The Detroit News, U.S.A., By Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks Special to The Detroit News, September 25, 2002
"You play, you pay" is the response often given to men who complain about the financial burden of
supporting their offspring. Today, for thousands of Michigan men, the refrain has become "You didn't play?
You pay anyway."
The stories of victims of paternity fraud often provoke disbelief. Many men are falsely assigned
paternity in default judgments and are compelled by the state to pay 18 years of child support for children
whom DNA tests have proved are not theirs. Many of these men are not properly served notice of the paternity
proceedings, never get their day in court and have no idea they are "fathers" until their wages are
garnisheed.
Often by the time these men realize what has been done to them, the statue of limitations for challenging
paternity has already passed, and they lose as much as half their take-home pay to child support,
arrearages, interest, and penalties -- sometimes to support children they have never even met.
In other cases, men are misled into supporting children who are not theirs. Sometimes unwed men are urged
to declare paternity of their girlfriend's or ex-lover's children at or near birth, and such declarations,
when later found to be the product of deception, are hard to undo. Other men are deceived by wives who bear
children through adulterous liaisons and who mislead them into thinking that the children are theirs.
In response to the paternity fraud crisis, the Michigan House of Representatives unanimously passed two
paternity fraud relief bills last year. House Bill (HB) 4635 and HB 4636 direct courts to terminate child
support obligations and cancel arrearages for men who can present evidence that they are not the fathers of
the children whom they have been ordered to support. These bills are with the Senate's Families, Mental
Health and Human Services Committee and will be the subject of a testimony-only hearing today.
Opponents argue that the bills would hurt children. However, these critics overlook the fact that when a
father is forced to pay child support and arrearages for a child who is not his, his own biological children
suffer. The children of falsely identified fathers need not be deprived of child support, because mothers in
these cases can do what they should have done at the beginning -- disclose the true identity of their
children's fathers so the state can then approach them to establish paternity and pay child support.
Children are also harmed by the current system because depriving a child of knowledge of his or her
parentage can have damaging medical implications. For example, for children facing life-threatening
illnesses such as cancers requiring bone-marrow transplants or other medical emergencies, knowing their
biological heritage can be a matter of life or death. Also, according to the American Medical Association,
it is important to have an accurate family history because genetic medicine is increasingly vital in the
treatment of many diseases.
Michigan Family Independence Agency statistics indicate that 30
percent of the nonmarital paternity tests performed in Michigan exclude the tested man from being the
child's biological father. The American Association of Blood Banks, which evaluated 280,000 paternity tests
in 1999, found similar numbers.
Because paternity fraud is so common, several states, including Georgia earlier this year, have passed
legislation allowing men greater opportunity to challenge paternity through DNA testing. A similar bill in
California was passed by the Legislature and awaits Gov. Gray Davis' signature. Alaska has a law that
requires unwed parents to establish paternity through genetic testing, thus insuring that child support
orders are issued only to biological fathers.
Virginia Forton, founder and executive director of Moms for Dads, a group that supports the proposed
reform legislation, says:
"Under the present system, it is easy for women to trick men and say 'this is your baby.' And it is the
men who step forward and take responsibility for 'their' kids who are the ones who are most likely to get
trapped. Everybody involved gets hurt."
Dianna Thompson is a founder and executive director of the American Coalition
for Fathers and Children in Washington, D.C. Glenn Sacks writes about gender issues from Winnetka, Calif.
The article contains info about children's identity fraud at The Hospital
for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
December 14, 2002.
Includes interview with employees of Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto,
Ontario, Canada who admit they deny children's identity information to husbands/male
partners of mothers who want to hide the real identity of their child because
they had an affair. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of The Child specifically
supports a child's human right to have a relationship with both his/her
biological parents. In addition, this article is proof that The Hospital
for Sick Children ("Sick Kids") supports paternity fraud.
Further "Sick Kids" supports a mother's rights only, which they view,
supersedes 3 other people's rights, namely, the rights of the biological
father, the rights of the mother's male partner/husband and the child's
identity rights.
Up to one in 25 dads could unknowingly
be raising another man's child, UK health researchers estimate.
Increasing use of genetic testing for medical and legal reasons means
Read More ..uples are discovering the biological proof of who fathered the child.
The Liverpool John Moores University team reached its estimate based on
research findings published between 1950 and 2004.
