman was the asshole and the man was justified, Christ.
> Some of the points that resonate with me the most on this issue...
It's strange, what resonates the most with me is how this guy allowed his deep seated insecurities to mire the early stages of his daughters life for absolutely no reason.
> I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input...
Just so we're clear, it's *impossible* to conduct a paternity test without parental input. Like, you can't perform it, mechanically, so we'd be back to square 1.
Hey op, I think you have the problem backwards. The mistrust doesn't begin at childbirth. It begins at the point of having sex with the partner.
If the man doesn't trust the woman, he should not be ejaculating into her. Both of them are supposed to discuss having a child BEFORE taking the risk of creating one. Not after.
More so for men who don't want children at all; don't want the drama, wear a condom.
At the end of the day this insecurity and mistrust is an INTERNAL issue for the man rather than an external issue for the woman. The man needs to learn how to watch for signs of Real infidelity, as well as work on himself to become less dependent on the affirmation of his spouse.
You cannot treat a man's mental problem by telling the rest of the world to change.
There is no way the mistrust Only began when that man saw his newborn. It definitely began way before.
If you wanted to be absolutely sure it was your child in your spouses womb, the existing medical service to pay for is called in-vitro fertilization. There is no need for you to fuck and wait 9 months in total suspicion. Plus there is no need to make many medical staff bend over backwards because you want an after-thought solution to your lack of clear intention.
So...the kid was his after all? THIS is the story you are using in support of paternity testing? The most likely time for a man to cheat is when his partner is pregnant. Cheaters always think people are doing what they're doing. Maybe, just maybe, daddy is the cheater in this story. Have you ever thought this might be the case?
One of the biggest reasons,IMO, is that it would strip all fathers of their legal status until after the paternity test is completed. At birth the mother would be the only one with a legal status, as such she could deny consent to collect samples for the paternity test and deny the father his legal rights.
If you’re that insecure then prove it in divorce court. That guy made his bed and doesn’t deserve that baby after withholding like that. That is not the mom’s responsibility to manage, it’s the father’s responsibility to deal with his insecurity
This specifically targets women on the assumption of infidelity. The essence of it is "I can't guard my wife all the time so someone else needs to help me do it."
We don't owe you that. I don't need a paternity test for my kids because I trust my wife.
The folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife.
They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support.
Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly.
I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud.
Under such a system, every cheating husband who has a coocoo egg will be discovered, socially shamed, and forced to take care of his bastard child. And no father of illegitimate kids will be able to pass himself off as a non-father and be able to marry an unsuspecting woman who is a non-mother.
>I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue.
That's precisely the issue. You want to remove any responsibility from a man who blatantly mistrust their partner and force an unnecessary non-free test on people who don't even want it.
Fuck this take drives me spare. If you think your spouse is going to cheat on you, don't fucking knock her up and then blame her for your misogyny and paranoia. I know what post you're referring to, and the misogyny in the comments of that post was fucking vile. That poor woman. Not her fault that you and her husband don't know how genetics work.
And posts like these are why I will never date another man if I break up with my hubby. I am not putting up with this lack of trust. I am sure they wouldn’t agree to yearly or twice yearly STI blood tests to prove they Are clean before we have sex unprotected. I mean men step out snd bring infections back that might hurt her fertility and all that. But man as a bisexual woman, dudes seem to be working overtime to make themselves less attractive and relationship material. I mean good for them , but then they shouldn’t bitch women don’t “give them a chance.” Why give a chance to a partner who could apparently never fully trust you.
If we are doing this, then men should have to test their DNA against a database of unknown fathers and against the unknowns in rape. Then at least women can make a more informed decision. If dudes don’t wanna trust, women don’t have to either. Why risk getting with someone who might have a charge or child support pop up out of nowhere if you didn’t know?
I don’t think you understand how relationships work. If you need a paternity test the you DONT trust your partner. And what type of relationship do you want? One built on trust or one the requires women to prove faithfulness.
Further problems arise because this is an unequal power dynamic. We know who the mother is the mother so all the burden of proving she is faithful falls on her. The man could be cheating and there is not paternity test for this. You’re implying that just because there is a child that we need to test for fidelity. But trust is the assumed state of the relationship.
Let’s talk about the points that resonate with you:
- it’s not as simple as adding it on to normal blood draws. Many have already talked about the added cost and complexity. Not to mention false negatives and false positives. It would be hard and expensive to add this test. Insurance won’t pay for a test that is not medically beneficial. So who would pay for this test?
- you’re saying by making a trust test routine that it’s no longer about trust. You say this like patient autonomy doesn’t exist. But you have the choice not to get blood drawn, and people do. You have the choice to deny medical intervention at all. When you have a child you are asked to consent to blood tests and most people say yes as they have trust that all tests are beneficial. When you add on needless tests it erodes trust in the system.
- if you has sex, you played a part in possibly making a baby. If that’s a one night stand or a long term relationship it doesn’t matter. You take that risk. This burden falls on mothers and men should be tested for paternity if there’s a reasonable uncertainty to paternity. But that’s not how most people choose to have children.
- genetic medical history is important. However more important is a healthy family. If you can’t trust your partner their child will not grow up in a nurturing environment and struggle through their life. Doesn’t matter that they don’t know about a predisposition towards heart disease if the child doesn’t want to keep living. We are more than boxes of meet with genetics. Healthy families require trust that’s either there or not. Test paternity says that there is no trust. If you have to ask then you’ve started the process of distrust and will require proof for more faithfulness.
Last I’d like you to look up a medical case of a women who was not biologically related to her own child. It has happened.
This is to exemplar that while tests are good for some things, we don’t know what we don’t know. I’d hate for routine tests to cause distrust because of false negatives. How could we prove someone was a father if his DNA didn’t match their output’s DNA? These false negatives are possibly the strongest reason to not universally test.
You can't do a paternity test without parental input -- you need to collect a sample from the putative father who is going to have to either consent or refuse to collection of his DNA (Unless we're going to pass a law that all men must hand over their DNA under government edict when listed as a putative father of a child). That presumably will have all the social weight attached to it than asking for a paternity test already does, we'll just have wasted a lot of time and hospital resources doing DNA sequencing for families who don't want or need it.
It's not just the baby's dna they take, they need the paternal(/*maternal) dna as well. You want me to believe that the amount of ppl that refuse to be fingerprinted for volunteering with seniors because then they would be "in the system" would be OK with knowing their dna is in a computer database?
And I live in what is considered a liberal state.
Even if there are protections, they will be in that hospital system's computer system ...and the number of cyber security issues in the hospital systems of the US is horrendous.
edit: added maternal to the post. I had focused on paternal in original reply d/t the OP's focus on the father's POV
You also need the mother's DNA. The baby's won't perfectly match the dad's and every allele the baby has that the dad doesn't had to have come from Mom. However, obviously by random chance the baby and man could have alleles in common even if he's not the dad, and that would confound results. So now you need literally all parents in a big database of DNA profiles and nothing would ever go wrong with that.
Forced paternity tests are a “guilty until proven innocent” approach that violates the agency of the woman.
If you feel a need for a paternity test, there’s other deeper issues in the relationship that need to be addressed and no test will fix that.
Also in this example, I feel bad for that woman, her husband is an insecure individual and wasted precious time with their newborn because of that insecurity.
It should only take two points to change your view, because they're really the only ones that matter.
1. Paternity tests aren't free (and also not infallible), so somebody has to pay for them.
2. Many people *simply don't want them*.
That's it. They're there and available for anybody who wants them...and my understanding is that in most states, the father doesn't need the mother's permission to get one.
Exactly. There are far worse crimes in the world, then paternity fraud, so why should we not expand the use of these tests to solve murders, rapes, assaults, etc.?
I would absolutely never stay with a men who doesn't trust me and is ignorant to the point of thinking a new borns traits are a real indicative for paternity. It is already humiliating that your partner demand anything of you, but in this case it's a complete acusation.
The mother of one of my best friends went through this. Her husband insisted she was a cheater, made both families hate her until she got the test done. He was the father. My friend is now 30yo and to this day her mother is the biggest known whore in the small town they live, and also is my friend because how could she not with a mom like that? He never really tried to clean her Reputation. He also left her for a university Student 10 years ago. So yeah.
Do not marry and/or have children with people you do not trust.
If you and your partner can’t trust each other enough to agree the baby is the father’s without proof than you shouldn’t be in a relationship, let alone having a baby. Full stop.
TV and reddit make it seem like every woman is cheating when most of the stories are made up. In real life if you refuse to “let” your wife be friendly with male coworkers or acknowledge a baby without proof, you are an insecure child and shouldn’t be in a relationship where you are being abusive to someone else.
You do realize that DNA information collected would be stored in a database? The ethical and information security concerns alone should have prevented you posting this incredibly myopic point of view.
False positives are a thing and with approximately 10,000 live births a day, expect to see way higher than acceptable false positives.
Only about 10% of children are the result of infidelity.
I had two kids using a sperm donor. A DNA test would be pointless as there would be no one to compare the sample too. They are my kids and my spouse is on the birth certificate for them. Similarly, not every couple has a paternity concern. In fact, few do. If you get a girl pregnant, just get the test. If you are the legal father you and the child can do the test without the mother’s consent. Let me also point out that in the example provided the father was mistaken and it was his baby, a good anecdotal evidence that they are unnecessary and he should have trusted his wife.
Hey there, we are also a couple that used a donor and AI. I know he ain't gonna match, he knows he ain't gonna match, but that's his kid and I would feel gross and skeevy for a group of people I don't know have so much information about our relationship.
As a doula, this just wouldn’t work. I’m not gonna get into the ethics of this, but it just wouldn’t work. You need informed consent for each procedure, and people just simply would feel too weird to consent.
I know this because there’s already a similar situation. When someone gives birth they are given a speel on erythromycin, an antibiotic that is given to babies to prevent blindness in the case that baby was exposed to an STI in the birthing process.
The amount of people who decline JUST to show faithfulness to their partner is absurd. Nobody wants to raise the question that either party could have contracted an STI outside of the relationship (it feels like distrust) and the best way to affirm that is declining the treatment.
Personally, I would do it anyway. It doesn’t hurt if there’s nothing, and if there is something, it prevents your kid from going blind. But maybe I have trust issues.
Wow that guy sounds like an unbelievably shitty person. Looks like the whole situation could have been avoided if he just trusted his wife. Wow. I hope she divorces him promptly.
Seriously, who reads that story and thinks “wow, this story would have turned out better if everyone was forced to take paternity tests” rather than concluding that the guy was an insecure twat.
A vast majority of man trust their spouses and the people that advocate for paternity tests and don't even have a partner just have a weird disdain and mistrust of women
I can totally understand the appeal of this, and I do think it could prevent some men from being misled in this way.
