Who Knew I Was Not the Father?
dd...@bellsouth.net
New York Times Magazine
Ruth Padawer
November 17, 2009
I.
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?"
Yet despite his indignation -- and despite his court filings seeking
to end his obligations as a father -- Mike loves his daughter. Every
other weekend, the 11-year-old girl, L., lives in Mike's house in a
quiet suburban neighborhood in Western Pennsylvania. Her bedroom there
is decorated to reflect her current passion: there's a soccer
bedspread, soccer curtains and a soccer-ball night light. On her bed
is an Everybody Loves Me pillow covered with transparent sleeves
filled with photos of her and Mike, the man she calls "Daddy,"
canoeing, fishing and sledding together.
As the two of them prepared breakfast together one Saturday in June,
just after L. finished fifth grade, Mike sang a little ditty about how
she was his favorite daughter. A few minutes later, when he noticed L.
sneaking a piece of raw biscuit dough, he poked her. She looked at him
impishly until they both giggled.
"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.
Mike's conundrum is increasingly playing out in courts across the
country, a result of political, social and technological shifts.
Stricter federal rules have pressed states to chase down fathers and
hold them responsible for children born outside of marriage, a
category that includes 40 percent of all births. At the same time, DNA
tests have become easier, cheaper and more reliable. Swiping a few
cheek cells and paying a couple hundred dollars can answer the
question that has plagued men since the dawn of time: Am I really the
father?
One hundred and twenty-two years ago, the playwright August Strindberg
meditated on this quandary. "The Father" is the story of a cavalry
captain whose wife hints that he might not be the father of the
daughter he adores. Consumed with doubt, he rages at his wife: "I have
worked and slaved for you, your child, your mother, your
servants . . . because I thought myself the father of your child. This
is the commonest kind of theft, the most brutal slavery. I have had 17
years of penal servitude and have been innocent."
Without a biological tie, the captain cries, his paternal love is
without foundation. But even as he laments that his daughter may not
be his, the captain seeks consolation from his childhood nursemaid.
With his mind unraveling, he rests his head in her lap and speaks of
the comfort of "mother" -- because that was the nursemaid's role,
biology notwithstanding.
Strindberg never reveals whether the captain's fears were justified,
and perhaps the answer doesn't matter. As long as the captain believed
he had a biological link to his child, their relationship was
meaningful. It is that link, or perhaps the fear of its absence, that
drives men today to DNA tests.
Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year
jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a
subset of tests -- those that are admissible in court and thus require
an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site
to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from
the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their
cheeks and that of their putative child's and mail the samples to a
lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their
paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right. Yet
as troubled as many of them might be by that news, they are even more
stunned to discover that many judges find it irrelevant. State
statutes and case law vary widely, but most judges conclude that these
men must continue to raise their children -- or at least pay support
-- no matter what their DNA says. The scientific advance that was
supposed to offer clarity instead reveals just how murky society's
notions of fatherhood actually are.
When Mike learned that Rob -- the man who had impregnated Mike's wife
-- would now be the one to make his little girl breakfast and tuck her
in at night, Mike wondered just what the word "father" really meant.
Was he the father and Rob the stepfather or the other way around? Most
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.
(Neither L.'s mother, Stephanie, nor Rob agreed to be interviewed for
this article. To protect the girl's privacy, the magazine is
withholding the families' surnames and L.'s full first name.)
Even in paternity cases simpler than that of Mike and L.,
nonbiological fathers often feel like serial dupes: their wives or
girlfriends cheated on them, the children they thought were theirs
aren't and yet they are required to support children they did not
create. Because nothing can be done about the cheating or the
biological revelation, the men focus their indignation on the money.
The urge to withhold every dime, lest it end up easing the mother's
life, is hard to resist. Often the fight isn't really about child
support; it's simply a way to channel rage about the woman's
duplicity. Some observers suggest that insisting these men pay child
support will damage rather than fortify the relationship between
father and child that society seeks to preserve. As Alaska's Supreme
Court concluded in a decade-old paternity case, making a nonbiological
father pay "might itself destroy an otherwise healthy paternal bond by
driving a destructive wedge of bitterness and resentment between the
father and his child."
Mike did not tell L. that he was asking a court to release him as her
legal father. But when she was 9, he did sit her down in his lap and
tell her that, according to her mother, Rob was her biological father.
He said there was a chance, though small, that the courts or her mom
would forbid him to see her. But if they did, Mike told L., he would
fight back.
