More and more Australian fathers are using DNA tests to check the
paternity of their children - and getting results they don't want
Greg Callaghan examines the plight of men who receive the
heartbreaking news that the children they have raised are not biologically
theirs.
In the thick golden light of a country sunset, Nigel Brown sat
hunched on his front doorstep, sobbing uncontrollably. Glancing back with
bloodshot eyes at his four children, aged 6 to 13, running amok inside, he
was hit by the sudden, somewhat surreal recognition that life as he had
known it was over. "It was like a punch in the stomach, the shock of
accepting my children weren't really mine at all."
A neighbour, worried by Brown's fragile emotional state, called his
mother, who promptly picked up the children and dropped them home to his
ex-wife, who lives on a property in the green, rolling hills outside this
Victorian town.
That was 18 months ago, and the handsome, slow-talking 36-year-old
hasn't seen his kids since. His personal descent began the night three years
ago when his wife of 12 years told him she'd met someone else and their
marriage was over; but it was only after learning the truth about his
children that the sense of betrayal began to gnaw at his soul. Doubts about
his youngest, his only daughter ("she was conceived after I'd had a
vasectomy, but my ex-wife blamed the doctor for stuffing up the operation"),
had long niggled him. But it was his spirited mother, Linda, who, shortly
after the marriage split, ordered a paternity testing kit through DNA
Solutions in Melbourne.
Linda found it easier than brushing her infant grand-daughter's
teeth. After receiving the kit in the mail, she took a swab of saliva from
the little girl's mouth and packed it into a sterile envelope, along with
one already collected from son Nigel. For good measure she added a lock of
hair and a few nail clippings. Six weeks later, at a cost of $600, no
questions asked, the results landed back in her letterbox, excluding Brown
as the father.
That terrible thunderclap was followed by another, just six weeks
later, when Linda, overwhelmed with foreboding, took samples from Brown's
youngest son, George.
The torment of a second negative result drove Brown to order a DNA
kit himself, this time to test his second-eldest boy, Tom. ("No worries,
Dad," his son told him, handing him a few plucked hairs.) Fearing the worst
from these results, Linda organised for the family doctor to open the
envelope. Just as well: another heartbreaking negative.
Having got wind of the tests, Brown's ex-wife shaved all her sons'
heads and sent a threatening note via her solicitor. Subsequent legal
counter-threats from Brown's solicitor, however, convinced her to agree to a
full round of paternity tests for all four children (the Family Court only
recognises DNA tests undertaken with the consent of the mother, using blood
samples analysed by an accredited laboratory). The result? Only Brown's
eldest son was his.
"How could it have come to this?" he asks with a hollow laugh. "I
don't understand how a mother could do this to her marriage, to her
children. I feel heartbroken for all four of them."
It is, of course, a deceit that dupes not just one dad but two, and
after one of Brown's best mates - named by his ex-wife as the possible
father - was tested and ruled out, it's now believed the father is in fact a
middle-aged businessman, with four children of his own, living in the same
town. This man, if pursued through the courts, may now be liable to pay
child support for the children Nigel Brown thought were his.
Every day in Australia, at least ten men will open their mail to
find the potentially explosive results of a DNA paternity test. Between two
and three will receive the unhappy news that they are not the biological
father of their child. For the first time in human history, science is able
to determine with almost foolproof accuracy (greater than 99.99 per cent)
whether someone is the father of a child. While the blood tests of old could
rule out paternity if a man had a different blood group from his offspring,
they couldn't definitively confirm it even if the blood groups matched,
always leaving room for doubt.
That doubt has plagued men for millennia, fuelling the classic
literary themes of infidelity, sexual jealousy, betrayal and revenge. From
Shakespeare to the present, the man tricked ("cuckolded") into raising
another's child has been the butt of social ridicule. Evolutionary
psychologists say the need for "paternity certainty" has propelled men's
historical drive to control female sexuality and so reduce the risk of
infidelity - from restricting their physical movement (foot-binding in
China) to excising sexual desire (circumcision in Africa) and reducing their
erotic appeal to other males (the head-to-toe burqa of fundamentalist
Islam). It explains, they argue, the traditional male preference for virgin
brides.
Public morals campaigners, meanwhile, point to the soaring number of
paternity tests - more than 5000 annually in Australia alone - as yet
another indication of the breakdown of the traditional family into a melting
pot of step-siblings and step-parents. But it's more likely that the DNA
test's ability to pin down paternity has simply lifted the lid on the
age-old problem of infidelity.
The American Association of Blood Banks estimates up to one in ten
people in the US has a different biological father to the one believed to
be, and best guesstimates in Australia put it at a minimum one in 20. The
Australian Medical Association claims there are conservatively 200,000
families where "the presumptive father is not the biological father". In the
past, when dad and kids thought they knew who they were, cradle-to-grave
family secrets could be concealed for generations. Not any more.
