Duped dads, diapers and DNA Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe Monday, April 30,
2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 19
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/30/ED212030.DTL
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Boston -- IF HE were in jail for mass murder, he would have been sprung by
now. After all, the DNA evidence proved that he was the wrong man.
So how come a man who has been proven scientifically not to be the biological
father must go on paying child support? How come the same DNA test that can
force one man into paternal obligation can't free another?
Last week, a Massachusetts man joined a fraternity that now has members as
far flung as Florida and Texas, Georgia and Ohio. They are known in the media
lingo as Duped Dads.
These are men who discovered that the children they believed were their
biological offspring were not. And then they discovered that in some courts, DNA
is not necessarily destiny.
There is little new about duped dads. Throughout literary history, the man
tricked into raising another's child was a stock figure of cuckolded buffoonery.
But in the eyes of the law, the husband in any marriage was legally the father.
Now, biological certainty intrudes into legal precedent and new scientific
tests produce new legal tests. In the fallout of divorce and child support,
courts are being asked to decide what's fair for men and what's best for
children. They are also being asked what exactly makes a man a father.
Life, it turns out, is nowhere nearly as clear cut as biology. In the
Massachusetts case, the unwed father had passed up the chance for a DNA test. He
signed on the dotted paternity line when Cheryl was born.
Over many years and despite many suspicions, he was called "daddy"
and acted as one. His parents were her grandparents and twice he sought more
rights to visitation. In short, as the court noted, "Cheryl grew to know
and to rely on him as her father, and he enjoyed her love and
companionship." Only after the mother asked for more money did he take the
DNA test and head to court.
But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided that he was too late to
resign from fatherhood as if it were genehood.
This "victory" for the child is cast as a defeat for the man. The
duped dads lawsuits are, after all, brought into courtrooms under the flag of
testing men's rights to cut their fatherhood ties and responsibilities.
But what would happen to men's rights if DNA was used to strip them of
contact with children? How many men who had changed a thousand diapers would
fairly howl if DNA evidence was used to sever their relationship with the
children they raised?
What does make a father? Diapers or DNA? In fact, family law seems to be
going in two directions at once. We are giving more recognition to nonbiological
relationships and more weight to DNA. As men cry fraud, several states have
either passed or are considering laws that would automatically end a man's
child-support obligation.
The anger that fuels these cases and the laws to set men free has less to do
with the kids than with the women who deceived -- either by what was said or
unsaid. Do we need to say that such family secrets are explosive? Corrosive? Do
we need to say that deliberate deception dupes not one man but two? Or that the
real victim of deception is the child?
I suspect that the availability of DNA testing eventually may make such
secrets extinct. But today I find myself wondering about a 7-year-old girl.
"I still love the little girl," said the man who sued to be rid of
fatherhood. How will he explain why he now calls Cheryl the little girl. Not my
little girl.
