Dad Blood

If DNA tests prove that you're not your children's father, do you still owe child support?

Cathy Young from the November 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Critics of paternity fraud legislation also emphasize the social, emotional, and psychological damage children are likely to suffer when Daddy suddenly discards them. And there is no doubt that children get badly hurt. Morgan Wise may have been shafted by the system, but it's difficult to view him with unalloyed sympathy when one learns that, after losing his claim for relief from child support payments, he took his battle public -- with the inevitable result that the rumors reached the boys' school, and he ended up telling them he wasn't their real father.

"Regardless of the circumstances of conception, for the child this is the only father he or she has known," Los Angeles attorney Jenny Skoble, director of the Child Support Project at the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law, wrote recently in Insight magazine. "If this man disappears from the child's life, the child not only loses his financial support, but suffers the well-known emotional effects of being abandoned by a parent."

That's often true, and it's unfortunate (though it is worth noting that the women's advocates typically making these arguments rarely show much concern about divorced fathers' complaints that their ex-wives intentionally disrupt visitation). Yet the reality is that no court can force a parent to be emotionally involved with his children and to participate actively in raising them. A court can only force him to pay up. It's true that courts sometimes bar the alleged father not only from using DNA test results in a paternity challenge but from having the children tested, so as to avoid potentially traumatizing them. Even so, a father who is unsure of his paternity may well withdraw from the children.

It is sad, of course, when a man who has been a de facto father to a child for years suddenly and abruptly abandons him or her. (Conversely, there is something self-serving and opportunistic about the position of some fathers' advocates that a man who has learned that his child is not biologically his should be able to continue contact and visitation but shouldn't pay child support.) But surely a good portion of the blame for such tragic situations rests with mothers who cheat and lie. The men who fight back don't necessarily believe, as some critics claim, that biology alone makes you a father; often, they are reacting to being deceived and used.

"What you're saying is that all a man is, in terms of a father to a child, is a sperm donor," Paula Roberts of the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C., told the Los Angeles Times. "We think that's really bad social policy." Agreed. But our current social policy all too often reduces a man to a cash machine.