The biological certainty introduced by DNA testing is rewriting the
laws on fatherhood. The Australian Law Reform Commission recently proposed
that DNA tests performed without the consent of the mother be outlawed, and
fathers like Nigel Brown who undertake them subject to criminal proceedings
- a prospect that enrages the men's rights lobby.
On November 29, the Victorian Supreme Court will consider an appeal
against Melbourne man Liam Magill, who in the first case of paternity fraud
in Australia was awarded $70,000 in 2002 after discovering he was the
biological father of only one of his three children, having paid child
support for seven years. The judge at the Victorian County Court found
Magill's ex-wife had knowingly lied when filling out the birth certificates
for her two youngest children, who were fathered by a family friend. The
men's rights movement sees it as a landmark legal finding.
The Magill case raises a number of very 21st century questions.
Should any man, rich or poor, be made financially responsible for a child
found to be not biologically his? Should the courts hold mothers accountable
when they make false statements regarding paternity? These inevitably lead
to the deeper question of what defines a father - child-raising or genes?
Most would argue that being a father is more about behaviour than
biology, something painfully exposed recently in the international custody
battle between the two men who both believed they were the father of Manny
Musu, the five-year-old girl critically injured in the Australian embassy
bombing in Jakarta in September. Sydney police constable David Norman proved
by DNA test he was Manny's biological father, even though her birth
certificate named Italian security executive Manuel Musu, the man who had
raised her. "She's my daughter, she lives in Italy, she speaks only Italian,
she has Italian citizenship," Musu told reporters before jetting home to
Verona with "his" child.
Manuel is Manny's father - in all ways except one. But for some men,
the need for a paternal bloodline is so strong that they never fully come to
terms with the news that they don't share their child's DNA.
Take Daniel White, a Melbourne cab driver who five years ago found
out his then 11-year-old son Justin was the result of a one-night stand by
his ex-partner. He'd long nursed nagging doubts - his tall, freckled,
carrot-topped son bears little resemblance to this olive-skinned, shortish
43-year-old - but crippling child support payments and a TV advertisement
for DNA Solutions spurred him to get the test, which excluded him as the
father.
"It's ruined my life," says White. "It's now probably too late to
have kids of my own." Of his now strapping 16-year-old son, he says quietly,
passing a hand through his greying hair: "As much as you don't want it to,
the feeling in your heart does change." So was the test a mistake? "No, I'd
rather know the truth, and Justin deserves to know his real genetic
origins."
It took the Child Support Agency a full seven months after the
results of the DNA test to cease garnisheeing White's wages, he complains.
"I still love the boy, but what I see whenever he comes through the door is
my ex-wife's deception."
How to effectively describe the poignancy of White now calling his
son the boy, not my boy? Some men, including Nigel Brown, are so distraught
by the discovery their kids are not biologically theirs that they cease
contact with them - for months, years, or even permanently. That's the truly
sad part of the story, one that generally dampens sympathy for these men no
matter how deep their paternal pain. Brown's mother, who still sees her
grandchildren every week, describes how her grand-daughter clings to her,
crying, asking where her daddy is. As Brown tells it, the children are
better off not seeing him in his anguished and confused state, but after 18
months he's about to consult a psychologist in the hope of seeing his kids
in the near future.
"It's okay to be hurt and angry with your ex-partner; it's not okay
to cut off contact with your child," says Claire Button, a sociologist
specialising in family violence who has given up trying to extract child
support payments for her two-year-old son from her ex-boyfriend, even after
a DNA test confirmed his paternity. She says some men, overwhelmed with
anger toward their ex-partners, will use a negative DNA result as an excuse
to resign from fatherhood, with devastating consequences for their children.
The ads on late-night TV target all doubting dads: get a DNA test
for your peace of mind - don't risk being reduced to just a wallet or a
sperm donor. They're ads you're unlikely to see much longer if the
recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) outlawing all
paternity tests gained without maternal consent are adopted next year by the
Howard Government.
No other prospect arouses a fiercer drumbeat from the men's rights
movement or greater ire from the women's lobby. Speak to suspicious
non-custodial fathers and they'll say a so-called "motherless" test is often
the only way they can learn the truth, and that getting their day in court
to force an ex-wife or partner to undergo a DNA test is difficult,
time-consuming and costly. Speak to mothers and they'll say fathers often
use paternity tests as a means to delay and thwart access to child-support
payments, and as a way to punish or humiliate them by suggesting they might
be promiscuous.
