In my last piece, I described how mandatory DNA testing of all children at birth would not only help prevent paternity fraud, it would do what we seldom think worth doing – give men power over their own parental rights.  As it stands now, the best we do is presume that a married man is the father of any child born to his wife during their marriage.  As countless examples have shown, that presumption is often wrong.

How often?  No one has ever bothered to find out the overall rate of false paternity.  Back in the nineties, I tried to figure it out myself using existing data and a few assumptions.  I came up with the figure 6.9% - 10.2% depending on the assumptions.  I make no claim that those are precise figures, but I’d bet they’re close.  If they are, that would mean that, in the United States, some 280,000 to 410,000 children are born to men who think they’re the father but who aren’t.

Not only that, I asked the Bureaus of Vital Statistics of the eight most populous states to search their birth certificates to see how many had “Father” left blank or filled in “unknown.”  For those states, which made up over 40% of the U.S. population, almost exactly 15% of birth certificates had no father named.  That’s about 600,000 children born with no father named.  Back then, about 33% of children were born to single mothers; now it’s 40%.  So the numbers can only have gone up.

And that brings me to the other thing that this New York Times Magazine article didn’t mention – the flip side of paternity fraud.  Whenever a woman commits paternity fraud, she does it to two men – the man who isn’t the father and the man who is.  Most commentary on the subject focuses on the man who’s stuck with a child who’s not his. 

But standing in the shadows of each of these morality plays is the actual father.  Maybe he’s the one-night stand the married woman had on the sly, or maybe he’s the long-time lover of a single woman who, once pregnant, decides he’s not the ideal father.  But whoever he is, and whatever role he’s played in the mother’s life, he should have the right and the duty to help raise and be a part of his child’s life.  As surely as she dupes one man into fatherhood, she dupes another out of it.

A lot of social science shows that men want to care for and help raise their children.  Of course some don’t.  Parents who want to avoid caring for a child they've brought into the world have a variety of ways of doing just that.  Safe haven laws, divorce, adoption and foster care ensure that a parent who doesn’t want to care for a child need only take some rudimentary steps to avoid it.  He or she may have a support obligation, but need not exercise their right of care.

But as before, that should be the father’s decision.  If social science is right, most fathers will want to take an active role in caring for their children.  If some don’t, that too is their decision, albeit one I won’t have a lot of respect for.  But by not telling the true father that the child is his, the mother takes that option out of his hands.  As with the man who’s not the father, no legitimate concept of morality places his parental rights and duties in her hands.  Only the laws of the several states do that.

Let’s be clear.  In all but the rarest of cases, a woman will know who the father of her child is, or will be able to narrow it down to a manageable number.  In the case of rape by a stranger, she obviously doesn’t know the man’s identity and he has no moral claim on parental rights anyway.  Doubtless a few births come from consensual trysts with men who are unknown to the women and whose identity can’t be ascertained.  In those cases, the woman will be unable to identify the father.

So what do we do if the woman says she doesn’t know who the father is?  We can’t ascertain his identity via genetic testing if he’s not around to provide a sample. 

I argue that we should do two things.  First, we should make it a violation of criminal law, probably a misdemeanor, for a woman to say she doesn’t know the father's identity when she in fact does.  Likewise, she should be required by law to identify each person who could be the father if there's more than one possibility.  As with all criminal law, impossibility of complying with the law would be a defense, so, if she truly can't identify him, she'd be off the hook.  

Second, no father should have his parental rights infringed or diminished by the action of another person.  In other words, until he has actual knowledge that he’s a child’s father, a man's parental rights must remain intact.  After that, if he fails to take up the duties of fatherhood, he may find his rights curtailed, but not before.   

Finally, mandatory DNA testing would place responsibility for fathering a child where it belongs - on the man who is the child's father.  Since we can now know in the vast majority of cases, who the actual father is, forcing responsibility for the child's upbringing on another man not only doesn't make sense, it contradicts a fundamental moral principle - that people should be responsible for the consequences of their actions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Paternity Fraud, Paternity Issues. You can trackback from your own site.