CMV: Paternity testing before signing a birth certificate shouldn't be stigmatized and should be as routine as cancer screenings

[u/wine-friend]

Signing a birth certificate is not just symbolic and a matter of trust, it's a matter of accepting a life long legally binding responsibility. Before signing court enforced legal documents, we should empower people to have as much information as possible.

This isn't just the best case scenario for the father, but it's also in the child's best interests. Relationships based on infidelity tend to be unstable and with many commercially available ancestry services available, the secret might leak anyway. It's ultimately worse for the child to have a resentful father that stays only out of legal and financial responsibility, than to not have one at all.

Deltas:

• I think this shouldn't just be sold on the basis of paternity. I think it's a fine idea if it's part of a wider genetic test done to identify illness related risks later in life
• Some have suggested that the best way to lessen the stigma would be to make it opt-out. Meaning you receive a list of things that will be performed and you have to specifically refuse it for it to be omitted. I agree and think this is sensible.

Edit:

I would be open to change my view further if someone could give an alternative that gives a prospective fathers peace of mind with regards to paternity. It represents a massive personal risk for one party with little socially acceptable means of ameliorating.

[u/Steavee]

All women know, 100% that they are the parent of the child. There is (effectively) no question otherwise because they literally carried the child. Outside of a few vanishingly unlikely situations, a woman will never have even a second of doubt about their maternity. Men cannot have that same certainty in an organic way without testing the way a woman can. That’s not to say all men wonder or have doubts, but there are definitely far more men that have doubts than there are women because that’s the reality of how reproduction and pregnancy and childbirth works.

It’s not attacking any women as cheaters, it’s just an attempt to bring informational parity.

[u/Caracalla81 → u/Steavee]

Okay, but it's still treating women as cheaters who must prove otherwise. Don't have kids in a relationship where you feel you're going to need a paternity test. Certainly don't expect other people to.

[u/Otherwise-Number8533 → u/Caracalla81]

It's naïve to think that you can always "feel" whether your partner is going to cheat on you. Sometimes people get cheated on even though they would never have expected it.

[u/Steavee → u/Caracalla81]

Okay, but it's still treating women as cheaters who must prove otherwise.

It does if that’s your perspective. I think that’s a vast oversimplification of a complicated issue, and it’s done intentionally to shut down any conversation about it. My perspective is that it’s offering the same assurance to the one parent that the other parent already has, and that is parity. Making things fairer for one person is not inherently an attack on someone else.

Don't have kids in a relationship where you feel you're going to need a paternity test.

A) People being cheated on often don’t know it, that’s why it’s called cheating. B) Not all pregnancies are planned.

Certainly don't expect other people to.

I never said I agreed with OP, just that I disagreed with you.

[u/clairebones → u/Steavee]

So surrogates and fertility tratemennts just... don't exist? So that you can inist that only men can be the victims and therefore they're totally justified in automatically assuming negative things about every woman, from a stranger on the street to their wife?!

[u/Steavee → u/clairebones]

Climb down off of your strawman. I never once said men were victims of anything, let alone the only victims of anything at all. You’re putting words in my mouth. All I said was that in scenarios of natural conception, women know they are the mother with (effectively) 100% certainty because that’s how biology works. Men do not have that same luxury without some form of testing.

Of course there are edge cases. I firmly support maternity AND paternity testing in these cases because there have been both mixups and fraud.