Thursday, June 07, 2007

Paternity testing

As some of you know, one of my great guilty pleasures is the watching of talk shows (specifically Maury Povich) on which paternity test results are revealed. These shows typically involve two distinct types of situations:

1. Woman swears she's 100% sure that a man is the father of her baby, and the man swears that he's not because the woman is sleeping with the whole town.

In this scenario, I'm usually on the woman's side. In part, it's because the men seem so idiotic (on the show I watched today, one guy said he was 100% sure he was not the father because "I've slept with three virgins, and I've didn't get any of THEM pregnant!"). In part, it's because I figure the woman is in a better position to know who the father is. What shocks me is how many women insist that there is NO WAY that anyone else could be the dad and then end up being wrong. That happened to both women today.

2. Young, happy couple has a kid (or one on the way), and the woman has brought the man on Maury to tell him a "terrible secret." The secret is that the kid might not be his (one woman on today's show was sleeping with 8 different guys around the time of conception). It goes without saying that if you're in this situation, going on Maury to tell your boyfriend/husband is a bad idea. But I'm torn about whether you should tell him at all. Who does it help? If he wants to be the father, and you want him to be the father, and he's a good father, is the DNA test a good idea?

1 comment:

Fishfrog said...

I'll never forget one episode I saw years ago where a guy (in category 2) was absolutely thrilled to be a father, and loved the mother a lot, and was completely and utterly destroyed when he found out he wasn't the father. The mother walked off stage as Maury held the sobbing man. On a follow up show we found out that the man had stuck around to raise the baby. Interesting side note about the follow up show: the mother brought another guy on who she thought maybe was the father and he also was not. This caused the first non-father to sob as much as before, because now the woman he was in love with must have been sleeping with at least two other guys. Poor bastard.