The study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Biological father
Professor Mark Bellis and his team said that the implications of so-called
paternal discrepancy were huge and largely ignored, even though the
incidence was increasing.
In the US, the number of paternity tests increased from 142,000 in 1991 to
310,490 in 2001.
An adulterous Spanish woman who conceived three children with her
lover has been ordered to pay £177,000 in 'moral damages' to her
husband.
The cuckolded man had believed that the three children were his until
a DNA test eventually proved they were fathered by another man.
The husband, who along with the other man cannot be named for legal
reasons to protect the children's identities, suspected his second wife
may have been unfaithful in 2001.
BEAUTIFUL women who have affairs can now blame it on their sex hormones.
Women with higher levels of oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, not only
look and feel more attractive, they are also more likely to cheat on their
partners, a new study has found.
One-night-stands are not what interest these flirtatious females, who
tend to have bigger breasts, relatively small waists and symmetrical faces
as a result of their high levels of oestradiol.
Rather, they adopt a strategy of serial monogamy, say the researchers,
led by Kristina Durante of the University of Texas.
Paternity Fraud & the Criminal Code of Canada
Paternity fraud: Is it or should it be a criminal offence under the Criminal Code of Canada?
Feminist organizations including the National Organization of Women (NOW)
has objected to legislation that requires the courts to vacate paternity
judgments against men who arent, in fact, the father.
Think about that. NOW wants some man, any man, to make child support
payments. The woman who doesnt even know who the father is, should not be
held responsible for her actions, is a sweet, loving, blameless mother who
seeks only to care for her child and if naming some schmuck as father who
never saw her before in his life helps her provide for the innocent babe,
well then, that's fine.
Last year, more than 3,000 DNA paternity tests were commissioned by
Australian men, and in almost a quarter of those cases, the test revealed that not only had their partners been
unfaithful, but the children they thought were theirs had been sired by someone else.Read More ..
The fairytale that saw Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott reunited with the son he thought he had given up for
adoption 27 years ago, ABC sound-recordist Daniel O'Connor, ended this week when DNA tests confirmed another man had
fathered Mr O'Connor.
The revelations were devastating for all involved, not least Mr O'Connor.
Still reeling from the emotional reunion with his mother, Kathy Donnelly, and Mr Abbott a few months ago, a simple
test of truth has thrown the trio into disarray a situation familiar to thousands of other Australians.
Paternity testing in Australia is a burgeoning industry.
The simplicity of the test cells are collected from a mouth swab grossly underestimates the seriousness of the
situation.
Proposed new laws will make it easier for fathers to recover child maintenance
payments if DNA testing reveals that they are not the child's father.
The Family Law Amendment Bill 2005 allows people who wrongly believed they
were the parent of a child to recover any child maintenance paid or property
transferred under an order of a court under the Family Law Act 1975 .
"The bill is intended to make it easier for people who find themselves in
this position to take recovery action without the need to initiate separate
proceedings for an order from a court of civil jurisdiction, such as a State,
Local or Magistrates court," Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said.
An acid sense of betrayal has been gnawing at Damon Adams since a DNA test showed that he is not the father of a
10-year-old girl born during his former marriage.
"Something changes in your heart," says Adams, 51, a dentist in Traverse City, Mich. "When she walks through the
door, you're seeing the product of an affair."
But Michigan courts have spurned the DNA results Adams offered in his motions to stop paying $23,000 a year in child
support. Now, Adams is lobbying the state Legislature for relief and joining other men in a national movement
against what they call "paternity fraud." Read More ..
Up to three million Britons may be wrong
about who their real father is , experts claim. But using DNA paternity
tests to discover the truth can cause its own problems.
BBC, U.K., May 16, 2003
Dad's got blue eyes, Baby brown...
When Tessa found out she was pregnant after fertility treatment, she felt
a mix of delight and doubt.
This wasn't simply pre-baby nerves - she suspected that her husband might
not be the father. For Tessa had started sleeping with a colleague when the
stress of the ongoing treatment became too much.
Keen to build a family with her husband, she let him believe the baby was
his. But her lover threatened to reveal all if she ended the affair, and Tessa
soon fell pregnant again. This time, her lover started to make nuisance calls
to her home.