"It's not just a DNA test," fumes Anne Sergeant, a Brisbane single
mother of three young children. "It's a year of child support appeals,
tribunals, legal battles - all for what? So the father can keep being a
non-father." Adds family counsellor Button: "Legal controls have to be
introduced. You can't get the results of an AIDS test without counselling,
and a paternity test involves the future wellbeing of children."
But according to Gabriel Owen, a volunteer with the Family Rights
Agency in Adelaide, "This argument that fathers only want free access to DNA
tests to shirk their responsibilities makes me angry, because that's not
what I see. They are just trying to settle the unease in their minds." Says
Sue Price, co-founder of the Men's Rights Agency, Brisbane: "Most fathers
desperately want it to be their child. After all, they've invested years of
their lives in child-raising or paying child support, and they know that a
negative result could mean being stripped of contact with their child."
A national survey in 2003 by the Australian Centre for Emerging
Technologies and Society found that while 90 per cent of people support the
idea of DNA testing on questions of child support, less than 50 per cent
think it should be done without the mother's consent. Should a father's
right to know prevail over a mother's right to privacy? No, says the man
behind the ALRC's recommendations, Professor David Weisbrot. "How would you
feel if your employer took your coffee cup and had a DNA test done without
your knowledge? You'd be outraged, and this is no different."
Oh, but it is different, argues Vern Muir, CEO of DNA Solutions in
Melbourne, one of a handful of laboratories in Australia that perform
mail-order, unaccredited testing. "Men have the right to know. Outlaw it and
you'll just create a black market, with people ordering tests from overseas
via the Internet."
Men who have tried - and failed - to obtain an order for a DNA test
from the Family Court are in no mood to accept further legal logjams. "I was
dumb enough to do the honest thing and go through the Family Court," says
Chris Lawrence, a 43-year-old from Perth with two young children, the second
one of whom he suspects is biologically not his. "Demonstrating to the court
why you couldn't be the child's father after 12 years of marriage is
hellishly difficult, especially if your ex-wife happens to be a Baptist, has
remarried, and doesn't want to expose past infidelities or be charged with
paternity fraud," he complains. "I don't love my daughter any less for her
not being my biological child, but I have a right to know."
Ask Diana Bryant, Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia,
whether she believes the courts are fair on men who want to confirm or deny
their paternity and she answers with an emphatic "yes". But the statistics
paint a different picture: of the more than 5000 DNA paternity tests that
passed through Australian labs last year (two-thirds of them initiated by
men), only 221 were ordered through the Family Court.
Somewhere in the middle of the tug-of-war between duped dads and
angry mothers is Michael Gilding, director of the Australian Centre for
Emerging Technologies at Melbourne's Swinburne University, who is
undertaking a large survey into the topic. "These tests aren't trivial," he
says, "and the potentially explosive results could tip a man, already under
tremendous stress, over the edge." Sufficient reason, then, for a mother to
be notified about the tests. "On the one hand, fathers and children have a
right to know, and a mother shouldn't be able to veto that." Gilding thus
draws a distinction between knowledge and consent, suggesting a mandatory
system where a father submits the mother's contact details as part of the
paperwork for the test and agrees to counselling if the results prove
negative.
A plausible compromise, perhaps, but the ALRC's David Weisbrot is
steadfast. DNA taken without lawful consent for any reason should be a
criminal offence, he says, and paternity tests are no exception. "I am
sympathetic to men who have never had a parental relationship, have been
denied access to their children and are only providing monetary support, but
it's up to them to obtain a court order."
That's easy for him to say, counters Gary Arnold, a 40-year-old
hospitality student from Sydney who found out his ex-wife was having an
affair around the time of conception of his second child. "In other words,
let your wife cheat on you, have children by other men, divorce you and make
you pay for it all, but you've got to prove to the court good reason to get
a DNA test without her permission." When one in four men taking these tests
finds he isn't the biological father of the child, Arnold fumes, "Where's
the f..king justice in that?"
The law gets even thornier for those who are the biological fathers
but whose sperm was used without their consent. In the famous "turkey
baster" case in the US in the early'90s, a woman seduced a friend by giving
him oral sex, pretended to swallow his sperm but spat it into a jar and used
a turkey baster to inject the seminal fluid directly into her vagina.
Although duped into paternity, the man was forced to pay child support by a
Californian court. A similar fate befell tennis legend Boris Becker, who
admitted he had oral sex - but not intercourse - with Russian model Angela
Ermakowa in a linen cupboard in 1999. She later gave birth to his daughter.
As far-fetched as these scenarios sound, an Australian court faced a
similar case earlier this year after a man on a motorcycle tour of western
NSW claimed a woman had seduced him, darted off to the bathroom with his
condom and a syringe, and impregnated herself. The courts didn't accept his
story - even with the testimony of a male witness.
