Painless Paternity Tests, but the Truth May Hurt

New York Times, U.S.A., October 2, 2005, By MIREYA NAVARRO

JOSEPH DIXON said he was not exactly thrilled when his girlfriend of one and a half years told him she was pregnant. But, Mr. Dixon said, he did not want her to have an abortion and was determined to do the right thing.

"I told her I'd definitely be there" for her, said Mr. Dixon, 29, a hotel doorman in Chicago. And he was. The two didn't marry but settled into the common rhythm of separate but shared parenthood, he said, allowing him to see his daughter whenever he wanted.

But when Mr. Dixon arranged to purchase a life insurance policy to give his 4-year-old daughter financial security last January, the results of a required DNA test delivered stunning news.

"The probability of paternity is 0%," the results read. He was not his daughter's biological father.

Like an increasing number of men, Mr. Dixon found his life spun around as the result of a paternity test. There was shock, then deep hurt and finally a realization. "I never had any idea she'd been cheating," Mr. Dixon said of his ex-girlfriend. "We knew each other, at least I thought."

With costs of paternity testing down - to $500 or less per test from nearly $1,000 just 10 years ago - and with the testing so simple it can be done at home (a swab from inside the cheeks does the job), DNA testing has become more common to settle legal disputes and questions about identity. A survey by the American Association of Blood Banks showed that more than 354,000 tests to establish parentage were performed in 2003, compared with about 149,100 in 1995.

Caroline Caskey, chief executive officer of Identigene, a DNA testing company in Houston that has advertised its services nationally in magazines and billboards, said that in about 30 percent of the paternity tests the presumed father turns out to be not the biological father, and that is consistent throughout the industry.
Although the tests ostensibly offer clarity, those who are left to wrestle with the results find themselves in unchartered emotional terrain from the moment the question of a test is raised, lawyers who specialize in family law say. After all, merely suggesting a paternity test could poison a relationship forever. If the results are negative, the emotional consequences could be life-shattering for everyone concerned.

Men like Mr. Dixon said they had no reason to doubt the women. But other men are reluctant to take a DNA test even when they are in the middle of legal battles over children and their lawyer suggests they confirm paternity as a first step. Some even flat out refuse.

"It's a cultural taboo in this country," said Jeffery M. Leving, a lawyer and fathers' rights advocate in Chicago. "It's very unmanly to request a DNA test to determine that your child is your biological child. It's emasculating and many men would not do it."

Paternity tests have been a staple of tabloids and popular entertainment for years. The designer and supermodel Elizabeth Hurley had a nasty public spat with her ex-boyfriend, the Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, before a DNA test proved he was the father of her child. A DNA test is what apparently led the actor Robert Blake to marry Bonny Lee Bakely, who bore his child and later was murdered in a car outside restaurant in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles.

And now there is Amber Frey, the "other woman" in the Laci Peterson murder case. She recently acknowledged that a DNA test proved the man who was paying child support for the older of her two children was not the child's father. Even the two-timing Gabrielle in "Desperate Housewives" has just added a new wrinkle to the show's already tangled plot line with a case of paternity deception: she gave fake test results to her husband, who asked for the DNA evidence because he suspects the baby his wife is carrying may be the gardener's.

In any case where paternity is in dispute - no one knows exactly how many - the issues can be so jarring some of the men interviewed for this article had trouble speaking or broke into tears when recounting their experience.

Dr. Enrique Terrazas, 39, a clinical pathologist from California, said his ex-wife eventually told him that one of his two children was not his child. His second wife had urged him to do the test because of a lack of resemblance between father and the child. In his view, what kind of person would have asked his own wife for a DNA test?

"It's like prenuptials," he said. "If you ask, it can be interpreted as saying 'I don't trust you,' or 'I want to protect my interest.' Unless you suspect infidelity and unless you have seen proof, to say I want a DNA test you're basically saying, 'You're cheating on me.' "

Dr. Terrazas cried on the telephone as he recounted the fallout. Because of the resulting dispute over child support payments, he said, he no longer sees his child regularly. His ex-wife's current husband is in the process of adopting the child.

He said that his relationship with the child "has been destroyed."