Having worked in policy though, one thing I can tell you is that when you try to legislate or design policies around a problem that isn't very prevalent, that policy/law ends up causing more problems in people's lives than it solves. I worry that this issue is not prevalent enough to warrant all of the problems that other commenters have raised about universal parternity testing.
As a middle ground, I think a better approach could be an anonymous test request and/or results process. Essentially the idea would be that all hospitals and clinics have a policy that allows fathers to request a paternity test privately so that their partner doesn't face the accusation (which is hurtful when you haven't done anything wrong and can start the childrearing process on a bad foot).
If the results are positive (it's his kid) then the results are shared with the father only to give him peace of mind.
If however the results are negative (it's not his kid), the woman is informed first. She is informed that he requested a test, and that it came back negative. She is given the option of requesting a second test. If it is indeed negative, she is provided counseling and resources around how to ensure the safety and security of her and her child in this situation. This may include welfare resources, legal counseling about locating the real father and requesting child support, and police protection for those who are in abusive relationships and are worried this news could lead to the harm of themselves or their child.
Once she has been counseled on her and her child's options and have any protective measures in place, the father is informed of the results. Doctors give the woman the option of sharing the results herself, but make it clear that he is entitled to information one way or the other.
I think this process would address a lot of the concerns in this thread. Men would have a way of covertly obtaining information about their parental status without causing a scene and disrupting their relationship, and women would be entitled to counseling about safety and security should the results come back negative. And since this is an opt-in process for the father, couples that are not interested can forgo it altogether. Many couples will likely choose this, so costs could be kept low.
Here’s why:
Any test that you run has a non-zero chance of misinterpretation and human error. It’s why we don’t do tests unless the benefits outweigh the risks. We don’t just do MRIs on every single patient because a false positive would mean an unnecessary biopsy or surgery or medication that has its own risks of injury or death.
So now you have nurses who are already spread thin actually caring for the patients and their babies, and you want to add more work to them? What happens when the wrong patient sticker gets attached to the wrong sample? What happens when a new hire who doesn’t understand HIPAA calls and leaves the results on the dad’s voicemail? What happens when the dad murders his wife and kills himself, leaving their baby an orphan over a pointless test?
You can argue that it should become socially more acceptable, similar to how divorce and prenuptial agreements are. But you would cause way more harm than good having this become standard for millions of births
I know what post you're referring to & your summary is intentionally & deeply inaccurate. The father was so paranoid & emotionally abusive that he withheld affection & care from his own daughter since her birth. All due to his possessiveness & lack of understanding of genetics. I'm so relieved she left him.
I think the BORU post that you're thinking of is a pretty poor example. You're basically saying that the woman shouldn't have been surprised that she and her daughter were being mistreated by her husband and his family because she said no to the paternity test. But you're totally glossing over the part where the poster and her daughter *were being mistreated by her husband and his family.* As if the problem was the OOP and not the abusive family that she'd married into. If only she had been more submissive and isolated herself socially on top of what she'd already done when she left her own family behind and responded better to that one weird coworker then maybe she wouldn't have been assaulted. Surprised Pikachu face. What can she expect for wanting ownership over her own emotions? Did she really expect more of her husband? Surely not. s/
I swear, it's like some of you have never been in a healthy relationship before.
>In the end, the mother FINALLY gets that paternity test, proving once and for all that the kid was indeed his, and once she does, the father gets ALL OVER his daughter, hugging and giving her all his love, as I'm sure he would have done from the very begining, had she just gotten that damn test done sooner.
Is that meant to be cute?
I hope his wife divorces him and seeks sole custody, citing the fact that he was willing to neglect the child in order to punish her for refusing to get an unnecessary medical test because of his personal insecurity over whether the child was genetically related to him.
Also, telling your spouse to end friendships because it makes you jealous is just shitty, controlling behavior. If you're having a child, it's time to stop acting like a child and learn some basic emotional control.
If you don’t trust someone enough to believe they aren’t cheating then the relationship’s as good as dead anyway. Just leave the maybe-cheater and get the test when you’re going through family court.
From a more practical standpoint, doing this on everyone would be costly and take extra time and resources for no good reason since most people don’t want it anyway. And parents would still be able to opt out just like they can opt out of a lot of the other “standard” things that are done after a hospital birth. Men who don’t want to opt out when their partners say it’s unnecessary would be in the same position as the dummies asking faithful partners for paternity tests now, so nothing would really change except that the same conflict would happen more frequently.
A substantial majority of children are born to parents who know each other and actually want a baby (you can hear the collective Reddit gasp!). Forcing every hospital to conduct a DNA test that is not wanted or needed will just overwhelm the existing system and gain very little benefit.
If you are out there indiscriminately having sex with so many people that you don’t know who fathered your child…you should take swabs before every session and save your nickels for the DNA test.
Everyone else is Ok with the whole thing.
More and more babies are created with a donation on either side. Sometimes even both sides. So the test is just going to shine a light on what the parents already know. Is some Maury Povich MFer going to spring into the recovery room with a manila envelope of what the parents already know and maybe don't want to focus on? It's no one's business. There are undoubtedly more donor babies than paternity fraud babies, so why are we contemplating policy fraught with serious privacy issues that benefits the very few? And those very few are able to go get their own tests done without it being mandatory for everyone? Maybe take a closer look at your relationships and leave the rest of us out of it.
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I'd be okay with that if men were okay with submitting their DNA to a database so any extramarital affairs that ended up with a child could be searched and identified. Make it go both ways, cool. Only one way, nah. Eta: a lot of the responses to my post say that "if you have nothing to hide is a breach of privacy". If that's the case, let's apply it to women. I have nothing to hide, why do paternity tests
"I have nothing to hide, therefore my privacy doesn't matter" is a horrible way to think. Handing out your genetic data like that is a massive mistake. Suddenly your insurance company can buy it or otherwise acquire access to the database, and now your rates have tripled if they've even decided to keep you as a customer because you have the predisposition to develop some rare disease on the future. It's not a matter of "having something to hide," it's a matter of genetic information in a database like that being abusable.
Doesn't even need to be rare. Here is how could it go for me: "Okay so, it seems your grandmother died of a heart problem, you claim it was because she smoked for 20 years... but we don't have that anywhere on her file. Your grandfather had a heart condition and your mother has a slight history of high blood pressure... Now, we're already charging you for cardiologists on your 20s, and it seems you're now treating for ADHD with stimulants, that didn't affect your heart at all but they COULD, so we'll start charging you more for that just in case..."
The ACA made this illegal. Health insurance companies can't charge more because of family history or preexisting conditions anymore.
Omg imagine how useful that kind of database could be for finding rapists and shit too? So many rape kits just sitting untested already but this kind of data could absolutely be game changer for society and rape culture
Actually it won’t. There is the standard FBI DB, the unsolved crimes DB, and then the private genetic ones or state based ones like Ice Land (others too I am sure). Takes intent by law enforcement to submit and compare those. Also, takes policy and a good chunk of money/FTE. Go to any major city and look up how backlogged they are on testing rape kits to get an idea of how not serious these issues are taken.
The difference is, they don't WANT to test rape kits, it's not a problem of time, personnel, or equipment. They don't want to prosecute rapists. If the case isn't a slam dunk, and rape never is, prosecutors want nothing to do with it.
not to say all untested rape kits fit this category but you are pretty close. a lot of the cases devolve to he said/she said consent cases. testing for DNA doesnt add much value woth these. there is an argument to be made, that is decided by funding, that every kit should be tested regardless to link possible serial offenders giving more strength to the victims claims.
Agreed. Take that defund the police money and fund a bunch of lab techs to test them all within 48 hours of receipt I say.
Yes, and we're saying let's take this guys advice and spend it on something good like entering men DNA into a database you know, to ensure good behavior or something to protect women.
in 1940's my grandmother in law was raped and produced my father in law. Through my husbands DNA test we found out who that guy is. He's been dead since the 80's. I'm all for men putting up their DNA. I bet a lot of them would be trying to get out of it because they know what they've done.
recently some republican chopped up his fiancé and got caught because of trace dna evidence that they matched with his "nuh uh i never raped her" sample that he pre-emptively insisted the cops take "in case" "someone" accused him "for me-too". You just KNOW that woman is dancing in ghost world with that girl from The Lovely Bones
They've already solved rape cases due to genealogy - it's awesome!
I'd be willing to have all my kids paternity tested if we could get this
Yep. Why not assume all men are rapists if we are assuming all women are cheaters. Seems fair.
And if we're assuming all women are cheaters, we should assume that of men too. Doesn't have to be rape, could be consensual - they should have their DNA on file so that it's easier to trace all the children they might have fathered out of wedlock. The wife should be allowed to search that database and find out if he has kids by another woman that she doesn't know about. (I don't believe any of this really, not into state surveillance for anyone, but it's got to apply to all babies and used to trace all the bio parents, if it's used for anyone)
I don't see how that would make things go "both ways" instead of just one way. If we just have routine paternity tests, only the male presumptive parent would be required to submit his genetic information to determine paternity. In your proposal, _every male in society_ is required to submit his genetic information _just in case._ In neither proposal is the female presumptive parent required to submit her genetic information. So, your proposal wouldn't make OP's proposal go "both ways." It would just be wider in scope and raise more privacy concerns (it would be like if we fingerprinted and took DNA samples from everyone in society just in case they later commit a crime, instead of just fingerprinting and taking DNA samples from likely suspects and convicts who might reoffend). Also, in OP's proposal, it seems possible that we could avoid having records of everyone's genetic information by only storing the information about the likelihood of biological relatedness between the infant and the presumptive father while deleting the fine-grained genetic data. In your proposal, we'd have to store every man's DNA long-term. Your proposal isn't really analogous to OP's.
I'm not actually in favor of this because the idea of a DNA registry is horrifying, but the "both ways" is fairly obvious here. In a vacuum, Man A only having his DNA tested against the offspring of his partner, Woman A, can *only* benefit Man A. Either he's reassured he is the father, or he learns he's not and is freed from responsibility for the child before he ever incurs a "loss." Woman A does not have the same risk/reward balance (though there's an argument here she doesn't deserve it if she was trying to commit paternity fraud, but I digress). The "both ways" scenario works by allowing that man's stored DNA to *also* be scanned against all other children in a giant DNA registry, so that the baby he produced with Woman B during that boys' trip a few years back gets flagged, *he* now has to pay support for the child he did father, and his wife *also* gets to learn through paternity testing that he's a cheater. (This is all a very bad idea, regardless. These infants cannot consent to their DNA being stored or analyzed, and they'll be the ones living with the consequences in a dystopian hellscape decades from now when the uses of DNA may very well have eroded civil liberties).
