For some time, I’ve made a sport of skewering New York Times articles.  As we say in Texas, it’s like shootin' fish in a barrel – too easy not to do, but nothing to brag about.

This article on paternity fraud, however, is almost uniformly excellent, even if it ultimately gives short shrift to what looks like the best solution to the problem – mandatory DNA testing at birth (New York Times, 11/22/09).

But the article treats defrauded men as real people with real feelings and motivations.  Its emphasis is on men and the children they take on to father, not knowing they're not theirs.  It shows how torn they can become when they learn the truth – that mom lied and that they aren’t the dad.  Here’s how one man described his experience of learning that “his” five-year-old daughter was another man’s:

“The day the results came back was the most devastating day of my life,” Mike said, beginning to cry as he described opening the envelope from the lab and reading there was no chance he was L.’s father. “This little girl,” he whispered, his throat tight, “is not my child. I ran upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom and cried and dry-heaved for 45 minutes. I felt like my guts were being ripped out.”

Still, what’s a “father” to do?  He’s raised a child for years, assuming he/she is his and then learns otherwise.  All of the caring and tenderness, all of the love, the sleepless nights, the first steps, the first words, the first day of school, indeed all of everything that goes into fathering collide with two immutable facts – the child is not his and his wife cheated. 

So he’s faced with a dilemma.  He's moved to leave because she lied to him, not just once, but every day that she accepted his money and watched him bond with the child, and failed to tell him the truth.  He feels he's entitled to do justice on his own behalf, to not put up with sexual infidelity and dishonesty.  And besides, to stay would mean abetting his wife's deception, to in effect say "fine honey, lie to me about some of the most important things in life; I won't rock the boat." 

But then there's the love he has for his child and the certain knowledge that, to desert him/her could be devastating.  His wife may have treated him like a wallet, but does that mean he should do the same?

Those are the two alternatives a man who's a victim of paternity fraud has.  He can leave and either lose contact with the child entirely or end up paying support even though he played no part in his/her conception.  Or he can stay with a woman he likely wouldn't have any part of if there weren't a child.

Not surprisingly, when faced with those choices, different men do different things.  Many swallow the hurt for the sake of the child.  Many don’t.  The article tells about Carnell Smith who raised a girl for 11 years and, when he learned she wasn’t his, walked away, his sense of justice stronger than his love.  

Smith was instrumental in changing the law in Georgia to allow defrauded dads to do just what he did – walk away from a child and its mother any time he learns he’s not the father.  But listen to what his daughter Chandria says about how that decision affected her:

“I was just a kid, so I didn’t really understand what happened or why,” she said. “He never did explain why he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

She stopped seeing friends and holed up in the bathroom, scratching and picking at her skin until it bled. The more it hurt, she told me, the calmer she felt. Her hair started to fall out, her grades slipped and she had trouble sleeping, details her mother and her mother’s lawyer at the time corroborated. Chandria received counseling at her school and privately for years.

“It kind of wrecked my self-esteem,” she says. “Even now, I worry about being a burden on people. I don’t want to be in the way. I don’t want to be anybody’s problem. It’s made me apprehensive about getting attached to people, because one day they’re there and the next day maybe they won’t be. You can’t help but be careful.”

Compare that with what Mike went through, and you get an idea of the personal disaster paternity fraud can cause.  And what Carnell Smith says is true too - that states can demand support from a biological dad at any time based on DNA testing, but men can't do the same.  If a guy gets the idea he's not the father a few years into a child's life, most states will tell him "tough luck; it's too late."

So paternity fraud is bad for everyone except for the mother if her deception works.  Then she gets to choose the father of her child and no one's the wiser.  And it's precisely that - the fact that men, in this age of genetic testing, still don't control their own reproduction - that's one of the biggest problems about paternity fraud. 

I'll have more to say about that soon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Paternity Fraud, Paternity Issues. You can trackback from your own site.