Paternity tests rob women of their hold over men
By Melanie McDonagh
On my one and only trip to Jamaica I got a tremendous kick out of a calypso band whose star number was a song about a boy whose attempts to get married were thwarted time and again by his father, who informed him about each girlfriend in turn: "That girlie is your sister but your mammy don't know." Incest being out of the question, the boy moved on, finally going to his mother to complain about his predicament. She solved his problem at a stroke: "Your daddy's not your daddy, but your daddy don't know." How we laughed.
There is a rather more disagreeable take on the game of Who's the Daddy just now, with last week's revelations about the millionaire who is trying to get 300,000 compensation for raising two children of his former wife who turned out not to be his own.
He is suing the wife and her present husband for fraudulent misrepresentation and deceit and wants the costs of rearing the two children for more than a decade reimbursed. The wife, it seems, has not allowed him to see them since she took a DNA test in 2007 to confirm their paternity.
It's hard to envisage a more unedifying quarrel, so very traditional in its fundamentals, so modern in its resolution. The unfortunate children are presumably perplexed that the man they called daddy since they were babies has been unaccountably absent from the scene for the past two years.
Meanwhile, another man, their mother's new husband and their parents' old friend, has taken his place. The first father - for so the children must think of him now has to try to cut out of his affections a boy and a girl whom he thought of as flesh and blood for 10 years. That's a lifetime from a child's perspective.
You have to ask: is the man any happier for knowing that his children aren't his? Are his children any happier now that their genetic father is proven to be someone other than their familiar father? DNA testing is the devil's tool. It has certainly made this family more miserable.
As I say, disputed paternity has always been with us. There is a good reason for the sensible Jewish custom of requiring that Jewishness pass through the female line; you can be sure who your mother is. The theme of the cuckolded husband is as old as comedy.
It's the fundamental male insecurity that a man could never, until now, be entirely sure that he is the father of his own children. Like birds feeding a cuckoo in the nest, a man could end up raising another man's children and be happily ignorant of the fact. At least the birds who raise the cuckoo - rather stupidly, given that the wretched fledgling is much bigger than they are - are jointly taken in. A deceived husband is in it alone.
The woman's prerogative of knowing who is a child's father was, when you think about it, the trump card of the sex. It accounted for the vice of jealousy in men; it made a mockery of the laws of inheritance; it made male claims to omnipotence absurd. When Jonathan Swift satirised the pretensions of the aristocracy, he pretended to have a vision of a great man's forebears. They amounted to a succession of footmen, servants, grooms - in other words, the lovers and passing fancies of the great man's female ancestors. The gist was that we really do not know whether any peer of the realm is descended from his supposed forebear.
It's not just satire. AN Wilson, author of an admirable book on the Victorians, has pointed out that both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert may have been the offspring of adulterous liaisons - and, in genetic terms, all the better for it.
Naturally, one deplores adultery and deception at least, I hope we do. But undeniably, the ability to pass a child off on a man was a potent female weapon; paternity suits litter the biographies of great men, at least, before the advent of contraception.
When Byron asked a friend of his about some misbegotten child, "Is the brat yours or mine?" he was, in a way, talking for his sex. The unscrupulous concubine in Balzac who passed off her pregnancy on two of her lovers and got handsome provision from both of them, was playing a very familiar part.
And then, all of a sudden, in our lifetimes all that changed. With the advent of DNA testing, that trump card became null and void. Men can require objective proof of a child's paternity before they part with a penny for its upkeep. Or, as in the case of the deceived millionaire, they can now require compensation for having raised a child who is genetically not their own. All of a sudden the balance of power between the sexes has shifted. It was astonishing, when the technology became available, that feminists didn't make more of a fuss about it. Or if they did, it passed me by.
Jude Law found himself recently in the predicament of many actors before him when an American model claimed that she was pregnant with his baby. But unlike many actors before him, he demanded, and got, proof of paternity before assuming the paternal role. Get a bit of DNA, pay a modest fee to a laboratory and Bob's your uncle or, rather, Jude's your daddy. Simple.
Of course, in theory the technology can work to women's advantage, too. The joke of the last Bridget Jones novel, serialised in a newspaper, is that Bridget had been sleeping with both the bad Hugh Grant figure and the nice Colin Firth one before getting pregnant and had the humiliating job of looking up ways of testing paternity on the internet in order to establish which one of them it was. I'm not telling you who, except that the revelation spoilt my day. But as in life, the story would have been much more amusing if there had been no way of finding out. I mean, where would the plot of Mamma Mia! be if they had resorted to a DNA test?
Imagine, in the case of the wronged millionaire, that he was still raising his two children under the illusion that they were his. Would he be better off? Almost certainly. Would they? Of course. With DNA testing, scientific certainty has replaced psychic insecurity and we're all the worse for it.
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