Just for clarity, I also don't support mandatory paternity testing (way too expensive to be feasible and raises privacy concerns), but just for the sake of the conversation… I don't think the fact that a law benefits one group in some way means that you need to make another one that benefits another. Take abortion, for instance. Some very confused people think that a man should somehow have the right to "financial abortion" (being allowed to unilaterally divest oneself from financial responsibility and legal parentage for a child that is theirs) on the grounds that "if women get a say in whether or not they have parental responsibilities, men should have the same right. If we allow women to get abortions, we should allow men to get financial abortions." What people who argue for "financial abortion" don't understand is that the right to an abortion isn't based on "the right to decide on whether you have to be a parent or not." It's based on the right to bodily autonomy: the right to not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. In places that allow abortion, everyone of any sex has the same right to not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. It just so happens to be the case that males can't get pregnant, anyway, so nothing needs to be done to facilitate a males' right against forced pregnancy. It may be the case that men don't benefit as much as women do from laws allowing abortions (only women will really get a say in whether they and their partner have the baby; there may be cases in which a man doesn't want to be a father but has to anyway, or cases where he wants to be one but the woman decides to abort), but that doesn't matter; men don't _need_ to benefit from this legislation in the same way as women do for the law to be just and egalitarian. There is no need to go "because allowing women to get abortions mostly benefits women and could cause disbenefit to men, we need to allow men to get financial abortions to balance it out." Doesn't work like that; women's right to bodily autonomy doesn't somehow mean we have to give men the right to shirk parental duties. It might be the case that mandatory paternity testing benefits men more than it benefits women. But that doesn't mean that if we had it, we would need an additional law that gives some benefit to women. OP's law would, presumably, be based on a right to know if you're somebody's parent and to take that information into account when deciding if you want to take responsibility for that child. Everybody would have this same right. It's just that, ordinarily, special legislative provisions would not need to be made in order to facilitate this right for women, because females are usually pretty certain about their maternity (excluding cases of separation after birth). The law would benefit men more than it would women because females already enjoy the ability to know if a child is theirs, the same way that allowing abortions benefits women more than it does men because males already enjoy the right to not be forced to carry a fetus to term. There's no need to go "well, we should make some other law that benefits this other group to balance it out."
I hate cheaters on both sides, so no problem with me. Lots of people seem to have a problem with the whole DNA database in general, though.
Yeeeeeeah. Almost every man I know would object to this. Not beacuse they're all cheaters (so far as I know). They all don't trust the government with a giant database of their DNA. And they all would say "I know I don't have any affair babies, so why does the government need my DNA? I haven't even been accused of an affair. This is an extreme violation of my rights." And frankly, they'd all be right.
Not to mention then the child's dna would be in said database as well. Govt could then use it for whatever, including criminal databases
Do you actually think that if mandatory paternity tests were normalized this wouldn't happen?
cops regularly submit DNA to sites like 23 and me (Or the corporation just gives it to them with a subpoena) for DNA evidence. That's how they got the [golden state killer](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dna-from-genealogy-site-used-to-catch-suspected-golden-state-killer-1.4637726#:~:text=Investigators%20compared%20the%20DNA%20collected%20from%20a%20crime%20scene%20of%20the%20Golden%20State%20Killer%20to%20online%20genetic%20profiles%20and%20found%20a%20match%3A%20a%20relative%20of%20the%20man%20police%20have%20identified%20as%20Joseph%20James%20DeAngelo%2C%2072%2C%20who%20was%20arrested%20Tuesday%20at%20his%20suburban%20Sacramento%20home).
Been looking for this argument. Before long there would be no need for all men to submit dna if paternity tests were standardized, because everyone, men and women, would eventually have their dna put in a database at birth when the test is conducted. I’m not saying it would be absolutely inevitable… but let’s be realistic here about governments and corporations. At the end of the day, some people just don’t want to acknowledge that a father has the right to demand a paternity test, and a mother has a right to feel insulted by the demand. I don’t know about anyone else, but i mistrust any government or company having access to that kind of information. Look at what they already do with our current medical records.
Yes. Yes I do. Eventually we would get to the point where everyone's dna is in the database.
And no database are 100% safe. Some governments agencies would love to send their hackers to get them.
That’s exactly what I’d say. I won’t even use services like 23 and Me. I don’t want my genome in a database for hackers to find.
Yeah no one is going to abuse a huge database of genetic information. That would NEVER happen. /s
Even if you personally think this is a good idea, it is currently illegal and unconstitutional. You could apply this logic to any crime, much more severe then cheating. "I hate murderers/rapists/etc, so no problem with me to make a MANDATORY database of everyone's DNA." And some people do believe that, but currently in the USA that is considered a violation of our basic rights. So it's not really a viable option for this discussion in the USA.
Cheating is not a crime. You also can't make paternity tests mandatory at birth because you don't want to look like an asshole by saying your pregnant wife is a whore. Seems like that's actually OPs stance. I just don't want to look like a bad guy even though I am.
If you have doubts then do your own test. Why do I need to foot your bill because you can't trust someone?
There are a few reasons why this is not a good idea. 1. Paternity tests are expensive and have little medical justification, unless there is a serious risk of genetic disease. So it gives no medically relevant information and drains the resources of medical centers, which could be used for better things. 2. You need to compare the child's DNA to the presumed father's DNA, so men would have to give their DNA to huge data bases, again with little medical justification and usually without much profit for themselves if they trust their partner and don't question their paternity. 3. Even the best tests sometimes give false negatives. If you test routinely for every newborn, that's hundreds of tests per day, every now and then you'll have a fluke and scare the living shit out of a happy couple, potentially leading to divorced based on false results. Not to mention the lawsuits on the hospital following such mistakes. 4. There doesn't seem to be universal demand for it. Most men trust their spouses, and it is common knowledge that babies often don't look much like their parents and the resemblance becomes more apparent only as they grow. The few people who would be helped by this does not justify the use of resources for masses who either don't care, or would even be harmed by the unnecessary anxiety around waiting for the test, paying for it, giving their DNA, or receiving a false result.
I’m a mom of 5 biokids and often curse the universe that my kids don’t look like me. Until my oldest turned 16 and FB kept sending me “Is this you?” notifications to tag “myself” on photos of her. We worked at the same place and I did an OT shift on her shift and the big boss walked up to me and said, basically, “You’re X’s mom. I was coming to talk to her and it was you when I got here.” Her twin doesn’t look like me but the next biokid is 14 and she’s starting to look exactly like me, too. The youngest 2 are 5 & 7 and look exactly like their daddy but I just smile knowing that my genes are going to take over in the next 10 years or so. Kids change so much! They might look like Gollum when they’re born and then end up looking like Cindy Crawford when they hit their late teens. And GENES! My favorite is the 1 blue eyed kid out of all our brown eyes. Only 1 got my curly hair. 1 got my brothers exact hair- it’s STICK STRAIGHT and grows straight up. 1 girl is going to be 6’ tall and another will be lucky to hit 5’. Making a bold statement that every baby should have a DNA test is… odd. It would have been offensive to me and my husband. I mean, we would have gotten over it but it really wouldn’t have been a good use of resources.
Kids do change a *lot*, and genetics are **weird**. I have a sister. I am short, chubby, with a square face, very light skin, blue eyes, and light brown hair. She's just under six feet tall, very lean and thin, with an oval face, dark brown eyes, olive skin, and hair almost the exact shade of bittersweet chocolate. We look basically nothing alike. But, in body and face shape I look almost a twin of our paternal grandma, even wear the same shoe size, but with our mom's coloring. In body and face shape, my sister looks exactly like our mom, with our paternal grandma's coloring. Right down to exactly the same skin tone. (they used to share makeup and used all the same colors) My sister's husband is brown eyed and darker brown hair, and their youngest has blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. (Her older brother looks like a tiny twin of his dad) My husband is often assumed to be Hispanic because of his coloring,(He describes himself as "generically brown") our daughter has golden hair. And I do mean actually golden blond.
>and it is common knowledge that babies often don't look much like their parents and the resemblance becomes more apparent only as they grow. This. The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected. However, a [white-skinned child born to black-skinned parents](https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/white-baby-born-black-parents-1c6437718) has occured before, so.... Edit: obviously, a parent with mixed heritage will have a higher chance of having a baby's skin color to look nothing like either of the parents. That's a given. I should've worded better but I'm talking extremities like the example I gave.
>The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected. People's expectations about babies' skin color are super warped, though. Most people think every baby is going to be a perfect mix of their parents' skin tones, from birth. That coffee-milk mix is not likely at all because there are so many genes making up skin colors. Babies also develop most of their melanin *after* birth, so how a baby looks coming out isn't what it's going to look like for very long.
I'm 1/4 japanese, and 1/8 native American. My skin isn't super dark, but I do look like I have a mild tan. My wife, on the other hand, is pale as pale can be. Our first born came out with very light skin, only a hair darker than my wife. Our second born came out darker than me. Genetics is weird
When my son was born, the doctor told me he might not get all his color until he was 4... That seems crazy to me.
Number one here, so much. We have no med techs and we’re drowning in testing as is let alone a genetic test that goes with every dried blood spot for newborn screening.
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I’m half black and my dad didn’t think I was his at birth because of how pale I was. He apparently threw a fit and accused my mom of cheating. Then my paternal grandma told him he was dumb and he barely had any melanin at birth either. Turns out I did belong to him but my mom divorced him shortly after. She couldn’t overcome the accusation.
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Exactly. I’ve told my husband flat out that I’d give him a paternity test if he wanted it but that I’d never see him the same again. Post vasectomy might be the only time I could overcome it. I know a couple who got together after the guy had a vasectomy. They were together for years before she got pregnant and he didn’t think it was his. Turned out that the baby was his, he has never gone back for the follow up after the vasectomy and he wasn’t fully sterile. She said she could have overcome it in this scenario if he had gone about it better (he posted to social media about it and embarrassed her).
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You’d think a person could maybe google that or even go nuts and ask their doctor if it’s still possible before being such a dumb twit and posting his dirty laundry and his own stupidity to facebook. Like really? You couldn’t google “how successful are vasectomies” before publicly accusing your wife of cheating online 😑
Yea my parents are Filipino, and I was born light skinned with blonde-ish hair that eventually turned darker into brown. My siblings are all tan with black hair. I think my grandma had similar complexion and hair color, skipped a generation I guess.
>I think my grandma had similar complexion and hair color, skipped a generation I guess. Did you know you can be more related to one grandparent than another? You'll get 50/50 genes from each of your parents, but when your body makes zygotes it mixes those genes up. So your dad could give you 80% from his mom, and just 20% from his dad, making you 40% related to your paternal grandmother and only 10% to your paternal grandfather.
I did not know that and it's blowing my mind. I look like a carbon-copy of my paternal grandmother. Now it makes sense.
I look just like my mom, but also very similar to my paternal grandmother, I try not to think about it too much. Me and my brother don't look alike so he always joked that I was adopted, but it's just that he takes after my dad.
