Paternity Tests

The New York Times Magazine reports on how paternity testing is changing fatherhood in the United States. The feature article, of course, leads with a poignant story:

For four years, Mike had known that the girl he had rocked to sleep and danced with across the living-room floor was not, as they say, “his.” The revelation from a DNA test was devastating and prompted him to leave his wife — but he had not renounced their child. He continued to feel that in all the ways that mattered, she was still his daughter, and he faithfully paid her child support. It was only when he learned that his ex-wife was about to marry the man who she said actually was the girl’s biological father that Mike flipped. Supporting another man’s child suddenly became unbearable.

Two years after filing the suit that sought to end his paternal rights, Mike is still irate about the fix he’s in. “I pay child support to a biologically intact family,” Mike told me, his voice cracking with incredulity. “A father and mother, married, who live with their own child. And I pay support for that child. How ridiculous is that?”…

Mike’s conundrum is increasingly playing out in courts across the country, a result of political, social and technological shifts. Stricter federal rules have pressed states to chase down fathers and hold them responsible for children born outside of marriage, a category that includes 40 percent of all births. At the same time, DNA tests have become easier, cheaper and more reliable. Swiping a few cheek cells and paying a couple hundred dollars can answer the question that has plagued men since the dawn of time: Am I really the father?

This issue has indeed puzzled humanity for thousands of years. As Aristotle reportedly put it (I cannot find the primary source):

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Still, is there something happening today that caused the Times to deem this newsworthy? Perhaps there is. As state governments rightfully clamp down on deadbeat dads — of which my late father was one — more and more men want to know for sure whether they are indeed responsible for their child’s upbringing:

Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a subset of tests — those that are admissible in court and thus require an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their cheeks and that of their putative child’s and mail the samples to a lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right.

On the surface, this sounds incredibly depressing to someone who, like me, views marriage as a sacred, holy institution. But the sad reality is that eighteen percent of married women in the United States have cheated at least once. (The number is probably even higher since more than a few cheaters probably lied to the pollster.) One in five Americans — men and women — in monogamous relationships have cheated on his or her partner, according to the same survey. With untold thousands of dollars on the line, can men really be blamed for wanting to be sure?

This is yet another reason why American men are increasingly skeptical of marriage. Not only can wives divorce husbands for no reason and take half of their assets, courts can, as the Times article notes, also force husbands to pay for the children of the man with whom the wife cheated. Modern society has deviated so much from the natural order that chaos has resulted.

Related: The Battle of the Sexes

(Hat tip: Roissy in DC)