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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.
That is not remotely emotional blackmail. It's perfectly normal to be upset when your spouse doesn't trust you and demands to check up on your behavior just in case you're up to something.
Not when it comes to legally binding documents. "Trust, but verify" is the way healthy relationships work. "Trust, but don't you dare verify" is the way abusive ones work.
No. A healthy relationship works on "trust". That's it. Not "trust, but verify" (which is in fact a lack of trust), not "trust, but don't you dare verify". Simply trust.
That would only make sense if you view trust as a binary. Typical usage treats it instead as a spectrum, with healthy relationships requiring less verification for the same level of risk.
Trust is a binary. While you may not extend trust to a person in all areas, for any given area, you either trust someone or you do not. There's no middle ground.
Credence is a probabilty measure, and even marginalizing it onto a single binary question gives you values on a continuum interval. Probability measures on a binary set are pairs (x,1-x), x∈[0,1], not binary values. Let's see if we can at least come to an agreement that there are more points along that interval than just the two endpoints:
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and I continue seeing no evidence to the contrary, I would believe her.
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and yet there was a suspicious death of someone she hated and circumstantial evidence pointing toward her, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me surveillance video, I would be pretty paranoid any time I saw a stranger who looked like her, but I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me video evidence and she had been weirdly missing during the time of death and her Google Maps timeline had an inexplicable gap, I would expect to believe her answers, but I would ask her a lot of questions.
If she'd said she could never kill anybody, but I had just walked in on her alone in a room standing over a dead body holding a bloody knife, I would initially believe her previous statement was most likely false, but in lieu of even more incriminating evidence I'd believe her "someone just dropped this knife and ran out the door, then I picked it up and wandered over here and found the body!" story.
If she was covered in blood too and I'd seen nobody leaving the scene as I approached, the story would have to be firmer for me to believe her, and the available evidence supporting it.
If also the room had a nannycam and its 4k recording showed her doing the stabbing, I would start looking to confirm my hopeful alternative theory that it was hacked and an AI-generated video uploaded, but until I found some evidence of that I'd believe she was probably guilty and I'd definitely be cooperating with the cops.
If I'd walked into the room just in time to witness her stabbing someone to death, I would end up asking a therapist about the possibility that I'd hallucinated the event, not just about trauma, but I'd consider the possibility that I'd gone mad too slim to say it was something I "believe".
If in the room was also a group full of people I trust who also witnessed the stabbing and who reaffirmed to me repeatedly afterwards that they all saw what I saw, I'd believe them, and it would take quite a bit later to convince me that I'd been having repeated distinct but coherent hallucinations.
So out of these 10 statements, considering my fraction of a point for statement 7 balances out the not-quite-a-full-point for 6 and almost-a-full-point for 5, my trust for her scores roughly a 6. In my defense and hers, I created a test that deserves a hell of a grading curve, and IMHO I'm pretty well calibrated at that "6". If I would believe her at even higher levels of this hypothetical I'd be too credulous; at lower levels I'd be too suspicious of her. It still seems fair to say I trust her, doesn't it?
I think some of our mutual friends and family would score a 5 here; IMHO my judgement of her character is better, but surely a 5 should be tolerable, even from family or someone very close? We shouldn't ghost or shun or disown anyone like that, right? It would still be fair to say someone trusts her, if they could watch a video that looks like her killing someone and say "we need to find the doppelganger". On this scale the cops' trust for her is only around a 1.9, and we could round that down to "don't trust her", but that's still a big step up from 0, right?
I don't think anyone should score a 10 here. They would be undeniably more trusting of her than I am, but would that make them better people than me, even to her? I wouldn't think a 7 was too gullible, but I also wouldn't think they were my moral superiors.
Trust is a prior credence. The more you have, the more contrary evidence can be survived by your posterior credence. There's no total order on probability distributions, so this is already a simplification, but even after oversimplifying: some people have a little trust, some have more, and some have a lot. Nobody who isn't utterly incapable of forgiveness (or of changing their mind) ever gets down to zero trust, and nobody who wouldn't stay in the Flavor-Aid line at a Jim Jones farewell party ever gets up to maximal trust.
I get that it's tempting to oversimplify. We don't even teach Bayes' theorem on discrete probability spaces in high school, much less how to compute or marginalize a posterior on an arbitrary probability space. So it's tempting to just reduce the options to either "I believe" or "I don't believe", and mostly that works well enough. The Pirahã mostly get by counting with "one", "two", and "many". Different strokes for different folks.
But please, don't try to turn oversimplification into relationship advice. There will be times when you or your partner are suspicious, about one thing or another. This will mean that you and they should ask and answer some questions, and ideally those answers will mean your trust for each other will increase (not from 0 to 1, but in that direction), because one of you was open enough to ask for reassurance and the other was understanding and open enough to provide it. This will not mean that your relationship is doomed.
Man, how did I forget to get "Your Soulmate will never make you feel untrusting or admit to needing help trusting you" on the list?!
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