Women who cheat on their husbands

The Times 23 January 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.


The Dallas Morning News 31 October 1999

DNA TESTS ALTER LEGAL LANDSCAPE FOR DADS

Man supports sons not biologically his

By Brooks Egerton

BIG SPRING, Texas - You are not a cystic fibrosis carrier, the doctor says. Sounds like good news, but it has ripped his patient's life apart. Both parents must have a defective CF gene for their offspring to develop the deadly disease -- so how could Morgan Wise's youngest child be sick?

"I'm sorry to say there's a good chance he's not your boy," he recalled the physician telling him. In disbelief, he had DNA work done on all his kids. The staggering conclusion: His three sons were not his three sons, at least not biologically speaking.

"I cried," said Mr. Wise, a railroad engineer who'd been divorced 2 1/2 years when the testing nightmare began in early 1999. "It's like a death." When grief turned to rage against his ex-wife, he asked a court to free him from paying child support. More shock followed as he learned that DNA EVIDENCE OF PATERNITY -- THOUGH WIDELY USED TO ORDER PAYMENTS -- OFTEN IS NOT ACCEPTED WHEN TRYING TO STOP THEM.

A central reason is the U.S. judicial system's age-old, hard-to-rebut presumption that husband equals father. There's no easy place in the equation for the modern miracle of DNA testing, which in recent years has brought powerful new facts to bear on legal matters and has given families information they sometimes can't cope with.

As cases like Mr. Wise's have surfaced around the country, courts typically have made children's interests paramount, determined to keep them from becoming innocent victims of a high-tech blood feud. Financially and emotionally, the reasoning goes, minors need the man who has functioned as their dad.

"Put the children first," said University of Texas professor Jack Sampson, a nationally known authority on family law. "The question of who's the father is not just a biological one."

That's readily understood in, say, an adoption, in which a man freely consents to parental responsibility. But what if a husband is deceived, as Mr. Wise says he was, into acting as a father? How do you explain to him that he can't capitalize on the sort of scientific evidence that could be used against him if he fathered a child out of wedlock?

"Too bad," Mr. Sampson said.

John McCabe, legislative director and legal counsel for the National Commission on Uniform State Laws, is more reserved: "I don't have a good answer to that. I don't think anybody does."

The commission, led in part by Mr. Sampson, is redrafting its model parentage law to guide state legislatures, which are funding the effort. The drafters remain resolutely children-first in their approach and are talking about making it even more difficult to challenge the presumption of paternity.

Rise in testing

A key reason for the rewrite is the explosion in DNA testing and its ability to answer paternity questions with virtual certainty. Officials estimate that accredited labs -- those whose results can be used in court - will perform more than 250,000 such paternity tests this year. That's more than triple the number a decade ago.

The companies' experience shows that women, for whatever reason, misidentify the fathers of their children with some frequency. DNA Diagnostics Center, the Ohio firm that did Mr. Wise's tests and is an industry leader, says 30 percent of the men it tests prove to be misidentified.

Similar numbers come from the Texas attorney general's office, which enforces child support: About a quarter of the men who disputed paternity in the last year turned out to be right. In Florida, the proportion was one-third.

Many of DNA Diagnostics' customers are women seeking child support and men who want custody or visitation rights, spokeswoman Lisa McDaniel said. But the Wise family infidelity scenario, she added, "is not uncommon." Some married women "think they're going to get away with it," she said. "You never know how things are going to unravel."

Ms. McDaniel said the company got a surge in business this summer from billboards, posted in 10 cities, that featured a baby with a Pinocchio nose and asked, "Is his mother a liar?" Mr. Wise's attorney in Big Spring, Robert Miller, has learned enough to change his standard advice to men in divorce cases. "I tell every father, 'We'd better get DNA
tests,' " he said.

Support battle

Because Mr. Wise stipulated during divorce that the boys were his and didn't test until later, Mr. Miller said, there's little hope of ending his $500-a-month support payment. As a rule, courts bar people from relitigating a case once it has been adjudicated and the appeal window has closed. Mr. Miller is trying to pry the matter back open by alleging that his client's ex-wife fraudulently concealed her extramarital activity. But a state appeals court, in an unpublished December 1998 opinion, rejected just such an argument in a central Texas case that closely parallels Mr. Wise's. The same month, a Philadelphia man lost a similar fight before Pennsylvania's highest court and has since been unable to get a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even if a husband tries to contest paternity before divorce, he may well fail. According to UT's Mr. Sampson, several states - including California but not Texas - allow no rebuttal of the fatherhood presumption unless the man can prove he was sterile, impotent or not cohabiting with the woman at the time of conception.

Other states do permit challenges such as DNA testing -- but only if it's done within five years of the child's birth, as currently recommended by the National Commission on Uniform State Laws. (Mr. Sampson and fellow drafters propose to cut the number to two years, writing that "a longer period may have severe consequences for the child.")

Texas now has no limit tied to birth. So could Mr. Wise have avoided child support by simply disputing paternity before his divorce was final? Not necessarily. He would have had to persuade a court to order DNA tests verifying the ones he had done -- something a judge could easily decide was not in the children's best interests, legal experts say.

Children's feelings

Mr. Wise's ex-wife, Wanda Fryar, now has primary custody of the three boys, who are 7, 8 and 10. A 14-year-old daughter, who tests show is Mr. Wise's biologically, also lives with her and her new husband in another part of Big Spring, a West Texas town of about 24,000.

The boys don't understand their father's attempt to disavow paternity, Ms. Fryar said. "If he had any concern for them at all," she said, "he would end it." She questions whether the DNA tests were done properly but sees no reason to have her own done. "The kids are his," Ms. Fryar said.

Under oath, she has given conflicting statements on this point. She testified during divorce proceedings in 1996 that she'd never had an extramarital affair. But at a hearing this spring, when Mr. Wise was seeking to revisit the support question, she admitted having sex with another man nine months before each of the boy's births and acknowledged that he could be the biological father. Ms. Fryar divulged the man's name after the judge ordered her to. So far, he has not become part of the litigation.

In an interview, Ms. Fryar conceded the liaisons, saying that Mr. Wise knew about them and that he had affairs, too. He denies both allegations.

'Why should I pay?'

Mr. Wise, who has also remarried, knows that some people will think he's punishing the boys unfairly. "But why should I pay for what she did?" he
asked. "I'm as innocent as the kids."

Does he still see them as his sons?

At one point he told a reporter yes, "because that's all I know and that's all they know." They still call him dad, he added. But when one had a birthday recently, "I didn't get him a card, because how do I sign it?" When he sees them these days, "I wonder who their father is. It's like I'm baby-sitting. . . . I'm like a significant other, like a stepfather."

Mr. Wise talked about how much he has cared for the boys, whose pictures remain on display in his living room; how he stayed up nights when the youngest, the one with cystic fibrosis, was struggling to breathe; how he fought for and won primary custody, back before DNA testing "just wiped my whole family out."

He said he wants to set up a college fund for the kids and help them in other ways, as long as Ms. Fryar can't touch the money. But his "death hate" for her, as he calls it, seems stronger than any parental love. If winning his legal battle meant he could never see the boys again, then so be it, he said.

"I don't care if I have to get a second job digging a ditch, I'm going to fight her all the way," Mr. Wise said. "I'll never get over it."


Comment : How many men have been duped ?