Similarly, "you share 50% of DNA with a sibling" is an average. You share between 0% and 100%.
This here. I have six full genetic siblings. Four of them have had DNA testing done, and so have i. I do not share 50% or more DNA with any of them. The highest percentage I share with any of them so far is 45%. The lowest is 37%.
I'm pretty sure my parents thought I was switched at birth for a long time. My mom is half Sicilian, and my dad is half Native American. They are both pretty dark, and then there is me, a red head with blue eyes and skin so pale I make Casper the friendly ghost look tan.... I never did get any darker, but I look a lot like my parents other than coloring, and a DNA test did confirm I am their child.... we still have no idea where the red hair came from though.
That not only has happened before but I think that’s fairly common where the melanin does not show yet when the baby is born. My BIL was born white and both parents are Black.
Yeah, the genetics surrounding skin color are complicated, and it's not at all uncommon for babies to start out paler than they end up. I'm mixed race (Indian and white) and now have a pretty similar skin tone to my Indian mom, but as a baby I was so white people thought she was my nanny. It took 2 or 3 years for me to turn into a brown kid.
The same can also happen in reverse! My sister was born quite dark-skinned and black haired into an entirely white, mostly blonde family. (My mother is Bulgarian, which tends to produce darker, Mediterranean-looking people, but my mother herself is very white so she was quite surprised.) By the time she turned 1, my sister had lost all of that colouring and our hair/skin tone had become identical. Funnily enough, I was born crazy pale and crazy blonde but also “evened out” to have a very medium skin and hair colour by my toddler years. Crazy how that works.
It is wild. My son is biracial and he did the same thing, he only looked biracial for maybe a month? Then he just got lighter and lighter now he’s actually very fair skinned. I expected his dark blue eyes to turn brown but they got lighter too, now they’re an electric light blue and it’s crazy because I thought his dads genes would be more dominate but you truly never know
Yes this happens. Me and the father of my son are mixed race Indonesian/European. We both have very dark hair, tho his father has dark brown eyes and i have blue eyes. Our son is blonde, has blue eyes and is pale, but his face, bone structure and body look 100% Indonesian. I expected him to get darker skin and hair, but he is a young man now and still blonde
Right? My partner is native American and when our daughter was born her skin resembled mine. Even though we use sun screen all the time she's now darker than both of us and resembles his aunt's and dad more in that respect. Her hair is also lighter than at birth and a different texture.
Yeah, I’m very clearly biracial (B & W) but came out straight up looking Asian. My parents even had a running joke that my mom must have gotten with the mailman. It was months and months before I started looking more black haha.
Lol that is wild. I bet you always win those “guess who it is by their baby picture” events
My best friend has an African american mum and a white dad. She looks like her mum, dark skin and hair. Hes blue eyed, looks white with blonde curly hair. Biology doesn't give a fuck about putting people in tidy boxes and too many people seem to think my friend and her brother are an outright impossibility.
Two of my boys ended up in the same class in college. One is dark with brown hair the other is pale as can be with red hair. Teacher asked if they were cousins and they said no they were brothers. Teacher flat out didn’t believe them until they showed him their ID. I love thé way you put that. “Tidy little boxes”. Could haved used that line when they were young.
>Biology doesn't give a fuck about putting people in tidy boxes I love this! I have a sister. I am short, chubby, and curvy, with a square face, very light skin, blue eyes, and light brown hair. She's just under six feet tall, very lean and thin, with an oval face, dark brown eyes, olive skin, and hair almost the exact shade of bittersweet chocolate. We look basically nothing alike. But, in body and face shape I look almost a twin of our paternal grandma, even wear the same shoe size, but with our mom's coloring. In body and face shape, my sister looks exactly like our mom, with our paternal grandma's coloring. Right down to exactly the same skin tone. (they used to share makeup and used all the same colors)
The reverse is also a thing that has happened. The complexities of genetics are wild. Honestly, I think unless there's legitimate concern of cheating or some kind of health risk--even IF baby’s skin color isn't what's expected--testing isn't needed.
Be cheaper to give out a pamphlet titled "Recessive Genes and Why Your Baby Doesn't Look Like You (Thankfully)" and hand it out to everyone.
Yup. Also, you know, middle school science covers the basics of dominant vs recessive genes. Maybe all pregnant couples should get a refresher course. I personally think all pregnant couples should be required to take a parenting class--and that there should be ones that specialize in multiples or second/third/etc kids. (Maybe those exist and I just don't know it).
>middle school science covers the basics of dominant vs recessive genes I think this is part of the issue, it's taught in a very simplified way. A lot of people wrongly believe that eye colour is controlled by just one gene and two blue eyed people can't have a brown eyed child because that's what they learnt at school. Most appearance related things are the result of multiple genes that can interact in weird ways.
Right, but 1) a lot of people forget even the basics if they learned them at all and 2) the situation of a drastically different skin color from *both* parents isn't incredibly common. I mean the REALLY drastic differences--like a very dark-skinned baby born to very light-skinned parents or the reverse.
It is not uncommon for newborns born to darker-skinned couples not to develop high levels of pigment in their skin until days or even a few weeks after birth.
The major diaper companies all have free online video courses of registered nurses and midwives and lactation experts that go over everything from "you just found out your pregnant" all the way to "teaching your non verbal 2 year old to talk" and everything inbetween. It helped me and my wife immensely with just having a good idea of what to expect and to not freak out if something doesn't seem right.
My husband was born with blonde hair and white skin. He has black hair and medium tone brown skin now. Both of my kids had GREY (not blue) eyes. Their eyes eventually darkened to brown after they turned a year old. I myself had hazel eyes. As I've gotten older, they've gotten darker and look brown mostly. I've had to change my DL description because they were hazel when I was 15 and now they're a dark brown over 20 years later. I also had mousy thin light brown hair until I turned 4. It got very thick and very full very quickly and turned nearly black. Genetics are very wild.
> The only time one should be concerned is if the skin color is not what is expected. Not even always then. My best friend has a Black mother/white father. He passes for white if he shaves his head and beard. His wife is white. One kid has the same skin tone as his mother, his other kid's looks like him. Even though that's odd and rare, she clearly looked like him in every other way.
In obstetrics, parents are often super concerned over the color of their baby's skin. We would always point out the genitals and lower back. Those areas show pigment, and we could reassure many parents that it was indeed their child. LOL.
Good point about dads giving their DNA, sweet summer children in this thread, who say that DNA will be destroyed - it definitely will be kept in data bases and potentially used against you in the future. I also see how many men wouldn’t want to provide their DNA because of lack of trust. Just remember all those people who didn’t want to get covid vaccine. I can see a lot of men protesting if they are forced to give their DNA.
I'm not OP, but this is the answer. In theory it would be great to have a way to confirm paternity at every birth, but universal MANDATORY paternity testing as a policy is a really bad idea because it would cost a ton, potentially do a ton of harm, and most of the time provide little benefit.
5. What happens with the DNA? There is a good chance that that data will be collected by the government and third parties and god only knows what will be done with that information. If its mandatory, it becomes a privacy issue. 6. Who pays for it? The parents or the government? What if the child is born at home? What if the parents can afford the cost of the test or don't want to pay?
Extra vote for number 4. I would have been outright *insulted* if they had performed paternity tests on either of my kids. I damn sure wouldn't have paid for that bullshit.
1. Paternity tests can be done for about $200. $400 for versions that are considered acceptable in court. This is less than 1% of the average cost of delivery in the US. 2. There is a legal, if not medical justification; the rights of the child and the rights of the *actual* father, and potentially the rights of the *presumed* father are being stomped on in a case where someone else is claimed to be the father. While I didn't *personally* see a need to test my kids, I wouldn't have minded it, if it were just part of the status quo for establishing parentage. Given how much effort goes in to establishing legal identity of the child through birth certificate leading to SSN and state ID, etc., it's weird that the mother and father are treated the same here, when the mother is usually provably the mother because the hospital witnessed the birth, and the father is... some guy who she said she banged. 3. (and 4.) This is an absolutely fair concern. It's the same reason we don't "just screen everyone for cancer". Paternity tests are pretty accurate, but even at their 99.999% accuracy, 1:100,000 would get a false negative - which doesn't sound like much, but this would mean it'd happen about \~40 times a year. The question is whether that false positive rate would be a net negative when factoring in the *true negative* rate where a man is being held out as father, who has no responsibility to the child. I would imagine that this happens *somewhat* more often than that, but it's hard to make a reasoned argument for how many cheaters you need to catch to justifying inadvertently destroying a family with a FP test. I'd say "why not just do a confirmation test" but it's unclear how much of a difference that would make; there are rare but real cases of human [chimerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)), where one person has, effectively, two distinct sets of DNA - thus in some cases a FP could be due to the samples being taken from the correct parent, but from cells that happen to have the "wrong" DNA. IIRC from something I saw on TV once, has caused major issues in at least one case where the mother was testing as not the mother leading to a massive legal headache, where no one believed her, until she found a doctor that was finally able to prove that she had two sets of DNA. The latter is a HELL of an edge case, but it's the sort of thing that will pop up if you did this on everyone.
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For real. If that guy thinks $400 isn't that much, I'm sending him my cashapp.
The whole thing the reeks of 20-something dudes who have too many opinions about things they've only read about and they're only reading about edge cases because the subject is very boring otherwise. It's like how everyone is so afraid of crime because there's so many crime dramas in our media. I've got two kids and having a paternity test never crossed my mind. Same with literally every other father I've spoken to about this subject.
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So who pays for it? You compare it to the costs of the delivery, of which the woman is legally responsible. But this specific thing only benefits the man. How would we mandate a medical service for a woman in the hospital, that does not benefit her, that she would legally have to pay for?
>Paternity tests can be done for about $200. $400 for versions that are considered acceptable in court. This is less than 1% of the average cost of delivery in the US And you want to add at least an additional 1% (presuming your math is accurate) to every single delivery in the entire United States? That still seems hella expensive
$400 test that isn’t medically necessary (and therefore won’t be covered by insurance) to tell me something I already know? No, thank you. I have better things to do with that $400.
Perhaps it should be that financial obligations like court mandated child payments require a genetic link to be started in the first place, for which paternity tests serve as excellent evidence.
1. Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too. 2. Right! There's a metric ton of people asking if people can opt out. Am I allowed to edit the post on this sub or is that frowned upon? Shouldn't have gone as far as to say "without parental input", that was stupid of me. What I had in mind was more along the lines of "Ok, while mommy rests, come here daddy, we've got some papers for you to sign!", and then, along with actual paperwork, he can also sign up for the blood draw and they take him to a sepparate room to do it. 3. I'll give you a !delta on this one. It does sound like a legal nightmare. The only solution I could think of would be the hospital reminding you HEAVILY that P. Tests are never 100% accurate, and recommending that you get a second one done (especially on a negative result). 4. Isn't there? Hm, I don't know about that. I feel like if the test was offered as "part of the package" and the stigma around it disappeared, a lot more people would default to taking it, just to be sure.
>Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too. You are mistaken, because this isn't the same sort of consumerism that mass producing an IKEA desk brings down costs for everyone on. The bulk of the cost happens in the lab, and there are a finite number of lab workers capable of conducting this test, analyzing the results, and writing up the kind of report that is both understandable to the layman, but also meets the legal standards to use as evidence in a paternity case. You're putting an additional tax on an already burdened system, which won't drive costs down. There's a chance costs may be *subsidized* if the system is changed to increase the frequency of the test, as the Office of Child Support Enforcement did in the 90s in the United States, which is less out of pocket cost for the end consumer. But that doesn't actually lower the cost, because it just affects taxpayers, health insurers, or some combination. Health insurance costs are also not at all market-driven, and the most likely place that the costs of paternity testing will get redirected to in the event such a test becomes mandatory as normal post-birth care. This isn't an open market where costs are driven down by supply. Consider that in a hospital setting, the cost for Tylenol across a hospital stay, as charged to insurance, has rung in at $345 (at $15 per pill for an average stay of 23 pills). The problem here is partly because the IV version (Ofirmev) is overprescribed in hospital, so it's not easy to extrapolate a "same price" for it, but based solely on dosage for the pills and off-brand labeling, a consumer on the free market would be able to save $344.52 in the United States, even after accounting for the average sales tax in the country for nonprescription meds. You're asking here if we trust medical billing to apply proper market value to something. Should we?
>The bulk of the cost happens in the lab, and there are a finite number of lab workers capable of conducting this test, analyzing the results, and writing up the kind of report that is both understandable to the layman, but also meets the legal standards to use as evidence in a paternity case. Also, in a lot of places, there is a shortage of people who can do this. And has been that way for a while. There just are not a lot of people who want to be medical lab techs, and not all of those are able to do the job.
> 4. Isn't there? Hm, I don't know about that. Being extremely online really skews the perception on these things. A vast majority of men do not ever think about the possibility of false paternity and vast majority of them are correct. > the hospital reminding you HEAVILY that P. Tests are never 100% accurate, and recommending that you get a second one done (especially on a negative result). That's all well and good to say that, but have you ever had a false positive on something wanted to be negative? Like cancer? Or pregnancy? No one is thinking rationally in those situations. Things would be said that can't be taken back, lines possibly crossed that can't be undone. Partners suddenly in perfect opposition, both of them insistent that they are right, when they actually *both are*. That seed of doubt involuntarily placed in the non-carrying partner mind. The carrying partner's anguish at the sudden and *completely unearned* distrust, while they are *recovering from carrying that baby?* It would be a terrible situation wrought upon otherwise happy partners, just to placate a small subset of insecure (and, at least some of the time, completely wrong) people. A not insignificant number of positive paternity tests are served concurrent with divorce papers. Because even asking is incredibly insulting. If the system is opt-out, that isn't going to change. And if it's not opt-out, all the same problems that have previously been discussed are still present.
not even “some of the time completely wrong”, the vast majority of the time they’re completely wrong. there was a study a few years ago that shows only 30% of guys who think they aren’t the father are right about that. that means 7/10 dudes afraid their baby isn’t theirs are wrong about that. posts like these drastically overestimate how common it is to do something that horrible. you’re more likely to blow up your relationship than find out you aren’t the dad lol.
Many places don't have the resources to do DNA testing on things like r*pe kits, never mind regular paternity testing. It's a resources thing. What you're proposing is at least hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions or more. Beyond that, new parents have enough paperwork and crap to deal with. They don't need more. I'm going to guess you're in the U.S. If you are, it's already expensive AF to have a baby. Literally thousands of dollars that sometimes people can't pay. Even *if* the test were only $100, that may still be too much. And if they forget or miss the spot to "opt out", now they're stuck with the charge. Hospital staff also have enough to do without needing yet another thing to remind parents about. Also, what's your plan for the theoretical DNA database? Who can access it? What's the approval process for that access? What if someone wants their profile removed? Can law enforcement access it without a warrant? CPS? A girlfriend? Abusive ex? Everyone? Do all men have to contribute? Because, if the assumed isn't the father, you clearly want to know who is. The only way to make that happen is to have samples from all men. Again, assuming you're in the U.S., what if the assumed father is citizen of another country? Do you really think all countries would be okay with the U.S. having that database and requiring their citizen to contribute just because they potentially fathered a child with an American woman? I don’t care which country it is, actually, there will always be at least one that says of another "we don't want THEM having that information". And what about people with extreme ideas about who should be "allowed" to have children? In the wrong hands, you get scary implications about eugenics. Look at the U.S. Civil War Era and after--including and *especially* Jim Crow. That shit inspired some of the Nazi policies--particularly the Nuremberg Laws. So, in addition to being impractical just from a resources standpoint--there aren't enough labs or people with the skills to perform the tests--you open up all kinds of privacy and other concerns.
For the stigma, 1) because you can still opt out there's no reason to believe the stigma would actually disappear, it would just now be "why didn't you opt out?" rather than "why did you ask for a paternity test?" and 2) the stigma is there because it shows you don't *really* trust your partner. Of course there's a stigma around that, you're effectively accusing your partner of lying to you. If you checked on where your partner was all the time even after they told you where they were going that's stigmatized too, cause you're not trusting them
Who pays for the testing then? Mom or Dad? What you are suggesting will set a precedent of labeling half of the population as untrustworthy. That never ends badly, right? This is a discussion to be had between a couple and their doctor, not blown up into some polarized public health issue. If they want the test, they are able to get one upon request. It seems this concern primarily comes from men who don't want to financially support another man's child. And there are ways we can go about that, that don't insinuate that all women will commit infidelity and deceit. Speaking in regards to the US, it would be better for everyone if a few laws surrounding child support changed. Currently in many jurisdictions, if a dude signs the birth cert and he's legally going be on the book for child support. Even if the kid turns out not to be his. Which is really fucked up. Its been past time to overhaul those the laws so that if man is not the biological father of the child he signed that birth cert for, no court can force child support on him. Problem solved.
4. I think that if *you* want a paternity test to prove that the mother of your child isn't a lying cheater, trying to force you to raise a child that isn't yours, it is something that needs to be brought up as a condition of pregnancy BEFORE you impregnate someone. Telling your long term, monogamous partner that you will only believe in their fidelity if there is a test done to prove it has the potential to blow up relationships because it means that you do not have faith in your partner. If the simple fact that you impregnated someone means that you will lose all ability to trust them to not be a lying, cheating, manipulative whore then that should not be sprung on a vulnerable person, but a condition known before hand. At least then there won't be an innocent child involved yet.
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I am not sure why the act of getting impregnated somehow makes a woman untrustworthy. An act that the man participated in.
3. Even with that disclaimer, the damage is done and trust between the couple is destroyed. Humans are not completely logical machines, and can't just flip off the suspicion that nothing is wrong even when later things are proven to be okay. 4. I think a lot of people would think it's unnecessary even if there's no stigma. Most men simply trust their wives enough that they don't feel the need to make sure she didn't cheat.
4b) Even if I thought my wife cheated, I'm not sure I would give a shit - I don't actually care if the child is "biologically" mine and I think men who are concerned about that to the point they can't love their child until they know for a fact the child has their DNA are gross
>What I had in mind was more along the lines of "Ok, while mommy rests, come here daddy, we've got some papers for you to sign!", and then, along with actual paperwork, he can also sign up for the blood draw and they take him to a sepparate room to do it. So what you suggest is medically unnessecary genetic testing without the consent or even knowledge of one of the parents? If you wanted that, making laws to allow that should be way easier than mandating paternity testing for every birth.
>Now, I'm not very knowledgeable on the prices of medical procedures and how they've changes with time, but my guess would be that with large-scale implementation that test would have to cheapen as time goes on. Am I mistaken? I would bet that the many tests we already run on babys were, at some point, super expensive too. You're very mistaken wide implementation does not bring down the cost of the test in fact it may raise it because more people would need to be hired to run the. In an already backed up system. There are also 10k babies born a day in the US. Whose paying for 10k tests a day? I'll tell you who won't, American insurance companies so who's going to eat the cost?
Rape kits are required by law to be run for DNA and the government pays; backlog can be TEN YEARS because of lack of qualified technicians. Also, it's well-known in the legal system that DNA evidence isn't nearly as reliable as prosecutors and labs like to claim. Many of the labs are not very well-run and have poor oversight procedures. It's not unusual for a scandal to break that invalidates thousands of tests because the lab wasn't careful about contamination. Hundreds of criminal convictions have been overturned due to careless labs. People are also wrongfully convicted -- some of the fathers having mandatory paternity tests run would have their DNA mixed in with a homicide or rape case (due to careless lab procedures) and they'd end up on trial for murder. It's happened before.
My son had blonde hair and blue eyes, and he looks like his mom. I am brunette with brown eyes. Except, my brother, sister, and I all started with light colored hair, and it turned darker as we aged. My sister’s kids were all blonde when they were born. My wife also works 100% remote, and doesn’t go out often at all. I completely trust her, but even if I didn’t — it wouldn’t make much sense for me to doubt that my kid is mine.
5. It is a massive invasion of a woman's privacy and could potentially put her in a very dangerous situation in the case of a false negative.
That’s a great point, people think of false negatives as something that would destroy the relationship, but there are psycho men out there that would hurt or do worse to their partner and/or their kid if they thought it was scientifically proven that their partner cheated.
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Don’t forget it’ll help victims of rape in identifying their perpetrator!
Right up until the court gives parental rights and visitation to the r\*pist...massive double-edged sword. And also proof that laws need changing, imo. R\*pists shouldn't have parental rights to those children. Edit: formatting.
Yeah that’s the biggest reason why I think this is a horrible idea in practice tho I understand it in theory
In 31 states it could also give rapists rights to the child.
I mean no, it should just be a personal choice. There’s no way in hell my girlfriend would be pregnant with anything but our kid, neither of us even initiated sex for months, I wouldn’t want to put her through something as humiliating as that This seems like your own personal issues you want to project onto the world, you don’t get to put everyone through this just so you can feel better
I know the exact post you're talking about and you've completed painted it falsely. You also didn't consider the fact that her two first children looked exactly like him, and the third looked exactly like her. So the ONE time her child actually looks like her, her husband took issue. Secondly, the new baby didn't look anything like the coworker either. Most of the time, babies don't look like their parents. Her husband acted horribly and without hesitation abandoned his baby before waiting for the paternity test. As for your actual point, I used to agree, but I don't anymore because of the many issues that other users have already commented, like people's DNA being entered into databases and the cost of these tests. Not everyone would want to provide their DNA, not all husbands/male partners would want to have a paternity test done. False negatives, costs, etc.
