Men who are unaware their child isn’t biologically theirs

[K8ate]

Hearing stories and seeing various online statistics, the average percentage of men who are unaware that their child isn’t biologically theirs ranges from 10% upwards.
Surely these figures can’t be accurate?

I do not buy the 10% figure. I think that's way too high. 10% of children being brought up by men who are not their biological fathers - quite possibly as this would cover so many reasons. Probably even higher.

But unknowingly? No, nowhere near that high. that means 1 in 10 women have a) slept with at least two men during the same very short time period b) lied about it c) the man is oblivious. Sorry, that's just not believable.

Exactly. These figures are utter bullshit. Made up bullshit.

My husband and I asked about a male pill when we were younger. He was surer than I was about not being ready for kids yet, and lived a more "regular hours" lifestyle. We've been told the reason that there isn't a male pill is due to the ethics boards. Any drug trial has to be in the best interest of the person taking the drug. It is in a woman's best interest not to have an unwanted pregnancy. They can't argue strongly enough that the risks to the man of his partner getting pregnant outweigh the physical risk to the man of taking a new trial drug.
I suspect it is also commercial. I think we were a niche market in wanting the man to control fertility..

There are a number of male pills under human trials and development, have been for 5+ years.

DH knew someone who found out that his 3 children were all the products of a long term affair, he’d had some tests and the doctor was surprised he had 3 kids. It broke him.

I've been hearing that the male pill was in development since I first started having sex, and I'm now of an age where I probably don't actually need contraception any more!

I'm think I'm generally in favour of testing everyone's DNA at birth, I think it makes sense.

If a person wants their name on their child's birth certificate they should have DNA to confirm it because I don't agree that a woman can just put done whoever's name she likes. Ultimately that is a legal document that records parentage for that child, it's their right to know who their ACTUAL parent is, not the person who their mum remarried, or the person their mum would really really like to be their dad.
Definitely should be done in cases where child support is being claimed too, it is already in some countries.

Well well well

I can't find a good man, where are they ...

Looks like 10% of you need to look a bit closer to home 🤣

Exactly!

Where are these mythical pills that were promised?

Actually, a birth certificate is as much about who has parental responsibility. Consider that in the past, in large part, being married was so important so that there was a man to share parental responsibiltiy.

Don't get me wrong, I have no issiue with a man wanting to be sure that the child is his before he commits to parental responsibility, I'm jst making the point that birth certificates have never been considered a 100% accurate way to tell who a biological parent is.

There’s at least 3 women my age I know (52) where the mum’s had flings with in two cases South American men and the other Greek or Portuguese. No DNA test just goes on what the mum eventually tells the child. Another one, father is black but unknown, mum tells daughter the dad’s name is Mr Brown but it’s false.

London area so I’m guessing the men worked or were students here.

All women in this case are devastated and mostly looking for a father figure in their lives.

Depends on what year the data was from with that 10% figure. Court requested DNA tests used to be sent out but the amount of men who swabbed other males was so high that now it has to be face to face (in our area, i do not know about anywhere else). My nephew had one 2 years ago and he had to show ID and the swab was done by someone 'official'.
I know not all Courts have the same procedures. I think Cafcass are used in most areas too?

Again, the amount of home tests that are tampered with makes them absolutely unreliable so I would dismiss any data apart from any recent, as in the last year.

There was a silly old joke about the new revolutionary pill that worked by changing your DNA, so maybe there's more to this thread topic then meets the eye!

I also heard of a different kind of male pill that the man actually puts into his shoe - then it makes him limp...

I agree that these figures are most probably skewed, as the people who take the tests and make the discovery are the ones with a reason to doubt in the first place.

Just like the majority of MILs are pleasant and the majority of men are not disgusting turds - but you'd never know that from MN, as nobody is starting threads about normal nice people doing boringly nice normal things.

These kinds of figures come from men who actually take paternity tests, so a particular subgroup of men who have reasons to think their partner or relationship is questionable in some way.

The actual figure for the population as a whole is low, a couple of percent at the most in most cultures.

I’d be fine with testing DNA at birth as routine. Or perhaps we should do it upon leaving the hospital, as this would also catch cases of babies who get swapped accidentally.

Should be a Suprême Court judge in the States.

But how will you select the ‘percentage’. Anything other than a census is immediately open to bias, either by people volunteering their DNA ( compared to people withholding it because they might have something to hide) or by bias in the selectors ( often for convenience or expense reduction). And ‘weighting ‘ is not much use, because you are still extrapolating form an incomplete sample.

@PeonySeasons

Did he not see the child again then?

No, she upped and moved 500 miles away before the DNA results came back. Then she refused to let him see the child on the basis he's not the father and had no rights. Then 12yrs later she tried to claim via CMS.

He should have got himself off the BC or fought for custody at the time he found out, but he was absolutely distraught and believed he has no rights at all. He's also forces and so he volunteered for back to back deployments for years after it all happened (his coping strategy was to stay at sea, be busy and drink too much).

It's a long saga of her sending me abusive messages over the years, her denying the DNA test results, telling DH to get off the BC so her partner could adopt the child but then refusing to cooperate with the process, making accusations of us harrassing her, sending stupid messages via 3rd parties..... It's a good Jeremy Kyle tale.

DH and I were good friends for 15 years before we got together and that was over 5yrs after they had separated so I'm not the OW or anything of that sort.

I know one woman who had sex with her husband's best friend and had his baby. The husband has no idea. The child is now a 30 year old man and the husband and his best mate are still very close.
What's excruciating is the fact the son looks exactly like the best mate. He is 6ft 5, very skinny with black hair and brown eyes, just like his biological dad. The husband is 5 ft 7, quite fat with ginger hair and blue eyes. It's blindingly obvious to everyone apart from the poor husband.

I know one woman who had sex with her husband's best friend and had his baby. The husband has no idea. The child is now a 30 year old man and the husband and his best mate are still very close.
What's excruciating is the fact the son looks exactly like the best mate. He is 6ft 5, very skinny with black hair and brown eyes, just like his biological dad. The husband is 5 ft 7, quite fat with ginger hair and blue eyes. It's blindingly obvious to everyone apart from the poor husband.

@CatMumSlave oh and to cap it all off, DH is infertile and we can't have children. He was a very prem baby and had undescended testicles which weren't treated for many years. By that time it was far far too late and everything was cooked. So he could never have fathered that child, but he didn't know that at the time.

It is a fact that my male cousin and I are becoming so alike.
My Father, my son and me are very alike, we have certain characteristics in common. Shape of mouth and lips
My cousin whose Mother is a sister to my Mother seems to have these characteristics. Previously not noticed, partly because of a few years age difference.
I can think of it now because all the older generation have died. Siblings also.

It's not quite what he meant (because he's clearly not the sharpest), but children have often been 'hidden' in plain sight in families and grown up not knowing who their mother is. I actually houseshared with someone in my 20s who had discovered that the woman she grew up thinking of as her mother was her grandmother and her actual mother was her eldest sister (who'd got pregnant at 15/16 in the 70s when her mother was early 40s, so it was just about plausible to pass the baby off as her mother's). I didn't know her well enough to ask how exactly it has been done, whether older siblings had been aware etc, how her sister concealed the pregnancy and her (grand)mother managed to appear to have given birth...

Pretty traumatic all round.