"For nine years, I thought my dad was my dad," L. told me when I met
her in June, as she tried to articulate the confusion she felt two
years ago and has felt ever since. Her favorite movie is "The Parent
Trap," a story of two girls who meet at summer camp and discover they
are identical twins, then successfully plot to bring their parents
back together. L.'s life hasn't worked out as neatly. She remembers
the way her stomach hurt and her head felt dizzy when her dad said he
wasn't her real dad, and she remembers crying.
"At first, it made me scared, because if my dad wasn't related to me,
then I was living with someone who wasn't a part of my family, like a
stranger," she said. "I want him always to be my real dad. Because if
he's not my dad, then who is he?"
II.
THERE IS A STRONG cultural imperative that a man should never abandon
his offspring: that a man who impregnates a woman should be
responsible for their child, and that a man who acted as a child's
father should continue to nurture her. But what is the cultural
standard when those roles are filled by two different men? 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.
The challenge is to settle on principles that help answer the riddle
of who is the father in each distinct and gut-wrenching situation. In
most states, paternity decisions are governed by centuries-old English
common law, the presumptions of which hold sway, whether or not
they're codified: a child born in a marriage is presumed the product
of that union unless the husband was impotent, sterile or beyond "the
four seas" when his wife conceived. The aim was to avoid "bastardy"
and to preserve family stability -- or at least the appearance of it.
Judges around the country have interpreted the common law in so many
different ways that what happens in contested-paternity cases depends
almost as much on the state as on the details of the case. Some state-
court judges have let nonbiological fathers off the hook financially,
but they are in the minority. In most states, judges put the interest
of the child above that of the genetic stranger who unwittingly became
her father -- and that means requiring him to pay child support. Some
judges have even rebuked nonbiological fathers for trying to weasel
out of their financial obligations. "The laws should discourage adults
from treating children they have parented as expendable when their
adult relationships fall apart," Florida's top court held in a 2007
paternity decision, quoting a law professor. "It is the adults who can
and should absorb the pain of betrayal rather than inflict additional
betrayal on the involved children."
In an age of DNA, when biological relationships can be identified with
certainty, it can seem absurd to hew so closely to a centuries-old
idea of paternity. And yet basing paternity decisions solely on
genetics places the nonbiological father's welfare above the child's.
Phil Reilly, a lawyer who is also a clinical geneticist, has been
wrestling with the policy implications of DNA testing for years, and
even he is stumped about how society should manage the problem that
men like Mike face. "We're at a point in our society where the DNA
molecule is ascendant, and it's very much in the public's
consciousness that this is a powerful way to identify relationships,"
Reilly says. "Yet at the same time, more people than ever are adopting
children, showing that parents can very much love a child who is not
their own. The difference here for many men is the combination of hurt
and rage over the deceit, the fact that they're twice beaten. I can
see both sides of this argument. As a nation, we're still in search of
what the most ethical policy should be. Every solution is imperfect."
Once a man has been deemed a father, either because of marriage or
because he has acknowledged paternity (by agreeing to be on the birth
certificate, say, or paying child support), most state courts say he
cannot then abandon that child -- no matter what a DNA test
subsequently reveals. In Pennsylvania and many other states, the only
way a nonbiological father can rebut his legal status as father is if
he can prove he was tricked into the role -- a showing of fraud -- and
can demonstrate that upon learning the truth, he immediately stopped
acting as the child's father. In 2003, a Pennsylvania appellate court
bluntly applauded William Doran -- who had been by all accounts a
loving father to his 11-year-old son -- for cutting off ties with the
boy once DNA showed they were not related. The judges found that Doran
had been tricked by his former wife into believing he was the father
of their son, and he was allowed to abandon all paternal obligations.
Courts, of course, deal with paternity cases only when there is a
legal dispute. Many men don't sue because it is expensive or because
they suspect they will lose anyway. And then there are those who never
even discover the biological truth. How many fall in that category is
impossible to quantify. The most extensive and authoritative report,
published in Current Anthropology in 2006, analyzed scores of genetic
studies. The report concluded that 2 percent of men with "high
paternity confidence" -- married men who had every reason to believe
they were their children's father -- were, in fact, not biological
parents. Several studies indicate that the rate appears to be far
higher among unmarried fathers.
Some other number of men discover they are not biological fathers, but
choose to soldier on rather than go to court, unwilling to upset their
children or the relationships they have established. Tanner Pruitt,
who owns a small manufacturing business in Texas, paid child support
for seven years after divorcing his wife. His daughter never looked
like him, but it wasn't until she was 12 that it began to bother him.
