Who’s your daddy? Moms that don’t know!
Christine Rosen’s article titled, Daddy’s DNA, reports in the Wall Street Journal (2.22.2008):
. . . A surprising number of the women who contacted Maury to prove paternity, in fact, had no clear idea of who their children’s father was — some have appeared on the show countless times trying to solve the mystery . . .
In a 2005 article in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, researchers who had studied families in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Canada, South Africa and several other countries wrote that they had found rates of paternal discrepancy of about 4%, on average. Which means that approximately one man in 25 named as the biological father on a child’s birth certificate is not the real father — and may not know it . . .
Perhaps the growing interest in paternity testing reveals a broader cultural anxiety about fidelity in contemporary society, an anxiety exacerbated by the fact that an increasing number of parents bear and rear children outside the institution of marriage.