Paternity Testing: A Blessing or a Curse

The jury is still out on whether the now easily available paternity tests are a blessing, a blessing in disguise or a curse.

            The School of thought which holds that paternity testing is a blessing will argue that the easy availability of DNA-based paternity tests has had a liberating effect on both men and women. For the men, a simple DNA-based paternity test offers opportunity of knowing – for sure – whether the child they are setting up to bring up is indeed theirs’ or whether they are having games played on them – a piece of knowledge which many of our men forefathers would have given anything for. Through such a DNA test, paternity, like maternity, becomes a certainty – beating the age old adage where maternity was said to be almost always a matter of certainty, with paternity always being seen as matter of presumption. For women too, paternity testing offers the opportunity of nailing men who go around fathering children and the abdicating their paternal responsibilities. Now while before the advent of DNA-based paternity testing the courts could dismiss the woman’s case (where she happened to suing for child support) on account of lack of enough evidence, the modern woman armed with a DNA test result showing the man in question to be the child’s father has a far better chance of success in her case.   

On the other hand, the school of thought which holds the view that paternity testing is a curse argues that such testing has destabilized the classical approach to parenthood; an approach which many feel was serving us just as well. In this classical approach to parenthood, having children was appreciated for its social value, rather than physical value. In this regard then, people had children to keep their ‘names’ - rather than their genes - alive. Of course our innate longing – according to way we have been programmed by the creator, was to move our genes to the next generation through our children, but since there was no way of knowing that whoever you were bringing up was indeed your gene-bearer (especially for the men), a person had to content themselves with having some to take their ‘name’ to the next generation. All that has changed with the advent of paternity testing – and all one has to do today is to take a simple DNA test, and they are well on their way to knowing if the person they call their ‘son’ or their ‘daughter’ is indeed their gene-bearer or simply a ‘name-bearer.’ Now the implications of knowing a person you have all along being treating as your offspring is nothing of the sort can be devastating to say the least, even if the person in question happens to be just a young child – as DNA tests are typically carried out on young children in dispute. So devastating, in fact, are the effects of the realization that the person you have been treating as your child is nothing of the sort that people have been known to do things they would never have thought of doing before – either to themselves or to the child in question - upon realizing that the child they have always thought was their was not. Of course the proponents of DNA based paternity testing will counter this argument with the fact that the all a DNA test does is to reveal the truth, and it is better to live with a bitter truth, than with a ‘sweet’ lie.