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This has always been morally insane.
I can't think of any other areas where society and law has some justification along the lines of "well it wasn't you, but someone needs to pay for it, and you are the easiest to catch."
Imagine this justification used for crimes:
[state]: pay the fine for running a red light
[person]: but i didnt run a red light
[state]: Well someone ran that red light, and we can't let it be known that running red lights will go unpunished. You were nearby and I've already captured you, it would be too much work to go get the real culprit if it turns out it wasn't you.
That is a light crime and it already feels heinous. More serious crimes with more serious punishments feels even more heinous. Imagine the above but for a crime that carries a lifetime prison sentence.
Just reversing the gender roles shows how insane this can be. A husband and wife. The husband wants kids, the wife does not. The husband manages to somehow adopt a kid without the wife's knowledge or consent (or he even forges her signature and commits some level of fraud in getting her assigned as the adoptive mother). Or the husband gets a surrogate to carry his baby, then he and the surrogate lie at the hospital about the mother's identity and he brings home a kid that isn't the wife's.
The wife then files for divorce because the husband clearly betrayed her trust. The wife then must pay child support to the husband for the raising of the adopted kid.
One of those scenarios might be the only way such insane parenting laws get reversed. Or they will just carve out an exception and send the man to jail without the slightest hitch in their step at the dissonance of their actions.
Its also a weird take on the responsibility level of the women involved. A women can't be expected to know for certain who the father is, but can be expected to raise a child? Like what?! Raising a child is way harder than knowing who the father is. In most cases not knowing who the father is would also be a demonstration of incompetence. If you claim to care about the welfare of the child, maybe having them raised by a woman that can't keep track of her sexual partners is not a great idea. Even if they aren't keeping constant track, once they know the due date of the baby they should be able to narrow down the conception to a 1-2 week time frame.
In a sane world we would be using this as an example of why Utilitarians shouldn't be in charge of writing laws.
Scenario: A person roles into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the [organ that can be lived without]. The shooter has the same blood type as the victim.
Question: Is it ok to take the organ from the shooter to replace the organ of the wounded person?
Utilitarian: You can take the organ from the healthy person in the waiting room, they are easier to find and might have been the shooter anyways.
One way to fix this would be to just normalize genetic testing after birth for everyone. Compared to all the other healthcare costs of giving birth, a 23-and-me style genetic test is an utterly trivial expense. It is certainly good for the parents to know if their new baby has any genetic disease, especially if they can obtain the info without ending up in a government or industry database.
And it is trivial for the father to also verify that he is indeed the father.
After all, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by it.
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Another aspect is that in the age of IVF, women can become victims of parentage fraud just as well. Of course, it would require the fertility clinic to be in on it.
I think it would not be very hard to bodymod a man so that instead of sperm, he is squirting a fertilized egg of his preferred genetic partner. I doubt that this would lead to implantation very often, though, fertilized eggs are not very mobile. One would need a microscopic robot bringing the payload where it needs to go. Still, not something which seems out of reach for this century.
Once women can no longer be certain of their genetic motherhood, I am sure their attitude towards genetic testing will change.
If my husband demanded a paternity test for our kids, I'd be very offended. If he couldn't trust me that much, does he even want to be married?
But if it was just standard at every birth, I wouldn't care at all.
Maybe a state will normalize it for some reason and the rest will follow suit.
I suspect that we're moving in a different direction though. Many states are making the spouse of the mother is listed on the birth certificate by default, even if they obviously are not the father. For example, two lesbians end up on the birth certificate and that's affirming and cute under the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). There seems to be a trend towards "intended parents" over genetic parent.
If intended parents matter more to the state than genetic parent, it doesn't make sense to start genetic testing. It would just be a triggering reminder that two women can't actually make a baby on their own.
This is textbook emotional blackmail. If you take offense to his verification of highly sensitive and legally important information, I question if you actually want to be married.
Are you married?
Let's say there was a test with 99% accuracy that would determine if you have had sex with someone else (maybe a genital swab of you and your wife that would identify bacteria from another women.) Your wife out of the blue demands that you take the test. The implication is that she suspects you have been cheating on her. You had a healthy relationship. You thought she trusted you. You never would even think of another woman.
Wouldn't this be off-putting to say the least? You thought you had one kind of relationship, one where it was you two, forever together, just you and her til death. And then suddenly it appears that she is in some other relationship, one in which you would cheat.
Yes, I am married and similar emotional blackmail nearly changed that. No. Women do not deserve "trust" in this case since they are guaranteed such knowledge naturally. If you don't care enough about your husband to grant him the same privilege that biology grants you, you don't deserve him.
I do not have a natural guarantee that my husband is faithful to me. All I can guarantee is that I am faithful to him.
Also see my response here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3726/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/440420?context=8#context
Men and women stand equal in their lack of natural guarantees about faithfulness, but not in their guarantees about parentage: you can present him with a child and falsely claim it is his. He can't present you with a child and falsely claim it is yours.
If I came out of a coma or had some head trauma that caused me to lose some time, and my husband earnestly presented a child to me as my own, then I would believe him.
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