"Paternity can now be verified by a simple test – but that doesn’t mean it should be"

[4th law of robotics]

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter.


Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away, the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers. DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves.

The subject has resurfaced lately, courtesy of a story in the Daily Mail, about a married television presenter who for years had been paying for the support of a child conceived, as he thought, as a result of his relationship with a writer. It seems that after meeting the child for the first time, he asked for a DNA test; it duly turned out that he was not, after all, the father. Poor child.


. . .

The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not. (That eminently sensible Jewish custom, whereby Jewishness is passed through the mother, was based on the fact that we only really knew who our mothers are.) Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter? You can feel quite as much tenderness for a child you mistakenly think to be yours as for one who is. Piers Paul Read’s interesting new novel, The Misogynist, touches on just this issue.

A.C. Grayling, the philosopher, has written with feeling on this question this week, in an article for the Evening Standard. Noting that 4 per cent of men are, all unknowing, raising children who are not genetically theirs, according to a report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Human Health, he ponders the impact a DNA paternity test can have: ‘The result can be shattering, leading to divorce, marital violence, mental health difficulties for all parties including the children.’ Well, yes. Scientific certainty has produced clarity all right, and relieved any number of men of their moral obligations, but at God knows what cost in misery, recrimination and guilt.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/6391918/whos-the-daddy/

Poor child, because the father found out he was cuckolded. It's anti-feminist because women can no longer trick men in to financially supporting someone else's children. Who cares if men are tricked in to raising someone else's kid, that's their moral obligation anyway.

Wow.

Before running across this article I would not have thought anyone felt this way. At least not publicly. But she seems sincere in her belief that giving men some control of their reproductive rights (ie, not having to pay for someone else's choices) is anti-woman.

I am pretty surprised by this attitude.

Has anyone else seen this expressed before? I would like assurances that this is a fringe belief, in no way supported by any significant number of feminists so I could maintain some hope for humanity.