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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’d love to read a steelman for
Why a father should be forced to pay child support without a paternity test
Why, if the biological father is different, they shouldn’t be the one required to pay the child support instead
For example, I care about the mother’s and child’s interests, but how will 1) not create animosity from suspicious fathers, and 2) not decrease child support since the resentful adoptive father will try to evade it (at least as much as the biological one)?
My first big scissor statement was reading Reddit (outrage fanfiction) “my husband asked for a paternity test and I divorced him”. But I now understand that perspective: believing that your husband will always be suspicious of you, that they think with apathetic game-theoretic logic, while you want selfless and unconditional “true love”. I understand that acting like an unemotional autist is not rational, not harmless, not me (because I have emotions, desires, and even my logic is biased for them).
But I can’t even imagine a decent argument for 1) or 2).
Are you asking about situations where the man is married to the mother? Or other situations?
I'm not an expert on this subject, but as far as I know:
(1) If the man is not married to the mother and does not acknowledge the child, then if she wants child support from him over his objection, she has to pursue a proceeding to establish paternity. In that proceeding, he is generally entitled to a paternity test. Probably there are some injustices in this process, for example if the man is tricked into acknowledging paternity, that could be a problem. Or if he is unaware of the paternity proceeding, having not been properly served. But for the most part, a cautious man can avoid being tagged with child support for another man's children, provided he is not married to the mother.
(2) If the man is married to the mother, it's a much bigger problem for him. In a lot of jurisdictions, he's completely screwed. In others, he has a limited amount of time to dispute paternity. I am pretty sure this rule has its roots in common law traditions from the distant past, in which there was no DNA testing available. (Of course, back then arguably a man was in a better position to prevent contact between his wife and other men.) I would guess it carries on today out of a combination of cultural inertia and gynocentrism. To be sure, it's very unfair to men, but there are still workarounds. For example, a man can secretly test his children and if he is not the father, make an excuse to move the family to a jurisdiction where this would be a basis to disclaim paternity.
Again, I think it's mainly a matter of cultural inertia. Although it would be interesting to see what would happen if a married woman ended up getting pregnant with the child of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.
The prohibition on challenging paternity only applies when the parties are married. Changing this wouldn't even make sense because you don't make support payments or deal with visitation rights when living in the same household. If you file for divorce then the marriage ends and you very much can challenge paternity. While you won't have to make child support payments, you also won't get any visitation rights.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Do you disagree with anything I have said?
I'm not sure what the point would be of legally disestablishing paternity would be if you're married. If you want to do it for your own edification then buy a test off of Amazon; there's no role for the court to play here.
You can't think of why a married man would want to legally establish he'd been cheated on and duped?
I suspect what's going on here is that @Rov_Scam is attacking some kind of straw man. Why would a married man wish to establish non-paternity? Obviously, the answer is that -- if the law allows it -- he would like to get a divorce and get out of paying child support. If he discovered he was not the father, either through an informal DNA test or some other way, then in theory he could file for divorce and, as part of that proceeding, ask for the Court to find that he's not the father and therefore he's not on the hook for child support. As part of that proceeding, he would presumably request a formal DNA test. (Of course this is only if a non-paternity proceeding is permitted in the relevant jurisdiction.)
Here's what I said before:
Now, obviously it kind of goes without saying that if a husband is formally disputing paternity, he's going to be doing it in connection with a divorce proceeding. Admittedly, I did not spell that out. Which -- I suspect -- was the opening @Rov_Scam needed to come in and pretend that I was talking about a non-paternity proceeding brought without any kind of divorce. Which I agree would be silly.
Which is why I strongly suspect that @Rov_Scam is just going after a strawman for whatever reason. But who knows? In another post I asked him to QUOTE me if I said anything he disputes.
I'm not trying to establish a straw man, I just don't understand why you continued to argue after I said you could disestablish paternity as part of a divorce proceeding.
I arbitrarily looked at the laws in the number of states and I couldn't find any that prohibited this.
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