He told the girl he wanted to check something in her mouth, quickly
swabbed some cheek cells and sent the samples off to a lab. After the
DNA test showed they weren't related, he contacted a lawyer, figuring
the lab results would release him from child-support payments and
justify reimbursement from the biological father. But the lawyer told
Pruitt his only option was to take the matter to court and that doing
so might mean giving up his right to see the girl at all. It might
also alert her to the truth. Pruitt didn't want to chance either
possibility, so he stayed silent and kept paying.
"I spent thousands and thousands of dollars, and it hasn't cost that
biological father a penny, and yeah, I'm angry, but it would have been
more harm to her psychologically than it was worth," says Pruitt, who
eventually fought for, and won, full custody. The girl, now 15 years
old, recently learned from a relative that Pruitt is not her
biological father. Afterward, Pruitt sat with her on a park bench,
held her hand and told her the saga. "When it was all over with, she
gave me a big hug and told me I'd always be her daddy," he told me.
"Even though she's not my blood daughter, I was there the day she was
born, and I've been there ever since, so she's my daughter, and as
long as she's alive, she'll always call me Dad."
Mike's first inkling that something was amiss in his marriage was in
2000, when he was digging through a closet looking for the source of
some mice. He didn't find any nests, but he did come upon a plastic
grocery bag of love letters to his wife, Stephanie, from her co-worker
Rob. Confronted, Stephanie confessed to a fleeting affair but assured
Mike that L., then nearly 3, was his. A year later, according to
Mike's undisputed court testimony, while changing the sheets, Mike
found Rob's photograph tucked under Stephanie's side of the mattress.
Despite Stephanie's assurances that L. was his child, Mike's doubts
haunted him. The marriage deteriorated, and as L. approached her 5th
birthday, Mike asked Stephanie to take a DNA test with him and their
child. They told the girl that all three of them had to take a test
for the doctor. Mike remembers telling her that rolling the swab
inside her cheek wouldn't hurt one bit.
"The day the results came back was the most devastating day of my
life," Mike said, beginning to cry as he described opening the
envelope from the lab and reading there was no chance he was L.'s
father. "This little girl," he whispered, his throat tight, "is not my
child. I ran upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom and cried and dry-
heaved for 45 minutes. I felt like my guts were being ripped out."
Mike and Stephanie separated immediately. Mike expected Rob to pay
L.'s support and remembers asking Stephanie if Rob would "step up" to
be L.'s father. He recalls Stephanie saying no, although Stephanie, in
court documents, denies that such a conversation ever occurred. Mike
would later claim that he agreed to support L. only because her
rightful father would not.
After Mike moved out, the lawyers he consulted told him there was no
use contesting paternity: if he denied he was the father, they said,
he wouldn't get to see L. at all, and the state would probably take
his money anyway. So when a clerk at the child-support office handed
Mike a form confirming he was the natural father, he signed. Since
then, Mike -- a human-resources analyst for an equipment manufacturer
-- says he has paid $7,500 a year in child support, child care, camp
and medical insurance.
At first, whenever Mike saw Stephanie after the divorce, he felt a
stabbing bitterness, but eventually, he grudgingly accepted the
situation. In 2005, he began dating Lori, a woman he had met at his
church and whom he would later marry. Lori deeply resented the chunk
of Mike's salary that went to another man's child, while she was
reduced to clipping coupons. But she accepted L. They made scrapbooks
together, baked scones and pizza and picked berries at a local farm.
Neither Mike nor Lori had any idea Rob was in L.'s life until 2006,
when Stephanie called and said she was marrying him. It was then that
Mike became consumed with resentment. "The courts insist on the best
interest of the child," Mike fumes, "but it was in the child's best
interest for Stephanie and Rob not to do this in the first place. So
why is that burden all of a sudden put on me?"
A year after Mike learned about Rob and Stephanie's marriage, Lori
read an article in the local newspaper about a paternity case
involving Mark Hudson, a Pennsylvania doctor who discovered he wasn't
related to his 11-year-old son. Like Mike, Hudson had questioned his
wife about the child's origins and was assured he was the father. In
Hudson's case, the state appellate court deemed this misrepresentation
fraudulent and dismissed his $1,400-a-month child-support obligation.
Lori showed Mike the article and urged him to file suit. For the first
time, Mike felt he had a chance at being understood. There were,
however, two crucial differences between the cases: Unlike Hudson,
Mike had signed a paternity acknowledgment knowing it was a lie. And
unlike Mike, when Hudson petitioned to end his legal fatherhood, he
wholly disengaged from the child, underscoring for the court that he
had stopped acting as the boy's parent.
