How DNA Testing is Changing Fatherhood

It was in July 2007 when Mike L. asked the Pennsylvania courts to declare that he was no longer the father of his daughter. For four years, Mike had known that the girl he had rocked to sleep and danced with across the living-room floor was not, as they say, “his.” The revelation from a DNA test was devastating and prompted him to leave his wife — but he had not renounced their child. He continued to feel that in all the ways that mattered, she was still his daughter, and he faithfully paid her child support. It was only when he learned that his ex-wife was about to marry the man who she said actually was the girl’s biological father that Mike flipped. Supporting another man’s child suddenly became unbearable.

Two years after filing the suit that sought to end his paternal rights, Mike is still irate about the fix he’s in. “I pay child support to a biologically intact family,” Mike told me, his voice cracking with incredulity. “A father and mother, married, who live with their own child. And I pay support for that child. How ridiculous is that?”

“Just because our relationship started because of someone else’s lie,” he said later, “doesn’t mean the bond that developed isn’t real.” Still, his love became entangled with humiliation and outrage, and each child-support payment stung so much that he felt compelled to take a stand on principle. In doing so, he also took the small but terrifying risk of losing his child.

Galling to Mike was that he was expected to subsidize this man’s cozy domestic arrangement. Mike’s wages would be garnished because he was the legal father — even though, in this case, the biological father had more of the benefits of fatherhood and none of its obligations.

Judges, legislators and policy makers have floundered trying to reconcile the issues — a tangle of sex, money, science, betrayal, abandonment and the competing interests of the child, the biological parents, the nonbiological father and the state itself. No matter how they decide, the collateral damage is high because fairness for one party inadvertently violates fairness for another.