Tessa had no choice but to tell her husband. "I said to him, 'I've had an
affair and you may not be the father of my children.' So with that, he went
up the stairs, got dressed and left. And that was it," Tessa says in Women Who
Live a Lie, a programme for the BBC's Five Live Report.
THERE IS A story I used to find hilarious in my high school years about
a not too bright man. He was light skinned, his wife was of similar hue,
but their first child was born with very dark complexion (darker dan Bello,
blacker dan Blakka).
When the man wondered aloud about the baby's complexion his wife assured
him that the child was born dark because the child was conceived in darkness
(they had sex with the lights off). The man accepted the explanation. Because
he loved his wife dearly, he also ignored the fact that the child had other
obvious signs of resemblance to the young dark skinned man who did their
gardening. To fix the problem, the husband put flood lights, strobe lights,
spotlights and forty other lights in the bed room so there would be no more
darkness to create dark babies.
"Supporters of paternity
identification bills point to a 1999 study by the American Association of
Blood Banks that found that in 30 percent of 280,000 blood tests performed
to determine paternity, the man tested was not the biological father."
Read More ..
Michael Lautar was devastated when he
learned his first wife was cheating on him,
and then crushed to discover the then
5-year-old girl who called him "Daddy"
wasn't really his daughter.
Next came the sucker punch.
Lautar is under court order to pay nearly $800 a month in
child support and other expenses, despite the fact his
ex-wife has admitted in Allegheny County court papers that
Lautar is not the girl's father. The child was born during
their marriage. After the couple divorced, the mother
married the girl's biological father. The mother, the father
and the daughter live together in Moon, according to papers
filed in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.
"I'm stuck in this rip-off, this fraud," said Lautar, 40,
of North Strabane. "It's paternity fraud, is what it is. ...
And the state is enforcing this fraud."
Lack of free Family Court Ordered DNA Paternity testing abuses Dads and Kids.
"The Labour Government is abusing fathers and children by failing to legislate for free DNA testing
to establish paternity", is how Jim Nicolle, spokesperson for the New Zealand Child Support Reform
Network, responds to United Futures call for Family Court Ordered DNA paternity tests.
A men's rights group has called for mandatory paternity testing
of all babies after government figures revealed almost 600 instances of
men compelled to financially support children they did not father.
Since changes to child support laws four years ago, there had been 586
cases of men successfully using DNA testing to show they were not biologically
related to children they had been financially supporting, the federal government
has revealed to The Australian.
The Visayan Daily Star, Bacolod City, Philippines, BY CARLA GOMEZ, February 28, 2009
Bacolod Regional Trial Court Judge Ray Alan Drilon has annulled the marriage of a Negrense couple after a DNA test showed that the child borne by the wife was not the biological offspring of the husband who works abroad.
The family court judge ruled that the marriage of the couple, whose names are being withheld by the DAILY STAR on the request of the court, was null and void.
Due to fraud committed by the wife in getting her overseas worker husband to marry her, properties acquired during their marriage are awarded in favor of the husband, the judge said in his decision, a copy of which was furnished the DAILY STAR yesterday.
The judge also declared that since the overseas worker is not the biological, much less the legitimate father of the child of the woman, the Civil Registrar is ordered to change the surname of the child to the mother's maiden name and remove the name of the plaintiff as father of the child.
The complainant said he was working as an electronics engineer in the United Arab Emirates and on his return to the Philippines in 2001, his girlfriend of 10 years with whom he had sex, showed him a pregnancy test result showing that she was pregnant.
On receiving the news he was overjoyed and offered to marry her. Shortly after he went to Saudi Arabia to work, and his wife gave birth to a baby girl in the same year.
The birth of the child only five months after their marriage puzzled him but his wife told him that the baby was born prematurely, so he believed her, the husband said.
Read More ..
From correspondents in Rio de Janeiro Agence France-Presse
September 18, 2007
A BRAZILIAN woman has been ordered by the country's Supreme Court to pay
a hefty fine to her husband for failing to mention that he was not the
father of two of their children.
The Rio de Janeiro woman, whose identity was not disclosed, was ordered
to pay her husband over $US100,000 ($120,170 Australian Dollars) for having hidden from him for
almost two decades that the children in question were fathered by a lover,
the court's offices said yesterday.
The husband also had sought damages from his wife's lover, the court
said.