This dictate to abruptly sever the bond with a vulnerable child -- to
simply cease reading bedtime stories or cheering at soccer games or
wiping away tears -- sounds coldhearted. But courts in Pennsylvania
and many other states are suspicious of men who claim they were
defrauded into serving as father but who, after discovering the truth,
nonetheless continue to behave exactly as a father would. Looking
through the narrow lens of legal reasoning, courts seem to conclude
that these men are perpetuating the fraud and worsening the child's
confusion and pain by prolonging a doomed relationship. In reality,
however, the requirement to cut ties often destroys the relationship
by forcing men to choose between their desire for retribution and
their desire to remain the child's parent.
Hudson chose the former path, though he told me he had hoped his ex-
wife would allow him time with the boy. "What do you do with that
information?" Hudson says of the DNA results. "Do you just stick it in
your back pocket and forget about it?" But if he wanted to maintain
that relationship, he was disappointed. The boy's mother said if
Hudson wasn't going to be the father for financial reasons, he
couldn't see the boy either. Court records show she also told the
child his father no longer wanted him. Hudson and his former wife have
another child, a daughter. When he goes to pick her up and tries to
talk to the boy, now nearly 17, Hudson says that the boy turns and
walks away.
Mike's enduring attachment to L. became the central question of a
hearing before a family-court magistrate in October 2007. Mike
acknowledged that he continued to act as L.'s father, even after the
DNA results, but argued he did so only because he was conned into
believing L.'s genetic father would not assume responsibility.
Stephanie testified, however, that she never claimed such a thing. The
real issue, her attorney, Todd Elliott, told the court, was that Mike
didn't really want to stop being L.'s father.
"Every time he was given a chance to deny paternity, he never did,"
Elliott said, according to the transcript. "He signed consent order
after consent order because he wanted to be the father. The testimony
here today is that he only did it because of some philanthropic belief
that he wanted to step up. That's not true. . . . He fought for every
other weekend. He fought for having her overnight on a Wednesday. He
fought for having her not be able to leave the jurisdiction. These
aren't things that someone does because they are just philanthropic.
He wants to be the dad; he just doesn't want to pay support."
Elliott's accusation infuriated Mike, who believed it accurately
described Rob, not him.
The hearing officer was persuaded by Elliott's argument: Mike hadn't
been defrauded into admitting paternity after the DNA tests, and he
had hardly abandoned L. after he learned the truth. Still, the officer
ruled, Rob had also acted "essentially as a parent." During the
hearing, Stephanie testified that Rob was the biological father, and
that he and L. loved each other. He had taken her on vacations to
Disney World, Las Vegas and the ocean, celebrated at her birthday
parties, bought her gifts and attended her soccer games and school
activities. As such, the hearing officer ordered, Rob should help pay
her support, too.
Despite being named a defendant in Mike's lawsuit, neither Rob nor any
legal representative for him ever showed up in court or contested the
rulings. But Stephanie did. Her attorney argued in an appeal that
parenthood shared by one mother and two fathers "would lead to a
strange and unworkable situation." So, the lawyer reasoned, Rob should
not be forced to help pay for L.'s care. David Wecht, the state-court
judge charged with hearing the appeal, agreed with Stephanie's
conclusions, albeit for different reasons. Pennsylvania law did not
allow for the recognition of two fathers of the same child, he wrote
in his opinion, and thus he could not order two men to pay paternal
support. Wecht concluded that under the law, Mike was L.'s legal
father. Fraud is the only way to rebut the key paternity doctrine, and
Wecht, like the hearing officer, concluded fraud did not induce Mike
to continue as L.'s dad after the DNA results; love did.
In reaching his decision, Wecht looked to a 2006 custody dispute that
seemed weirdly similar to Mike's. A married man named Kevin Moyer
learned he was not the genetic father of his 9-year-old son. Still,
when the marriage ended, Moyer retained partial custody and paid child
support. Like Mike's ex-wife, Moyer's ex-wife, Vicky, subsequently
married the son's biological father, a man named Gary Gresh, who had
had little contact with the boy for his first nine years of life. The
child lived primarily with Vicky and Gresh, but when he was a
teenager, he asked to live full time with Moyer, whom he considered
his father. Moyer sought primary custody of the boy. The Greshes
fought back, suing to name Gresh as the legal father instead. The
appellate court, however, ruled in favor of Moyer. Gresh, the judges
said, had given up his right to be a legal father by being entirely
absent during the child's first decade. Moyer, on the other hand, had
provided emotional and financial support throughout the boy's life.