Dr. Terrazas's former wife answered a request for an interview with an e-mail message that said, "I do not want anything to do with any media coverage that focuses adversely" on her children. It is the fallout faced by the children, most child advocates and lawyers say, that is most traumatic. And the men who seek to halt child support payments - an act many of them say is an attempt to right a wrong, rather than to abandon the children they still care about - are surprised to learn that they are still required by many courts to continue to pay because it is deemed in the best interest of the child, especially if the man is the only father that child has ever known.

Some men have organized groups like the United States Citizens Against Paternity Fraud (www.paternityfraud.com) to call for mandatory DNA testing at the time of birth and laws that exempt men from child support if they are proven not to be the biological father.

"It's really a lose-lose situation," Debbie Kline, executive director of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support, a child support advocacy organization, said of the situations when parentage isn't determined until long after birth. "And for the children, if this man is removed from the child's life, it's going to be devastating."

To prevent grief down the line, Mr. Leving said he recommends that his clients get a DNA test if they have a child out of wedlock. Other lawyers say men should think about the test even within a marriage if there's suspicion of an affair or any circumstance that does not pass "the smell test."

"I think the real bottom line is that for a few hundred dollars you can buy peace of mind that the child is yours," said Randall M. Kessler, a family law lawyer in Atlanta. Still, most men resort to DNA testing only when they are pushed. Lawyers like Mr. Leving say clients often request the test when they are being denied visitation rights and become suspicious of the reasons. In other instances friends or relatives - and often a current girlfriend or wife - might raise suspicion that a child is not theirs, or the mother herself might blurt it out.

"It happens in the heat of an argument, and the woman goes, 'You're not even the father of the child!' " said Taron James, who formed the group Veterans Fighting Paternity Fraud in California in 2002 after he fought for years to stop child support payments for a child that was not his.

In the most recent case to make headlines, Ms. Frey went to court to set aside the paternity judgment against the man who was paying child support for her 4-year-old daughter and attached the results of a DNA test that showed the girl's father was actually someone else.

Gloria Allred, the lawyer for Ms. Frey, said her client had believed "in good faith" that the man paying child support was the girl's father and argued that while women obviously have the responsibility to establish who the father is, so do men.

"Any man who's alleged to be the father of a child born outside of marriage is entitled to take that DNA test" to establish paternity, she said. "If he did not take the test, then he needs to take responsibility for his failure to do so. He shouldn't blame the mother."
But Glenn Wilson, who represents Anthony Flores, the child's presumed father, countered that unlike his client, "she knew who she had sex with."

"They were in what he thought was a monogamous relationship," he said. Despite such serious implications, like children not knowing their actual medical history, some of the men, and even their lawyers, do not entirely fault the mothers, who say the wrong man is the father of their child for a variety of reasons. Some of the women, they said, are in denial that there could be more than one possible father.

Others do not want to be seen as adulterers. And still others believe the truth will destroy relationships both with their partner and their child.

A spokesman for one mother who did not want to be interviewed explained why she had not been honest with her husband.

"The boy would have found out," he said. "She wanted to protect the boy."

But some women are Read More ..liberate in what Mr. Leving called "father shopping," picking the best provider possible even when he is not the true father. Lawyers like Mr. Leving advise to take the test without the mother's knowledge, "that way if he's the father, he doesn't have to start conflict with the mother."
Mr. Dixon said that he was floored when he got the DNA test results, but that he was not angry at his girlfriend.

"I was just really hurt," he said. "That was four years you're getting attached, a long time to put your heart into somebody."
He said he insisted on both of them telling the girl right away.

"I told her that I still loved her, but that I didn't want her to grow up with a lie," he said. "She was shocked. Her first question was who's my dad and where's he? I kind of left it up to her mom to tell her."

The mother refused a request for an interview through Mr. Dixon. As it turned out, Mr. Dixon said, the biological father is not in the picture, and "I was lucky enough that the relationship between me and the mother remained civilized."

Mr. Dixon, who also has a son from an earlier relationship, and the girl have gone back to their old routine. He regularly picks her up after school and delivers her back to her mother before heading to work at the hotel, he said.

Little has changed, except that he now calls her "goddaughter" and she calls him "goddaddy."
Most of the time, anyway.

"Sometimes," he said, "she still calls me dad."