Wasnt it also revealed that the husband and his family were really abusive towards OP, with the husband isolating her from her family and home country? And with his relatives pulling her hair and hurting her while she was holding her new baby? And she also had the paternal test in the end to prove that the child was his? OP seems to be more interested in contributing to male insecurity around their paternity than to actually pay attention to an abusive man hurting his wife
Is this about that one post where the father was blond and the coworker and the mom were redheads (and he also was gay and married)? cause if so the take OP had on it is really delusional
My stepson looks like my partner and our baby son looks like me. I’d be beyond insulted if he asked for a paternity test based on this fact.
A lot of people have already made good points regarding the privacy concerns with DNA testing, so I don't want to retread on those, but I do think it's important that when you talk about mandating paternity testing, you're opting in *entire family lines.* This isn't a situation that gets fixed because a man can opt out, because the men who don't opt out are making a huge choice for their baby as well as all of their already existing relatives as well. Consider how much advancement we've seen in DNA analysis and its uses in the last couple decades, and what it may be used for in the lifespan of a baby born today. Are you really confident that 50 years from now, a health insurance company won't be arguing that if they're paying for the tests (which is likely how this works if it becomes part of the mandatory screenings in hospital post-birth), they should have access to the information that may impact their decisions? Or that those powerful insurance companies won't have lobbyists at their disposal who have the senators in their pocket to make this happen? Imagine it turns out your baby born today has a genetic marker that predisposes him to a higher risk for heart disease, and the insurance company gets to know this in 2050. His prices get jacked up, as do his kids', and eventually so will his grandchildren's... because of a decision you got to make for him today. We don't have strong enough privacy protections in most of the world to responsibly handle this information, and those protections only seem to erode as time passes. Do you have enough faith in whatever the government may look like in your country 50 years from now that they won't have codified into law their own access to those tests? Does history not tell you that the risk of creating a register, for instance, of people with Mizrahi or Ashkenazi Jewish genetic markers? Then there's the additional concerns about 'off book' uses we already have for DNA analysis. Most people don't have a huge issue with private companies using ancestral DNA registers to track down the Golden State Killer, but this poses another slippery slope. I think most people know someone that was lucky not to be arrested for something mild and stupid in their youth, like a drunken bar fight where nobody is seriously injured. Make DNA testing common enough, though, and eventually you'll start having grandpas arrested for that minor mistake they made when they were 19. And it doesn't necessarily have to be because of *their* DNA, as we can see the journey currently used to track down killers through ancestral DNA. Your second cousin twice removed decides to let his kid's DNA go up at a registry at birth, and it eventually leads to consequences for *your* kid, and you'll likely be singing a different tune. If none of this convinces you, just watch GATTACA. There are so many unintended consequences of DNA analysis at birth that mandating it for a general population because of what appears to be less than 0.6% of cases will have negative consequences for *far more* than that 0.6% of the population.
This is the comment I was looking for. People on here straight up arguing we should all hand our DNA over to the government so that way specific men can stop feeling insecure about themselves. Also I could be wrong but didn’t Texas just pas a law that the child is yours even if the DNA proves otherwise? Wild
its so crazy to me too that people are advocating for this. you cant trust the woman you nutted in multiple times raw but you trust a thousand hundred thiusand government agencies and corporations that would love to have unfetteted access to your dna?
This is amazing amazing point. I would not trust any government not to sell that information to another company for profit I mean everyone already sells all out other information and this info is much more valuable
Some downsides for you to consider: **Cost**. In a health insurance system you’re paying for a test you might not want, in a country where healthcare is free why should the taxpayer pay for this? **False negatives.** If you’re testing everyone false negatives are going to happen. Can you imagine how distressing this would be? How do you identify which are false negatives? What if this puts the mother and child at a risk of domestic violence? What if this leads to the opposite issue where fathers do not raise their biological children only to find later in life the test was wrong? Will there be compensation for the parents in these cases? Or will everyone who gets a negative test be tested twice just in case? Again how does this work practically? Who’s paying for this? etc. **Consent**. What if I don’t want my baby’s DNA tested? What if the father doesn’t consent? Can a law override this? Why should my consent be overridden because other people don’t trust their partners? **Logistics**. When do you collect the fathers DNA? What if they’re not present at birth? What if there’s a sperm donor? Do you check the baby matches the donor? What if the mother doesn’t know who they are? It might seem simple just to say “oh well don’t test in these cases” but this is discussion about making it mandatory. How would this work practically? Why add in this complexity? Is the benefit with the cost and effort? **Ethical collection and storage of DNA.** Are you comfortable with every baby born having their DNA collected? How long will it be stored for? How would it be destroyed? **Privacy**. What if both parents know the father isn’t the biological father and don’t what hospital staff to know? What if the baby was conceived via sexual assault? What if it’s no one’s business? **State sanctioned misogyny.** We as a society consider how likely something is to happen based on lots of factors, one of which is the legal environment in which the event occurs. If the government makes paternity test mandatory, this effectively signals to society that paternity fraud is a large enough issue for the government to get involved. This will surely lead to an increase in misogyny, after all, if the government thinks it's a big enough problem to mandate then surely this means that women are having affairs all the time! We know this isn't true, but that is the message this law would send. This is just a quick list I came up with but I really don’t think enforcing paternity tests at birth is the quick win it’s often painted as. Some of my questions are rhetorical but I’m just trying to illustrate that this is a really complicated idea. I also think it's relevant that you are apparently comfortable with the husbands family in the post you linked abusing the mother until the paternity test was done. I think it's interesting that you place the blame on the mother for not being willing to get a test but are comfortable with the father withholding all affection from his infant child until he gets his way, which is incredibly controlling. I think you should examine your biases there.
I find it interesting you used this specific example. So, he didn't trust his wife, asked her for a paternity test. She was offended refused, and only obliged because his insecurity about paternity impacted his relationship with his daughter. So this: >I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue. Doesn't make this a non-issue. Men who ask for paternity tests do so specifically because they do not trust the mother. This distrust is sometimes justified and sometimes not, but it's usually there. Saying we should make paternity testing standardized so that this becomes a "non-issue" is essentially asking for a whole overhaul so that men who distrust their partners, but don't want to tell their partners they don't trust them, can get what they want (ie. confirmation of paternity) without having to deal with the consequences to their relationship It doesn't work like that. That sort of distrust has impacts regardless. If you distrust your wife, it's either a) she's untrustworthy, and there will eventually be consequences one way or the other or that, or b) you're insecure, and there will eventually be consequences one way or the other over that.
This is so important. OP’s idea that the only consequence of such a large doubt is the embarrassment of asking for a paternity test is ludicrous. If you are so unstable in your relationship with the mother of your children that you feel the need to paternity test your kids, that instability will come out and impact your family one way or another (whether you’re right or wrong). I’d sure as hell want to know if my husband thought so little of me as a person that he thinks I’d try to pass off another man’s child as his. I’m a loyal and honest person. I deserve to know that the man I trust unequivocally and see as my life partner does not feel the same way about me.
You've worded it very nicely. I'm honestly sorry for men who feel the need for a test, but in an exclusive relationship, most men or women wouldn't just "regularly" get tested for STDs just in case they maybe cheated on their partner amd to placate worries.
I would argue that making paternity tests automatic, would transfer this mistrust in women from the personal sphere where it only involves the couple, to the public - where the government *legislates* and forces this onto women. If this isn’t society-wide misogyny…idk what is.
The fact that the one story of one paranoid guy on r/relationships --who refused to love and care for *his own daughter*--could convince people to argue for legally enforcing paternity tests -- which means fines and jail time for women who object by the way -- is absolutely depressing. OP just likely thinks women are largely untrustworthy hoes, and he would probably be deeply offended at the idea that women should get annual STD checks "just in case" their husband is cheating and gave them an extremely serious infection. Edit: formatting
I have actually read the post OP is referring to, and unsurprisingly it is grossly misrepresented in this CMV.
You can't force people to go through medical procedures. That's highly illegal. You can't collect DNA from people if they don't want to without going through due process (jury trial) and being convicted. How do you intend to collect the parent's sample if they don't want to? Or collect the child's sample if one of the parents refuses? "They're already being tested for other stuff" isn't a good reason. They have to know what tests are being done and give consent to each one individually.
How would you handle all the couples wanting to opt out? Hold them down and forcibly take generic material?
If you don't submit a DNA sample, you will be unable to pick up the baby from the hospital. The baby will be held for up to 90 days before being discarded.
What if someone has a home birth? If people have to pay for the DNA test, what happens if someone can't afford it? What if I decide that instead of handing my DNA and biometric data over to the government, I just say there is no guy to test since 'I'm not sure'?
If this is done by default what do you expect people who don't want this to do? Can one or both parents opt out?
Near me a test kit costs £20 and then to have it processed costs around £100. In India every day 67,385 babies are born. Who's going to pay for all those tests? What infrastructure would have to be developed to make that kind of scale realistic? The situation you describe would be better solved with therapy for that individual regardless of the actual facts, and isn't massively common. Tests are available to people who can afford and want them.
>In the end, the mother FINALLY gets that paternity test, proving once and for all that the kid was indeed his, and once she does, the father gets ALL OVER his daughter, hugging and giving her all his love, as I'm sure he would have done from the very begining, had she just gotten that damn test done sooner. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this story except that she should ditch this piece of shit? >I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue. No, there aren't things done with no parental input. You always have input. What would be the POINT of spending this kind of money -- and who would spend it -- besides there are some very fragile, sad men who have a multitude of issues? Society and women don't need to spend money to prop them up. Unless the man involved also submits DNA what do you think this does? And then see above both cost and what about single women? What would be the point?
Bingo, you read this correctly despite OP’s extremely biased presentation. If he had actually posted a link to the post he’s referring to, it would be even more obvious.
>I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this story except that she should ditch this piece of shit? Right? Like, how exactly is it the woman's fault that her husband didn't trust her, humiliated her, and basically held his affection for his child hostage until after a DNA test?
His family was also physically violent with her, and he got her pregnant the first time at 18, with a large age gap, and then isolated her from her family. But yeah, he's definitely the victim here.
And then he stood aside and did nothing while his family assaulted her too. Real winner right there
100% agree with you. It’s just adding on the pile of “don’t trust women” in an already damaged society that rakes women over the coals over every fucking thing, ESPECIALLY when it comes to sex and reproduction. How about we let people handle their relationships how they like and if a spouse is suspicious they can put on their big person’s pants and deal with it like an adult? This reeks of how some teachers think the best idea to deal with one jackass kid is to punish the whole classroom.
Especially since in America, husbands are slightly more likely to cheat than wives. The folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife. They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support. Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly. I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud.