The ruling preoccupied Wecht as he considered the facts in Mike's
case. If the court recognized Moyer's paternal role despite the lack
of genetic tie -- and despite the available biological father -- how
could Wecht disregard the role Mike had played in L.'s life, just
because her biological father was now in her life?
Still, the state of the law frustrated the judge. In his opinion,
Wecht wrestled with how to apply a law that requires deliberately
ignoring genetic facts that are of the utmost importance to the people
involved. The law's exasperating consequence, he wrote, is that the
man who "may very well be the biological father is able to avoid any
direct support obligation" and the nonbiological father is left with
"unjust results."
Although Mike sensed that Wecht understood his predicament, he felt
trapped by the ruling and he appealed, hoping another judge might find
him a way out. When the appellate panel turned him down, Mike brought
his plea to the state's top court. Then he waited.
III.
CARNELL SMITH, an engineer-turned-lobbyist in Georgia, is the leading
advocate for men like Mike. In 2001, after Smith's own paternity
struggle, he formed U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, to help the
men he calls "duped dads." In his most notable success, Smith
persuaded Georgia lawmakers to rescind nonbiological fathers'
financial obligations, no matter the child's age or how close the
relationship. Smith then became the first man to disestablish
paternity under that law.
Smith's movement was spurred by federal welfare reform in the
mid-1990s that pressured states to track down the fathers of children
born out of wedlock and make them accountable. Congress demanded that
states find fathers for at least 90 percent of those kids, arguing
that connecting a child to her father would improve the child's
emotional well-being. Identifying a man to tap for child support in
welfare cases would also reduce government spending. The law required
paternity-acknowledgment forms to be distributed at every birth by an
unwed mother. It did not require states to offer genetic testing
before those forms were signed, but most of the forms do note that
genetic testing is available. Advocates on both sides of the issue,
however, say nearly all men sign the form without undergoing testing.
Sometimes they believe they are the father; sometimes they don't
understand what they're signing; sometimes they hesitate to question a
girlfriend's fidelity right after she's given birth; and sometimes
they sign knowing full well the child isn't theirs. If the putative
father isn't at the birth and the unwed mother is on welfare or
seeking child support, she must identify the man she thinks is the
father. He is then served with legal papers. If he doesn't respond,
judges usually name him the father by default.
The policy changes have been a huge success: the number of out-of-
wedlock births with established paternity has more than tripled in the
last 15 years, reaching 1.8 million in 2008. But as that figure
swelled, so did the number of men who started having doubts. What if,
they asked, the child wasn't really theirs? New, easy-to-use
technology provided them with the means to an answer. As Identigene, a
paternity-testing company, says in its marketing material, "Putting
your mind at ease has never been more convenient, affordable or
accurate."
With the scientific proof in hand, men like Carnell Smith began
fighting back. A few months after Smith split up with his girlfriend
in 1988, she announced she was pregnant with his child. Believing her,
he signed a paternity acknowledgment for their daughter, Chandria. He
obtained joint custody, paid her support and spent virtually every
weekend with his little girl. When Chandria was 11, her mother sued to
increase support. Smith decided to be tested, and the results excluded
him as the father. In a lawsuit, Smith demanded Chandria's mother pay
back the $40,000 he had laid out in what he calls "involuntary
servitude" and fraud. The court ruled against Smith, concluding that
he had known that his former girlfriend had other partners at the end
of their relationship and should have realized he might not be the
father. By not exercising his "due diligence" and getting a DNA test
early on, the court put the burden on Smith for not unearthing the
truth sooner.
The law that Smith helped to pass in Georgia, like a similar one in
Ohio, sets no time limit on using DNA to challenge paternity. The
premise is that a man shouldn't be punished for entering a paternal
relationship that he would have avoided had he known the truth. It is,
Smith says, a correction to a double standard that allows mothers and
caseworkers to use DNA to prove paternity but prohibits men from using
that same evidence to escape its obligations. But child-welfare
experts counter that a child shouldn't be punished by losing the only
father she has ever known -- or the financial security he offers --
just because he's upset that she doesn't share his genes. In 2002 the
National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws - an
influential body of lawyers and judges that proposes model laws -
drafted a compromise. The proposal would allow the presumed father,
the biological father or the mother to challenge the paternity until a
child turns 2. The proposal had two goals: to balance the rights of
children with those of their presumed fathers and to encourage
parentage questions to be raised early in a child's life, before deep
bonds are formed. Several states, including Delaware, North Dakota,
Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, have adopted that model
or a variation of it. But men's rights groups complain that most
putative fathers don't discover the child isn't theirs until after the
two-year window closes -- at which point, they have little or no
recourse.
