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</A> -Cui Bono?-
London Times
January 23 2000
One in seven fathers 'not
the real parent'
Lois Rogers, Medical Correspondent
AT LEAST one in 10 children was not sired by the man
who believes he is their father, according to scientists in
paternity testing laboratories.
Some laboratories have reported the level of
"unexpected" paternity to be as high as one in seven
when they perform DNA genetic tests on blood samples
from supposed parent and offspring.
There are now seven government-approved laboratories
doing paternity testing. Cellmark Diagnostics in
Abingdon is the largest and receives more than 10,000
requests a year. One in five of them is "private" and has
not been ordered as a result of a court or Child Support
Agency dispute.
David Hartshorne, spokesman for Cellmark, said that in
about one case in seven, the presumed father turns out
to be the wrong man.
"It is surprising how often the mother is wrong about the
person she thinks is the father," he said. Marriage
breakdown and more births outside marriage have
increased disputes about paternity and the desire for
testing, he added.
In addition to DNA evidence, other studies of mass blood
samples suggest that increasing numbers of women are
unsure if their husbands are the fathers of their children.
This phenomenon of misattributed fatherhood has been
investigated in a newly published study by social
scientists at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Oliver Curry, the principal researcher, said long working
hours and commuting by fathers could contribute to
uncertainty about whether children have been fathered
by the man who is bringing them up.
"It can have major consequences for the way men treat
their supposed children and the amount of time, money
and emotion they invest in them," Curry said. "It can
range through the entire spectrum from serious abuse to
deciding not to pay for their education, or not buying
them the latest expensive trainers."
The team from the LSE is calling for investigations to be
set up by the government's new National Family and
Parenting Institute. They believe that mistrust over
paternity may be an overlooked factor in family
breakdown. Women are driven by primitive urges to
seek the optimum genes for their children, which can
lead to them sleeping with a "high social-status
Casanova" as well as their regular partner during the
fertile period around ovulation, researchers claim.
David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas
who is about to publish a new study on the subject, said:
"A proportion of these misattributed fathers will believe
that the child is genuinely theirs, and often the mother
tries to foster that belief."
He also estimates that the tendency for women to shop
around for the best genes leads to them making
mistakes about who has fathered their child.
Soraya Khashoggi, 57, former wife of arms dealer
Adnan Khashoggi, has revealed how DNA tests
established her 18-year-old daughter, Petrina, to be the
child of Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced former
Conservative minister.
Khashoggi said her ex-husband had completely
accepted Petrina: "He gave her his name without ever
asking who her true father was," she said.
Paula Yates, the television personality, discovered at 37
that her real father was Hughie Green, the Opportunity
Knocks star.
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