Should Paternity Tests Be Mandatory?

Read that again. This is not equating in terms of severity. Actual point, over your head.

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And yet you seem oblivious to the conditions that have to hold for your comparison to be apt. To wit: The ‘crime’ of false paternity must be of similar (im)moral status to that of slavery. Otherwise, the comparison is literally absurd. Consider: We look back with disgust, horror and shame that our forebears even countenanced slavery, much less abided it. Is it your suggestion that, 200 years hence, our descendants will have a similar experience looking back at our failure to stigmatize and criminalize false paternity?

Again the point is not about the person who brought it up; it’s about the policy itself.

Difficult to answer as, absent signs/symptoms, there would be no predicate for ordering such a test.

Is there a tsunami of societal problems related to false paternity that I’m not aware of?

And you don’t see option 1 as fraud? (In practice, I think option 2 is a red herring. If cuckdad wasn’t having sex with her, he should be able to put 2 and 2 together. I suppose there is a corner case where she figures out she’s pregnant, has sex with cuckdad quickly, and smooths the timing over so he doesn’t figure it out. But mostly this is about Option 1).

What I’m saying is that most relationships have assumptions of fidelity built in. That should be the legal baseline. If your wife has a kid and doesn’t tell you it might not be yours, she’s implying that it definitely is. If it’s not definite, it’s fraud to not let you know.

Um, no. You are so one dimensional, it isn’t even funny. There is no equating of severity, period. I did no such thing. You should be ashamed and owe me an apology.

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I can’t even imagine how devastating it would be to find out a child you thought was yours for 18-years isn’t yours. I imagine you’d still love the kid the same, but the mother. So much hate.

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I don’t disagree with the policy either. What’s the negative here? Hurt feelings when people act like the option of the test = a direct insult to the woman?

Fraud in a legal sense? Meh. Fraud in a moral sense? Absolutely

We’ll have to agree to disagree. I don’t think cheating should be illegal, just immoral.

In a moral sense, 100% agree.

Um, no. That isn’t the comparison or point…Cripes!

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Here you go.

If that is the case, the comparison is inapt.

How is it anything but a direct insult to the woman?

This ain’t rocket science… If the baby looks like the mailman you gotta swab that baby’s mouth

No… This is very rare. No need to kill a fly with a sledge hammer.

I’m not saying it can’t be inferred as insulting. I’m asking if that’s all the objection we can come up with for offering it?

Doesn’t seem like a great reason to not offer men a paternity test if they elect for it.

It isn’t even an if. I never did. Nor is it inapt.

The absence of laws against something does NOT mean that the something isn’t wrong and/or shouldn’t be rectified now or in the future. That was clearly the point, and doesn’t require some equal units of evilness. Though defrauding a man out of a significant chunk of his life is still a significantly evil act. There are men who who will never have children of their own having found out later in life they have been lied to (directly or through omission.) Time/youth, money, potentially ones own biological children, etc.

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Depends on how old your daughter is. If she’s over 21, a pap smear is recommended every 3 years.

This is a false dichotomy. When it happens it has a huge negative effect on many lives. And it happens. Doesn’t have to be a tsunami to be serious.

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Not sure what you mean here. But if you mean the test should be available if a parent requests it, sure.

At this juncture, at the very least it indicates the issue in question is not a cut-and-dried one like, say, slavery (hyperbolic comparisons notwithstanding).

No. Slavery is a significantly evil act. This is orders of magnitude less evil (if it is evil at all).

A Pap smear checks for evidence of cervical cancer, not HPV.

It would have to be tsunami (in either size or effect) in order to rise to the level of mandatory testing.

I think where this crosses over from moral into legal is when you start to talk about the financial implications. At a minimum, the status quo, where a man can be forced to support a child he supported in the past even though he found it isn’t his, is a case of the law actively enforcing moral fraud.

Cheating itself might be a moral issue rather than a legal one. However, if resources pass hands on an assumption of fidelity, deception becomes a financial crime rather than a moral infraction. It isn’t the sex that was the crime. It was taking financial resources on false pretenses.

My point about fidelity being the legal assumption was just that cuckolding a man is fraud even if the woman didn’t explicitly state the child was his. If the relationship is such that he would assume he is the father, it becomes fraud simply through her omission of not telling him. Once she accepts resources, she has taken those resources on false pretenses and that is where the line to a legal financial crime has been crossed.

So is your issue that we offer it to everyone equally and allow them to deny?

I very well may be wrong here, but I believe the paperwork I signed was an explicit agreement to be the legal father as I was rejecting the paternity test. Not a Dr or a lawyer so grain of salt.

I get what you’re saying, I just don’t agree re: the legal line

No, it is significantly evil. It could be magnitudes less than slavery and still be significantly evil. If it is evil at all? We are talking about defrauding people out of choosing what do with their own lives! If? How is that even an if? That is time, a resource that can not be replaced, unknowingly invested into a lie. For nearly two dozen years, at the least. A person’s actual life spent. If? And there are men who will have medical procedures done, not matter how minor or potentially reversible, based on the lie of someone else, thinking they had enough BIOLOGICAL children? If?!

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Family courts don’t care though. If you have a guy who has resources and is willing at one point to support a child. Bam. That’s a child who isn’t a ward of the state.

Family courts aren’t going to set the precedent of allowing fathers to escape their obligations creating even more children who are wards of the state.

The solution to this problem is to be really, really prudent about who you sleep with. Almost like it’s an adult decision with life rending consequences if you choose wrong.

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What paperwork? I don’t remember signing any paperwork for either of my kids and I wasn’t offered a paternity test (not that I needed it those blondies are definitely mine).