The last time Smith saw his one-time daughter was nine years ago, when
she was 11. His outrage at Chandria's mother and the system remains
close to the surface. "We're penalized for trusting our wives or
girlfriends!" Smith seethed to me. He has long since lost track of
Chandria. It is as if she ceased to exist once their biological
connection evaporated.
Chandria, however, has not forgotten Smith. Her memories of her 11
years with him are happy ones, which makes what happened afterward so
hard for her to grasp. As Chandria, who is now 20, remembers it, Smith
just disappeared from her life. "I was just a kid, so I didn't really
understand what happened or why," she said. "He never did explain why
he didn't want anything to do with me anymore." Chandria says he
wouldn't answer when she called him at home, or he would promise to
call back but never did. Smith says he doesn't recall Chandria calling
him.
She stopped seeing friends and holed up in the bathroom, scratching
and picking at her skin until it bled. The more it hurt, she told me,
the calmer she felt. Her hair started to fall out, her grades slipped
and she had trouble sleeping, details her mother and her mother's
lawyer at the time corroborated. Chandria received counseling at her
school and privately for years.
"It kind of wrecked my self-esteem," she says. "Even now, I worry
about being a burden on people. I don't want to be in the way. I don't
want to be anybody's problem. It's made me apprehensive about getting
attached to people, because one day they're there and the next day
maybe they won't be. You can't help but be careful."
Chandria now attends college in Georgia. She has seen Carnell Smith on
the local news and on the Internet and cannot reconcile the man who
seems to her so insensitive with the father she knew: attentive,
seemingly proud of their relationship and eager to spend time with
her. "He was what a father was supposed to be," she says, "but when
things changed, he completely disconnected. That's just not fair.
You've been in my life my entire life and for you to just cut that off
for money, well, that's not fair to anybody."
Child-welfare advocates say that making biology the sole determinant
of paternity in cases like Smith's puts the nonbiological father's
interest above the child's. Besides, society has increasingly
recognized that parenthood is not necessarily bound to genetics.
Reproductive technology has made it possible for one person to supply
an egg, another to fertilize it, a third to gestate it and a fourth
and fifth to be deemed the parents. Stepparents, grandparents and same-
sex co-parents are increasingly winning legally protected access to
children whom they helped raise, even when no direct genetic link
exists.
"Having been involved in cases like these, I think the answer to 'Is
it my kid?' is irrationally important to the cuckolded husband," says
Carol McCarthy, an officer of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American
Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. "My own biases are going into this
because I'm adopted, so I'm real into 'your parents are the people who
raise you.' I couldn't care less who my biological parents are. My
parents are the ones who went through all the crap I gave them growing
up."
IV.
WHY IS IT THAT we imbue genetic relationships with a potency that
borders on magic? How many among us have trolled through genealogy
records in search of unknown relatives or have welcomed strangers into
our homes and hearts in instant intimacy simply because a genetic
connection is suddenly revealed? Grandpa Harry's older brother's
grandchild just found us on the Internet! A lovely man! Let's have him
over for dinner! The emotional connection between newly discovered kin
is trenchant because we believe the genetic link to be significant,
allowing us to embrace a stranger who -- if that tie were lacking --
we would never otherwise blindly accept. But what happens when we
believe a tie exists, as Mike did, and then discover it doesn't? If
betrayal and money are taken out of the equation, would everything
look different?
Denny Ogden has thought a lot about these questions. He was 54 when he
got a phone call from a woman saying she was his daughter. As a
college junior, Ogden had an intense summer romance; that September,
the woman told him she was pregnant and planned to give up their baby
for adoption. The day the baby was born, Ogden called his old flame
from a pay phone on campus and listened, distraught, as she described
the beautiful baby girl she knew she needed to give away. He felt
confused and guilt-ridden.
In the 34 years that followed, Ogden only rarely thought about that
little girl. He married, had three kids and settled into a comfortable
life in Connecticut, telling his secret to no one, not even his wife.
The three times that his wife gave birth, he felt swoony and in love
with their creations, and as he examined each baby's tiny toes and
fingers, he wondered fleetingly how that other girl, by then a
teenager, had turned out.
But then the phone rang, and a woman named D'Arcy Griggs said she was
calling from Seattle to say she was his daughter. Her birth mother had
died of cancer, but Griggs had met the mother's family, who in turn
had led her to Ogden, and no, she wasn't after his money. Shaken,
Ogden called his lawyer. He also ran a background check on Griggs and
her husband, a prominent surgeon, to make sure Griggs's tale held
together. It did. Ogden told the whole story to his shocked wife, and
over the next several months, Ogden and Griggs exchanged hundreds of e-
mail messages, phone calls and photos, quizzing each other on intimate
medical histories and marveling at how similar their coloring was,
their love of adventure (she's a skydiver; he's a private pilot) and
their distaste for green peppers and Spanish class. He took to calling
Griggs "honey" and slid her photo under his desk blotter at work,
alongside those of his other children.