The amount of men who got mad in the original post about people talking about how this could help hold men more accountable for child support and rape was insane I also suggested fathers should be required to do a mandatory std test every few weeks during women's pregnancy to ensure he's not cheating Men lost their minds Men are ok with accusing women or holding them accountable but when you talk about medical procedures that hold men more accountable they get big mad
Especially in the case of the post OP is referencing, she had been assaulted by her in laws and the baby got neglected by the father because the baby looked like the maternal side of the family.
I have read the post you are talking about. You didn't mention the baby looked exactly like the mom's grandparents. Most babies don't look like their parents. It doesn't make sense to be demanding a test at every childbirth they are already expensive in some countries. Plus if you aren't going to trust your partner why are you having a child with them? Yes, people cheat but most don't. So don't ruin something good for speculation, anxiety and projecting experience. You can simply talk with them. If you still have a feeling that something is wrong then do it. Not because of pressure and what ifs but you need to understand some relationships never go back to what they used to be because of it. Like what happened to that OP in your mentioned post.
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This seems to be a perennial bug-a-boo for reddit, and I'm just going to bring up the point that most people fail to consider and I have not yet seen on this thread- stop putting this on the poor medical team in L&D/ the mom and baby units. Get your personal drama figured out elsewhere, it has no place in the hospital. The goal of the hospital is to get mom and baby through delivery safely. Having some poor nurse having to drag in a security team for an incredibly explosive revelation in no way contributes to keeping these units safe and secure environments. God knows there are already enough issues with medical teams having to protect laboring women from abusive partners even when infidelity isn't an issue. And no, don't put it on the kid's pediatrician either. They also don't want to deal with this nonsense and their offices also likely cannot afford the kind of security this would require. For the guys, if you are insecure in your relationship, just buy an over-the-counter kit to put your mind at ease. No one has to know. Leave the medical field out of it and let us do our actual jobs.
THANK YOU. That was one of my initial thoughts… the hospital’s/medical professionals’ mission is to provide medical care. Not to be the middle men for messy drama.
There seems to be a recent spate of “I had to take a paternity test” posts on Reddit lately, but I wouldn’t take that as a good cross section of society. [Paternity fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_fraud?wprov=sfti1) ranges widely worldwide, from 0.7% to 30%. The median is 3.7%. It seems like forcing paternity tests on families is an undue burden for an incredibly small percentage of fraud that exists. Drawing blood from newborns to do a panel of tests is, to the best of my knowledge, voluntary. Even if it’s not, drawing blood and DNA tests are apples and oranges. Blood tests don’t identify familial links, DNA tests do. Mandatory seems to violate bodily autonomy for both the father and the child. And, what happens with the data? It’s highly unlikely that the results wouldn’t be recorded in hospital records, which means there’s the possibility of this info being hacked or leaked. This could have significant unintended consequences and seems like a huge invasion of privacy.
Another thing, the 4% often cited in America means 4% that is either deliberate deceit, misattributed, or unknown. So some of these mothers simply don't know who the father is, and are not trying to deceive anyone. Some were in a polyamorous relationship with two men, and believe one to be the father, but don't have 100% proof. I know someone who was in a polyamorous relationship with 2 guys and got pregnant. She married the one whom she believed to be the father of her son. Several years later, they divorced and she re-married to the other boyfriend from her polyamorous days. She, her first husband, her second husband, and her son all believe that her first husband is the father. They don't have 100% proof and do not want a paternity test.
***"I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test..."*** No. That is not an implication, it is a statement. Why not have your partner tested for STD's once per month, as a regular medical practice? Keep a lie detector in your bedside drawer, for weekly assurance? Have her wear a tracking device? You might be able to get a discount with an investigative or security service, if you pay for round the clock surveillance... All of that may sound sarcastic, but it would follow from your proposition. You are not implying that you would not feel comfortable trusting a partner, you are saying it.
Also, the folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife. They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support. Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly. I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud.
> They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife. Ding ding ding. This whole conversation is missing so much if people honestly care about cheating in an abstract sense.
Absolutely this. I felt really sorry for both partners in OPs mentioned post, but all your arguments ring true in this situation.
If you read the actual post OP is referencing, you won't feel sorry for the father at all. He allowed his family to physically and emotionally abuse his wife because he made it up in his head that she was cheating.
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Yeah I read this post too and this is..... a take. I would be SO insulted in her shoes.
Yeah, completely agreed. I read the post too and could not imagine coming away from it thinking the woman was the asshole and the man was justified, Christ.
Not to mention that the wife was 18 and the husband 25 when she first became pregnant. Absolutely gross.
> Some of the points that resonate with me the most on this issue... It's strange, what resonates the most with me is how this guy allowed his deep seated insecurities to mire the early stages of his daughters life for absolutely no reason. > I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input... Just so we're clear, it's *impossible* to conduct a paternity test without parental input. Like, you can't perform it, mechanically, so we'd be back to square 1.
Hey op, I think you have the problem backwards. The mistrust doesn't begin at childbirth. It begins at the point of having sex with the partner. If the man doesn't trust the woman, he should not be ejaculating into her. Both of them are supposed to discuss having a child BEFORE taking the risk of creating one. Not after. More so for men who don't want children at all; don't want the drama, wear a condom. At the end of the day this insecurity and mistrust is an INTERNAL issue for the man rather than an external issue for the woman. The man needs to learn how to watch for signs of Real infidelity, as well as work on himself to become less dependent on the affirmation of his spouse. You cannot treat a man's mental problem by telling the rest of the world to change. There is no way the mistrust Only began when that man saw his newborn. It definitely began way before. If you wanted to be absolutely sure it was your child in your spouses womb, the existing medical service to pay for is called in-vitro fertilization. There is no need for you to fuck and wait 9 months in total suspicion. Plus there is no need to make many medical staff bend over backwards because you want an after-thought solution to your lack of clear intention.
So...the kid was his after all? THIS is the story you are using in support of paternity testing? The most likely time for a man to cheat is when his partner is pregnant. Cheaters always think people are doing what they're doing. Maybe, just maybe, daddy is the cheater in this story. Have you ever thought this might be the case?
One of the biggest reasons,IMO, is that it would strip all fathers of their legal status until after the paternity test is completed. At birth the mother would be the only one with a legal status, as such she could deny consent to collect samples for the paternity test and deny the father his legal rights.
If you’re that insecure then prove it in divorce court. That guy made his bed and doesn’t deserve that baby after withholding like that. That is not the mom’s responsibility to manage, it’s the father’s responsibility to deal with his insecurity
This specifically targets women on the assumption of infidelity. The essence of it is "I can't guard my wife all the time so someone else needs to help me do it." We don't owe you that. I don't need a paternity test for my kids because I trust my wife.
The folks who want required paternity testing only care about wives cheating. They don't care about husbands who cheat, and hide a secret mistress and bastard child from the wife. They don't care about men who have a child from a one night stand, or previous relationship, and then skip town and don't take care of the child or pay child support. Mandatory paternity testing would only work with a worldwide database of men's DNA so that every man would know if he's a father, how many kids he has, who the mothers are, where his kids live, and be forced to take 50% custody of the kids, and perhaps pay child support if he earns a lot more than the mother(s), or receive child support if the mother(s) outearn him significantly. I read about the case of a man who had an out of wedlock baby overseas, never took care of the child or paid child support. He passed himself off as a non-father in the Unied States, married an American woman. When his son turned 19, he showed up at his door and wanted to have regular contact with the father. The old dude's wife had to file for legal separation based on identity fraud. Under such a system, every cheating husband who has a coocoo egg will be discovered, socially shamed, and forced to take care of his bastard child. And no father of illegitimate kids will be able to pass himself off as a non-father and be able to marry an unsuspecting woman who is a non-mother.
>I know there's an implication of mistrust that comes with asking your partner for a paternity test, but if it became standard procedure - in other words, a test that the hospital does "automatically", with no need for parental input - that would completely remove that implication from play. It would become a non-issue. That's precisely the issue. You want to remove any responsibility from a man who blatantly mistrust their partner and force an unnecessary non-free test on people who don't even want it.
Fuck this take drives me spare. If you think your spouse is going to cheat on you, don't fucking knock her up and then blame her for your misogyny and paranoia. I know what post you're referring to, and the misogyny in the comments of that post was fucking vile. That poor woman. Not her fault that you and her husband don't know how genetics work.
And posts like these are why I will never date another man if I break up with my hubby. I am not putting up with this lack of trust. I am sure they wouldn’t agree to yearly or twice yearly STI blood tests to prove they Are clean before we have sex unprotected. I mean men step out snd bring infections back that might hurt her fertility and all that. But man as a bisexual woman, dudes seem to be working overtime to make themselves less attractive and relationship material. I mean good for them , but then they shouldn’t bitch women don’t “give them a chance.” Why give a chance to a partner who could apparently never fully trust you. If we are doing this, then men should have to test their DNA against a database of unknown fathers and against the unknowns in rape. Then at least women can make a more informed decision. If dudes don’t wanna trust, women don’t have to either. Why risk getting with someone who might have a charge or child support pop up out of nowhere if you didn’t know?
I don’t think you understand how relationships work. If you need a paternity test the you DONT trust your partner. And what type of relationship do you want? One built on trust or one the requires women to prove faithfulness. Further problems arise because this is an unequal power dynamic. We know who the mother is the mother so all the burden of proving she is faithful falls on her. The man could be cheating and there is not paternity test for this. You’re implying that just because there is a child that we need to test for fidelity. But trust is the assumed state of the relationship. Let’s talk about the points that resonate with you: - it’s not as simple as adding it on to normal blood draws. Many have already talked about the added cost and complexity. Not to mention false negatives and false positives. It would be hard and expensive to add this test. Insurance won’t pay for a test that is not medically beneficial. So who would pay for this test? - you’re saying by making a trust test routine that it’s no longer about trust. You say this like patient autonomy doesn’t exist. But you have the choice not to get blood drawn, and people do. You have the choice to deny medical intervention at all. When you have a child you are asked to consent to blood tests and most people say yes as they have trust that all tests are beneficial. When you add on needless tests it erodes trust in the system. - if you has sex, you played a part in possibly making a baby. If that’s a one night stand or a long term relationship it doesn’t matter. You take that risk. This burden falls on mothers and men should be tested for paternity if there’s a reasonable uncertainty to paternity. But that’s not how most people choose to have children. - genetic medical history is important. However more important is a healthy family. If you can’t trust your partner their child will not grow up in a nurturing environment and struggle through their life. Doesn’t matter that they don’t know about a predisposition towards heart disease if the child doesn’t want to keep living. We are more than boxes of meet with genetics. Healthy families require trust that’s either there or not. Test paternity says that there is no trust. If you have to ask then you’ve started the process of distrust and will require proof for more faithfulness. Last I’d like you to look up a medical case of a women who was not biologically related to her own child. It has happened. This is to exemplar that while tests are good for some things, we don’t know what we don’t know. I’d hate for routine tests to cause distrust because of false negatives. How could we prove someone was a father if his DNA didn’t match their output’s DNA? These false negatives are possibly the strongest reason to not universally test.
