Paternity Testing: A Blessing or a Curse

The jury is still out on whether the now easily available paternity tests are a blessing, a blessing in disguise or a curse.

            The School of thought which holds that paternity testing is a blessing will argue that the easy availability of DNA-based paternity tests has had a liberating effect on both men and women. For the men, a simple DNA-based paternity test offers opportunity of knowing – for sure – whether the child they are setting up to bring up is indeed theirs’ or whether they are having games played on them – a piece of knowledge which many of our men forefathers would have given anything for. Through such a DNA test, paternity, like maternity, becomes a certainty – beating the age old adage where maternity was said to be almost always a matter of certainty, with paternity always being seen as matter of presumption. For women too, paternity testing offers the opportunity of nailing men who go around fathering children and the abdicating their paternal responsibilities. Now while before the advent of DNA-based paternity testing the courts could dismiss the woman’s case (where she happened to suing for child support) on account of lack of enough evidence, the modern woman armed with a DNA test result showing the man in question to be the child’s father has a far better chance of success in her case.   

On the other hand, the school of thought which holds the view that paternity testing is a curse argues that such testing has destabilized the classical approach to parenthood; an approach which many feel was serving us just as well. In this classical approach to parenthood, having children was appreciated for its social value, rather than physical value. In this regard then, people had children to keep their ‘names’ – rather than their genes – alive. Of course our innate longing – according to way we have been programmed by the creator, was to move our genes to the next generation through our children, but since there was no way of knowing that whoever you were bringing up was indeed your gene-bearer (especially for the men), a person had to content themselves with having some to take their ‘name’ to the next generation. All that has changed with the advent of paternity testing – and all one has to do today is to take a simple DNA test, and they are well on their way to knowing if the person they call their ‘son’ or their ‘daughter’ is indeed their gene-bearer or simply a ‘name-bearer.’ Now the implications of knowing a person you have all along being treating as your offspring is nothing of the sort can be devastating to say the least, even if the person in question happens to be just a young child – as DNA tests are typically carried out on young children in dispute. So devastating, in fact, are the effects of the realization that the person you have been treating as your child is nothing of the sort that people have been known to do things they would never have thought of doing before – either to themselves or to the child in question – upon realizing that the child they have always thought was their was not. Of course the proponents of DNA based paternity testing will counter this argument with the fact that the all a DNA test does is to reveal the truth, and it is better to live with a bitter truth, than with a ‘sweet’ lie.

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The Changing Face of Paternity Testing

Paternity testing and the context under which it is done have undergone tremendous change over the last two decades.

            For one, the number of people seeking a paternity test has increased tremendously over the last couple of decades. As people adopt more and more liberal sexual attitudes, many men are finding themselves doubting the paternity of children they are alleged to have fathered, and the only way out of such disputes is often a paternity test. As it were, with the sexual liberation, many women are now increasingly having multiple partners (which was hitherto the preserve of men). Now the tricky thing here is that while maternity is almost always a certainty – as a woman usually has a clear chance to know the baby she gives birth to is hers hence not much demand for maternity tests even when there is polygamy – it is on the other hand harder for a man to establish whether he indeed sired a given baby. It doesn’t help that many women who are now having multiple partners tend to compartmentalize them, a situation where handsome (but not-so-well-off) Jack ends up being compartmentalized as the ‘baby daddy’ to sire the babies, and rich (but-not-so-handsome) James ends up being compartmentalized as the ‘baby daddy’ to provide for the babies, a situation which is obviously unfair to James, who will almost inevitably ask for a paternity tests once he suspects  that he is being used in such a way.

            The technology used to conduct the paternity tests has advanced over the last two decades too. A huge milestone in paternity testing was the adoption and popularization of DNA based paternity testing in the mid to late 80s, and which gave the paternity tests a level of accuracy hitherto unimaginable. Before DNA based paternity testing become an accessible possibility, people mostly had to make do with blood type tests, which were eliminatory rather than confirmatory tests. That is to say, such blood type tests would only eliminate the chances that a given man had sired a given child, but always left the possibility that the child could still have been sired by another man with a similar blood group to the man in question. DNA based paternity tests on the other hand are not only eliminatory, but also confirmatory.

            Paternity testing has also become more convenient (and generally less painful) over the last two decades. In the days when paternity testing was based on blood group typing, both the father and the son (or daughter) had to go to a medical laboratory, have blood drawn (obviously through a painful needle prick) and then wait for results – which as we have seen, would only be eliminatory. With the advent and advancement of  DNA technology however, paternity testing has become rather convenient – the only ‘intrusive’ (if we may call it that) part of the test often being a painless swab in the inner cheek to draw the DNA sample, which can be even send by mail to the testing laboratory.

            Paternity testing is also becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day. At the beginning of DNA based paternity testing, many men who were interested in establishing the paternity of their children, or children who were themselves interested in establishing their paternity were often put off by the high costs involved. At that time, the production of most of the kits used for the process was the preserve of the companies that had done initial research in the field of DNA testing and therefore gotten themselves patents. As these patents expire however, more and more companies are venturing into the production of these kits, thereby increasing competition in their production and lowering prices for the users of the technology. Ultimately, this translates into falling prices for paternity tests.

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