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I’ll raise the issue of paternity testing as potential culture war fuel.
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the specifics. But anyway, the practical reality is that a husband having such a test done on the kids without consulting anyone else is illegal. Basically there is never any permission given to do such tests.
On one of the now-defunct Manosphere sites, namely Dalrock’s blog, a regular commenter who went under the online name Novaseeker made a prediction about 10 or more years ago: not only will there not be any new legislation making paternity tests easier, as usually demanded online by angry men’s rights activists, but the opposite will happen. Namely: a growing number of men, usually in case of facing an initiated divorce, will start tinkering with these laws, covertly getting paternity tests done, basically on the black market, and this in turn will result on corresponding legislation becoming even more punitive and restrictive. There’ll be heavy fines, maybe even prison sentences etc.
Again, this was written more than 10 years ago. I wonder if anything of this has materialized or not.
I think this is less broadly true. I'm not familiar with Europe but based on my research on the United States there are only 15 or so states that seem to have any regulation of genetic testing of another person. To the extent this conduct is prohibited there, it's prohibited under general genetic testing/privacy/medical decision laws (requiring consent of both parents) rather than some kind of specific anti-paternity-testing law.
More broadly, I think the law recognizes an obvious distinction between legal parentage and genetic parentage. There's an (often rebuttable) presumption that the two are the same but they don't have to be.
Imagine a couple adopt an infant. They remain together for several more years and then divorce. Can a court order the non-custodial parent pay child support to the non-custodial parent? Should the biological parents (if they are even identifiable) be on the hook for the child support? There's no question here that the parents are not the biological parents of the child but I think courts would still happily order one to pay child support. There's an obvious analogy to a situation where a man signs a birth certificate. Acts as a child's father for some years. Only for it to come to light they are not genetically related.
There's also an obvious problem with this analogy: in the case of adoption the choice was made knowingly whereas in this case it was the result of fraud on the part of the custodial parent.
I agree, which is why it makes sense to have mandatory testing. When the (putative) parents sign the birth certificate, they provide a saliva sample and they get a notification a week or two later either confirming biological parentage or not. If the man who signed the birth certificate is not the father, he gets a limited time period, like 90 days, to formally withdraw his signature.
If things worked that way, then yeah, you could say it's analogous to adoption.
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