The Power of Paternity Testing

According to people who live through it, it is hell going through life without knowing who your biological father is. It is a similarly hellish experience, (as a man) bringing up a kid without knowing whether it is really yours’ – unless that is a choice you have consciously made. Yet the number of people living through these experiences has been on the rise in the last few decades.

            The number of kids – who eventually grow into adults – without knowing who their biological fathers are is on the rise, as women become and more sexually liberated, and as more and more opt for unconventional methods of getting kids, like where they opt to conceive through the products of the various sperm banks now spread out throughout the globe. In the same vein, as the sexually liberated ladies compartmentalize the roles of the men in their life (where man is for instance give the role of being the baby father, while another one is assigned to be the provider and yet the another one the role of being a protector), many men are finding themselves bringing up children whose paternity they are not quite sure of.

            Both the offspring living without knowing their real biological fathers as well as the men bringing up children they are not sure are biologically theirs’ are people who can benefit from the power of paternity testing.

While paternity testing has been with us for a number of decades, the methods used to be unreliable, and many people thought it better to live with convenient lies, rather than try to pursue an inconvenient truth through inconvenient means.

The modern paternity test has however changed all this, and we are increasingly seeing more and more people coming out to search for the truth regarding either their paternity or the paternity of the children they are bringing up, hoping that such truth will ‘set them free’. The typical modern paternity test is actually a DNA test, whose results are more often than not incontestable. Furthermore, unlike the olden paternity test – which typically required for drawing of blood to be used in an eliminatory test based on blood groups, all that is typically required for the modern paternity test (which, as mentioned, is a DNA test) is for the participants to swab their inner cheeks, which are rich in DNA sample material. Obviously this kind of a swab is more convenient, less painful and less intrusive than drawing blood for blood group comparison.

But the real power of the modern paternity test lies in its accuracy. As mentioned, the modern paternity test, which is in essence a DNA test, is both eliminatory (it eliminates the possibility that so and so could be so and so’s father) and confirmatory, seeing that the DNA patterns of closely related people, say father and kid, tend to be related in some incontestable ways.

Money is of course a major force in the world, and another facet of the power of the modern paternity test is its low – and falling – cost. A DNA test which was a few year’s ago beyond the reach of many people is increasingly becoming more and more affordable, and within the reach of the masses.

And the ultimate power of the modern paternity test lies in its ability to reveal the truth, and thus free the people who take it, from the bondage of living in uncertainty over something as unalterable as paternity.