Considerations

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)

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Related posts:

1. Mater­nity Leave
2. Japan­ese Culture
3. Rape
4. A Mother at 70
5. A Chris­t­ian Nation?