Here's a bizarre article by one Melanie McDonagh who claims that paternity tests are anti-woman.
Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away, the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers. DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves. ...Now I can see that some men might rather welcome an end to the old-fashioned scenario whereby they find themselves held to account for the paternity of children born to girls with whom they just happen to have had sex. The actor Jude Law recently found himself in just this position, and unhesitatingly and ungallantly demanded a DNA test.
By contrast, the old situation, in which women presented men with a child, and the man either did the decent thing and offered support, or made a run for it, allowed women a certain leeway. The courtesan in Balzac who, on becoming pregnant, unhesitatingly sought, and got, maintenance from two of her men friends, can’t have been the only one. Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.
As one of the commenters points out: why limit the search for the "best" father to just men who the mother had sex with? Why shouldn't the mother get to demand support and fatherhood from any man in the world?
The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not. (That eminently sensible Jewish custom, whereby Jewishness is passed through the mother, was based on the fact that we only really knew who our mothers are.) Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter? You can feel quite as much tenderness for a child you mistakenly think to be yours as for one who is.
Another brilliant commenter suggests that maternity wards dispense with all the tracking bracelets and let new parents simply leave with whichever newborn is closest when they check out of the hospital.
Yet another of the excellent commenters points out that the author wrote a similar article for The Times in 2009.
The whole article is so absurd that I'm tempted to believe that it's some sort of satire. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so genuinely misandrist.