Two months after their first talk, Ogden flew to Seattle to meet her.
He and Griggs spent four days, morning to night, catching up on 34
lost years, staring in the mirror side by side, comparing noses and
ears and hair. "For the first time in my life, I felt like I totally
fit, as if we shared the same personality," Griggs says.
Ogden was so reluctant to leave that he even stayed an extra day. As
they prepared to part, one or the other of them (their memories are
fuzzy on this detail) pointed out that they couldn't be sure they were
related unless they had a DNA test, so they found a lab through the
Yellow Pages and were tested. Both felt certain it would confirm what
they already felt to be true.
When the news came back that Ogden wasn't the father, he was crushed.
"It broke my heart," he said. "We talked to each other and cried, and
I even called the testing lab to say, 'Are you really sure?' " As
confused as Ogden had been about how to become a father to a 34-year-
old stranger, he was even more confused about how to stop being a
father to a 34-year-old daughter he had quickly come to love.
Griggs was devastated, too. Her biological mother was dead, and she
had lost the man she thought was her father. She sobbed for days. Even
seven years later, she cried as she recalled it: "I had finally found
a connection, a family I belonged to, and then I thought it was gone.
But he didn't go away. I think of him as my 'almost dad.' I call him
before I call anyone else in my family whenever I'm upset. When I was
going through my divorce, we talked three, four, five times a day for
weeks.
"If we had met on the ski slopes or at an airport, we might have hit
it off as friends, but the fact that we believed we truly belonged to
each other is why we loved each other right away like we did," she
told me. Griggs is no longer interested in finding her true biological
father. For her, Ogden is enough. On each Father's Day, she sends him
a card and scrawls across the top, "I wish."
Many of Ogden's friends and family don't understand why he and Griggs
remained close after discovering they were biological strangers. "They
don't get the whole idea that believing you're genetically connected
makes something happen between people," Ogden said. "All the emotions
and feelings were there because we were convinced we were linked. I
had committed myself to this child, and when I found out she wasn't my
child, how could I just step away?"
V.
IN LATE JUNE, Pennsylvania's highest court announced it would not
consider Mike's appeal. That left Wecht's decision intact: Mike was
the legal father and the sole man responsible for L.'s support. "It
all could have been avoided from the beginning if she'd just told the
truth," Mike said of his former wife after the decision was handed
down, "if she hadn't led us to believe we were father and daughter, if
she had just told me after she got pregnant that it might not be my
kid."
Three and a half years earlier, at a federally convened symposium on
the increase in paternity questions, a roomful of child-welfare
researchers, legal experts, academics and government administrators
agreed that much pain could be avoided if paternity was accurately
established in a baby's first days. Several suggested that DNA
paternity tests should be routine at birth, or at least before every
paternity acknowledgment is signed and every default order entered. In
2001 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court urged the state to
require that putative fathers submit to genetic testing before signing
a paternity-acknowledgment form or child-support agreement, arguing
that "to do otherwise places at risk the well-being of children."
In other words, the same care that hospitals take ensuring that the
right mother is connected to the right newborn -- footprints, matching
ID bands, guarded nurseries, surveillance cameras -- should be taken
to verify that the right man is deemed father.
Mandatory DNA testing for everyone would be a radical, not to mention
costly, shift in policy. Some advocates propose a somewhat more
practical solution: that men who waive the DNA test at a child's birth
should be informed quite clearly that refusing the test will prohibit
them from challenging paternity later. Yes, the plan would reveal
truths some men might not want to know. Yes, it would raise
administrative costs, lower the number of paternity establishments and
blow apart some families. But far fewer children would be entangled in
traumatic disputes in which men they call Daddy suddenly reject them.
In the meantime, maybe the solution is to accept that lives can be
messy and relationships much more complicated than the law would like.