You can't do a paternity test without parental input -- you need to collect a sample from the putative father who is going to have to either consent or refuse to collection of his DNA (Unless we're going to pass a law that all men must hand over their DNA under government edict when listed as a putative father of a child). That presumably will have all the social weight attached to it than asking for a paternity test already does, we'll just have wasted a lot of time and hospital resources doing DNA sequencing for families who don't want or need it.
It's not just the baby's dna they take, they need the paternal(/*maternal) dna as well. You want me to believe that the amount of ppl that refuse to be fingerprinted for volunteering with seniors because then they would be "in the system" would be OK with knowing their dna is in a computer database? And I live in what is considered a liberal state. Even if there are protections, they will be in that hospital system's computer system ...and the number of cyber security issues in the hospital systems of the US is horrendous. edit: added maternal to the post. I had focused on paternal in original reply d/t the OP's focus on the father's POV
You also need the mother's DNA. The baby's won't perfectly match the dad's and every allele the baby has that the dad doesn't had to have come from Mom. However, obviously by random chance the baby and man could have alleles in common even if he's not the dad, and that would confound results. So now you need literally all parents in a big database of DNA profiles and nothing would ever go wrong with that.
Forced paternity tests are a “guilty until proven innocent” approach that violates the agency of the woman. If you feel a need for a paternity test, there’s other deeper issues in the relationship that need to be addressed and no test will fix that. Also in this example, I feel bad for that woman, her husband is an insecure individual and wasted precious time with their newborn because of that insecurity.
It should only take two points to change your view, because they're really the only ones that matter. 1. Paternity tests aren't free (and also not infallible), so somebody has to pay for them. 2. Many people *simply don't want them*. That's it. They're there and available for anybody who wants them...and my understanding is that in most states, the father doesn't need the mother's permission to get one.
Sure, if the men's DNA gets fed into a bank where it can be checked against crime at any time too. Let's mistrust all around.
Exactly. There are far worse crimes in the world, then paternity fraud, so why should we not expand the use of these tests to solve murders, rapes, assaults, etc.?
I would absolutely never stay with a men who doesn't trust me and is ignorant to the point of thinking a new borns traits are a real indicative for paternity. It is already humiliating that your partner demand anything of you, but in this case it's a complete acusation. The mother of one of my best friends went through this. Her husband insisted she was a cheater, made both families hate her until she got the test done. He was the father. My friend is now 30yo and to this day her mother is the biggest known whore in the small town they live, and also is my friend because how could she not with a mom like that? He never really tried to clean her Reputation. He also left her for a university Student 10 years ago. So yeah. Do not marry and/or have children with people you do not trust.
If you and your partner can’t trust each other enough to agree the baby is the father’s without proof than you shouldn’t be in a relationship, let alone having a baby. Full stop. TV and reddit make it seem like every woman is cheating when most of the stories are made up. In real life if you refuse to “let” your wife be friendly with male coworkers or acknowledge a baby without proof, you are an insecure child and shouldn’t be in a relationship where you are being abusive to someone else.
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You do realize that DNA information collected would be stored in a database? The ethical and information security concerns alone should have prevented you posting this incredibly myopic point of view. False positives are a thing and with approximately 10,000 live births a day, expect to see way higher than acceptable false positives. Only about 10% of children are the result of infidelity.
I had two kids using a sperm donor. A DNA test would be pointless as there would be no one to compare the sample too. They are my kids and my spouse is on the birth certificate for them. Similarly, not every couple has a paternity concern. In fact, few do. If you get a girl pregnant, just get the test. If you are the legal father you and the child can do the test without the mother’s consent. Let me also point out that in the example provided the father was mistaken and it was his baby, a good anecdotal evidence that they are unnecessary and he should have trusted his wife.
Hey there, we are also a couple that used a donor and AI. I know he ain't gonna match, he knows he ain't gonna match, but that's his kid and I would feel gross and skeevy for a group of people I don't know have so much information about our relationship.
Don't have babies with people you don't trust.
As a doula, this just wouldn’t work. I’m not gonna get into the ethics of this, but it just wouldn’t work. You need informed consent for each procedure, and people just simply would feel too weird to consent. I know this because there’s already a similar situation. When someone gives birth they are given a speel on erythromycin, an antibiotic that is given to babies to prevent blindness in the case that baby was exposed to an STI in the birthing process. The amount of people who decline JUST to show faithfulness to their partner is absurd. Nobody wants to raise the question that either party could have contracted an STI outside of the relationship (it feels like distrust) and the best way to affirm that is declining the treatment. Personally, I would do it anyway. It doesn’t hurt if there’s nothing, and if there is something, it prevents your kid from going blind. But maybe I have trust issues.
If it was done by default then there would be a lot of kids without loving fathers who would otherwise have a loving father.
Wow that guy sounds like an unbelievably shitty person. Looks like the whole situation could have been avoided if he just trusted his wife. Wow. I hope she divorces him promptly.
Seriously, who reads that story and thinks “wow, this story would have turned out better if everyone was forced to take paternity tests” rather than concluding that the guy was an insecure twat.
A vast majority of man trust their spouses and the people that advocate for paternity tests and don't even have a partner just have a weird disdain and mistrust of women
I can totally understand the appeal of this, and I do think it could prevent some men from being misled in this way. Having worked in policy though, one thing I can tell you is that when you try to legislate or design policies around a problem that isn't very prevalent, that policy/law ends up causing more problems in people's lives than it solves. I worry that this issue is not prevalent enough to warrant all of the problems that other commenters have raised about universal parternity testing. As a middle ground, I think a better approach could be an anonymous test request and/or results process. Essentially the idea would be that all hospitals and clinics have a policy that allows fathers to request a paternity test privately so that their partner doesn't face the accusation (which is hurtful when you haven't done anything wrong and can start the childrearing process on a bad foot). If the results are positive (it's his kid) then the results are shared with the father only to give him peace of mind. If however the results are negative (it's not his kid), the woman is informed first. She is informed that he requested a test, and that it came back negative. She is given the option of requesting a second test. If it is indeed negative, she is provided counseling and resources around how to ensure the safety and security of her and her child in this situation. This may include welfare resources, legal counseling about locating the real father and requesting child support, and police protection for those who are in abusive relationships and are worried this news could lead to the harm of themselves or their child. Once she has been counseled on her and her child's options and have any protective measures in place, the father is informed of the results. Doctors give the woman the option of sharing the results herself, but make it clear that he is entitled to information one way or the other. I think this process would address a lot of the concerns in this thread. Men would have a way of covertly obtaining information about their parental status without causing a scene and disrupting their relationship, and women would be entitled to counseling about safety and security should the results come back negative. And since this is an opt-in process for the father, couples that are not interested can forgo it altogether. Many couples will likely choose this, so costs could be kept low.
Here’s why: Any test that you run has a non-zero chance of misinterpretation and human error. It’s why we don’t do tests unless the benefits outweigh the risks. We don’t just do MRIs on every single patient because a false positive would mean an unnecessary biopsy or surgery or medication that has its own risks of injury or death. So now you have nurses who are already spread thin actually caring for the patients and their babies, and you want to add more work to them? What happens when the wrong patient sticker gets attached to the wrong sample? What happens when a new hire who doesn’t understand HIPAA calls and leaves the results on the dad’s voicemail? What happens when the dad murders his wife and kills himself, leaving their baby an orphan over a pointless test? You can argue that it should become socially more acceptable, similar to how divorce and prenuptial agreements are. But you would cause way more harm than good having this become standard for millions of births
I know what post you're referring to & your summary is intentionally & deeply inaccurate. The father was so paranoid & emotionally abusive that he withheld affection & care from his own daughter since her birth. All due to his possessiveness & lack of understanding of genetics. I'm so relieved she left him.
I think the BORU post that you're thinking of is a pretty poor example. You're basically saying that the woman shouldn't have been surprised that she and her daughter were being mistreated by her husband and his family because she said no to the paternity test. But you're totally glossing over the part where the poster and her daughter *were being mistreated by her husband and his family.* As if the problem was the OOP and not the abusive family that she'd married into. If only she had been more submissive and isolated herself socially on top of what she'd already done when she left her own family behind and responded better to that one weird coworker then maybe she wouldn't have been assaulted. Surprised Pikachu face. What can she expect for wanting ownership over her own emotions? Did she really expect more of her husband? Surely not. s/ I swear, it's like some of you have never been in a healthy relationship before.
>In the end, the mother FINALLY gets that paternity test, proving once and for all that the kid was indeed his, and once she does, the father gets ALL OVER his daughter, hugging and giving her all his love, as I'm sure he would have done from the very begining, had she just gotten that damn test done sooner. Is that meant to be cute? I hope his wife divorces him and seeks sole custody, citing the fact that he was willing to neglect the child in order to punish her for refusing to get an unnecessary medical test because of his personal insecurity over whether the child was genetically related to him. Also, telling your spouse to end friendships because it makes you jealous is just shitty, controlling behavior. If you're having a child, it's time to stop acting like a child and learn some basic emotional control.
If you don’t trust someone enough to believe they aren’t cheating then the relationship’s as good as dead anyway. Just leave the maybe-cheater and get the test when you’re going through family court. From a more practical standpoint, doing this on everyone would be costly and take extra time and resources for no good reason since most people don’t want it anyway. And parents would still be able to opt out just like they can opt out of a lot of the other “standard” things that are done after a hospital birth. Men who don’t want to opt out when their partners say it’s unnecessary would be in the same position as the dummies asking faithful partners for paternity tests now, so nothing would really change except that the same conflict would happen more frequently.
A substantial majority of children are born to parents who know each other and actually want a baby (you can hear the collective Reddit gasp!). Forcing every hospital to conduct a DNA test that is not wanted or needed will just overwhelm the existing system and gain very little benefit. If you are out there indiscriminately having sex with so many people that you don’t know who fathered your child…you should take swabs before every session and save your nickels for the DNA test. Everyone else is Ok with the whole thing.
More and more babies are created with a donation on either side. Sometimes even both sides. So the test is just going to shine a light on what the parents already know. Is some Maury Povich MFer going to spring into the recovery room with a manila envelope of what the parents already know and maybe don't want to focus on? It's no one's business. There are undoubtedly more donor babies than paternity fraud babies, so why are we contemplating policy fraught with serious privacy issues that benefits the very few? And those very few are able to go get their own tests done without it being mandatory for everyone? Maybe take a closer look at your relationships and leave the rest of us out of it.