What men fear most 132

Paternity fraud and the cuckold

Lurking behind such startling redefinitions of fatherhood is the DNA paternity test. With it, the ancient wisdom summed up pithily by Lord Kilbrandon—“maternity is a matter of fact, paternity one of mere inference”—has been stood on its head. Where once grudging assumptions if female fidelity—or chastity belts—led to the legal assignment of paternal rights and responsibilities to the husband of the child’s mother, DNA tests now allow these to be delegated to men on the basis of highly accurate biological evidence. Once male consent, expressed through his willingness to get or stay married to a child’s mother, was the ultimate arbiter of whether a man accepted the father role.

Now an immutable biological fact holds sway. Fathers’ Rights groups laud paternity tests for giving men the same certainty of paternity and thus ‘peace of mind’ as women have always had about their maternity, the furore surrounding high profile ‘paternity fraud’ cases suggests that, in some contexts, such certainties have added considerable fuel to the fire started by the biological assignment of child-support obligations. Paternity fraud cases offer headline-grabbing tales of men as many fear they have become in the post-modern reproductive scene: rejected as partners and fathers by unfaithful and deceiving women who are legally vindicated in their post-separation desire to treat them as littlemore than walking wallets. Fathers’ Rights groups portray such “cuckolded,”“deceived,” and “hustled” men as the inevitable outcome of a world in which the power of  women has spiralled out of control and, as a consequence, men’s role in the family is neither valued nor assured

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