Several judges in Pennsylvania, including David Wecht, who heard
Mike's case, have used their paternity rulings as a platform to urge
the Legislature or top state court to grant them the discretion to
consider DNA. It is evidence, they say, that should be neither exalted
nor ignored, but rather weighed as one of many factors, along with the
history of the relationship and the child's age, in determining who
should raise a child and who should pay for his or her upkeep. In
other words, maybe a nonbiological father could be granted custody
rights even if the biological father is charged with paying support. A
small but growing number of courts in other states have gone this
route, but such arrangements are still rare. "There shouldn't be any
reason why custody couldn't be treated differently than paternity and
support, each looked at on its own merits," Wecht says. "But many
states, including Pennsylvania, haven't begun to grapple with these
issues yet. They are exceedingly complex, intellectually and legally,
and perhaps most significantly, the issues are hotly disputed
politically."
VI.
L. SAYS SHE wishes her parents, Mike and Stephanie, had taken a DNA
test when she was a baby instead of waiting until she had a firm --
but inaccurate -- sense of who her biological father was. It's not
that she wishes Mike hadn't turned out to be her dad; it's that,
having had Mike as her dad for so long, she can't bear that he turned
out not to be her father.
As Mike's case wended its way through the courts, Mike asked L. to
take another DNA test, this one with witnesses. He knew the appellate
court was unlikely even to consider DNA evidence, but if it did, he
wanted to make sure the veracity of his test results would not be
questioned. L. wavered. Why help him prove he wasn't her dad? "I
didn't really want to be reminded of that," L. said.
Eventually, she yielded, and the test confirmed she was not Mike's
biological daughter. She was disappointed. She had been secretly
nursing a fantasy that provided her own "Parent Trap" ending. "I got a
picture in my head," L. said, "that the test people would call and say
they had been wrong, that he really was my biological dad and that
everything I had thought before never really happened."
Andrew Usher
<snip>
This was actually an interesting article, probably because it was not
written by Denise.
I can't help but say that this problem would be avoided if we simply
did not have child support. Clearly it's all the money anyway.
It's unfortunate that we can't name the people in this story, the
woman certainly deserves it. The man's case seems a bit special
pleading (if he supports child support in general) since he wants to
act as af father in the real world but to be not considered a father
by the courts.
And this is why I don't like 'paternity fraud' laws much: although
they do benefit some men, they ignore the fact that the most frequent
victims of child support are biological fathers that are not social
fathers to their children. If, as is well argued here, the emotional
bond is the important part of fatherhood, why should our laws consider
only the biological truth?
Andrew Usher
dd...@bellsouth.net
> dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> This was actually an interesting article, probably because it was not
> written by Denise.
>
> I can't help but say that this problem would be avoided if we simply
> did not have child support. >>
(Denise) What would you put in its stead? We already have a situation
in which 1/4 of American children live under the poverty level.
Andrew Usher
> On Nov 20, 10:41 pm, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > This was actually an interesting article, probably because it was not
> > written by Denise.
> >
> > I can't help but say that this problem would be avoided if we simply
> > did not have child support. >>
>
> (Denise) What would you put in its stead? We already have a situation
> in which 1/4 of American children live under the poverty level.
I have talked about this before. Besides, if you're worried about
this, then you must oppose the effort mentioned in the article to free
non-biological fathers from child support. Presumably it doesn't
matter to the well-being of the child whether the money is coming from
a biological father, does it?
> Clearly it's all the money anyway.
Yeah, that's the point. If not for the money there'd be no issue.
Andrew Usher
dd...@bellsouth.net
> dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> > On Nov 20, 10:41 pm, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> > > <snip>
>
> > > This was actually an interesting article, probably because it was not
> > > written by Denise.
>
> > > I can't help but say that this problem would be avoided if we simply
> > > did not have child support. >>
>
> > (Denise) What would you put in its stead? We already have a situation
> > in which 1/4 of American children live under the poverty level.
>
> I have talked about this before. Besides, if you're worried about
> this, then you must oppose the effort mentioned in the article to free
> non-biological fathers from child support. Presumably it doesn't
> matter to the well-being of the child whether the money is coming from
> a biological father, does it?
(Denise) I'm worried about leaving massive numbers of children high
and dry. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that I oppose all
efforts to free non-biological fathers from child support. I think the
area is complicated and that it may be difficult to find a solution
that is fair to all.
Dustbin
> On Nov 20, 10:41 pm, Andrew Usher<k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> dd...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> This was actually an interesting article, probably because it was not
>> written by Denise.
>>
>> I can't help but say that this problem would be avoided if we simply
>> did not have child support.>>
>
> (Denise) What would you put in its stead? We already have a situation
> in which 1/4 of American children live under the poverty level.
That is thanks to your idiotic capitalist system - Send David Rockefella
the bill ;-)
D.
Dustbin
It's not complicated. It is a consequence of the capitalist system. But,
of course the key issue here is money and the key issue of capitalism is
money.
D.