Unorthodox as they are, such cases are now being taken up as weapons
in the battle over men's legal rights. "Men can be tricked into becoming
fathers," says Sue Price. "And proving it is very difficult." The law, she
insists, has not caught up with the laboratory, and still harks back to the
paternity controls put in place in the 19th century to protect children from
being falsely labelled illegitimate. Under current law, signing a birth
certificate as a "father", accepting paternity in a child support affidavit,
or marrying a woman to whom you have been paying child support provide a
firm "presumption of legitimacy" that even direct DNA evidence might not be
able to challenge. Men who impregnate women through having sex with them but
don't intend to be fathers are still treated as such by the law, which
requires them to pay child support. Men who donate their sperm are exempt,
legally and socially, but men whose sperm is "stolen" languish in a legal
limbo where they have to prove, Bill Clinton-style, that no, they did not
have sex with that woman.
Save the Males"; "Say No to Female chauvinism"; "Paternity fraud:
don't support a lie" ... You can see the born-again, testosterone-fuelled
slogans on T-shirts, fridge magnets and bumper stickers, all available at a
host of American Web sites, including www.paternityfraud.com, where the
science of DNA testing is fuelling an angry new men's movement. All rail
against a system that forces men to pay for the upkeep of children they
might not have fathered, or that otherwise penalises men who are barred from
seeking a DNA test to answer the question burning deepest inside them. One
site quotes a US survey suggesting that up to 30 per cent of unwed mothers
who sign affidavits of paternity name the wrong man as the father - though
it doesn't specify how many knowingly do this.
While pitying the plight of the fathers so deceived, one wonders how
much of their rage stems from naked revenge toward ex-partners rather than
genuine concern for the children. All too often the arguments of the men's
rights lobby turn into finger-wagging exercises against single or abandoned
mothers struggling to raise children alone. Or worse, the easy moral
superiority of judging unfaithful women, whom society continues to view far
more harshly than the male equivalent.
The bloodymindedness of some men is staggering. While preparing this
article I interviewed a former IT consultant earning more than $60,000 a
year who paid $100 a week in child support for his eight-year-old daughter.
Though his paternity had been confirmed by a DNA test, he complained that
his ex-wife's new partner was rich enough to pay for the upbringing of their
child himself. Another father, outraged by his ex-wife's unfaithfulness,
admitted he had enjoyed a few flings himself during the marriage, blithely
unaware of his barefaced hypocrisy.
As a growing number of Australian men cry fraud, taxpayers hold an
increasing stake in child support collections - now increasing by $3 million
each year. If just a fraction of the 400,000-odd fathers paying child
support discover they are not the biological fathers of their kids and the
authorities can't track them down, social welfare agencies will have to foot
the rising bill for family assistance. This could run into the hundreds of
millions and the Child Support Agency, already buckling under the strain of
tracing wayward fathers, would be confronted with a minefield of new
challenges.
Not least of these is the absence of children's voices in the
debate, which is why, in weighing the rights of an innocent child against
those of an innocent man, the Family Court almost invariably rules in favour
of the former. This is a bitter pill for the men's rights lobby. "How is it
in the best interests of the child that the wrong father pays child
support?" asks Price. Complains William O'Brien, a 48-year-old who is paying
$900 a month for a 14-year-old son he discovered in 2001 is not biologically
his: "I can get off a murder charge because of DNA evidence, but I can't get
out of child support."
Indeed, the mother who knowingly lies about paternity surely
deserves as much disapproval as fathers who abandon their children. One
simple solution, suggests Price, may be to introduce DNA testing for all
newborns in conjunction with the Guthrie blood test that has been standard
for the past 20 years. "Why shouldn't all newborns have their DNA matched
and recorded at the same time?"
Although such testing could save a lot of heartbreak in the longer
term, it's highly unlikely ever to be passed into law, given its Brave New
World overtones. In any case, neither codes of practice nor legal
regulations are going to end the traumas caused by paternity testing. Like
it or not, the genetic genie is out of the bottle and the fallout on many
families is likely to be immense.
"Blokes like me are supposed to be tough and not cry, but we suffer
in silence ... " says Nigel Brown, his voice trailing off.
And while he suffers, those four children of his are still without
their Dad. J For privacy reasons, names of aggrieved fathers, their partners
and children mostly have been changed.
* The Australian Medical Association says that in at least 200,000
families "the presumptive father is not the biological father".
* In the US, it is estimated that this is the case for up to one in
ten people.
* In Australia, about one in four men taking paternity tests
discovers he is not the father of his children.
* According to a US survey, up to 30 per cent of unwed mothers who
sign affidavits of paternity name the wrong man as the father.
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