Abortion rights and paternity tests
This morning my thought is pretty simple: abortion is seen as a woman’s issue, which of course it historically has been, but with the advent of paternity tests, it could easily and quickly become a man’s issue.
Back before abortion was legal, and especially if the women were unwed or otherwise shameable, the fathers could just deny paternity. But what with the science we now have, men who are proven to be fathers will be on the hook for caring for their babies much more.
Of course DNA tests are not new, but we’ve had abortion rights for a while now. So for the past few decades if a man were worried about being forced to pay he could try to talk his girlfriend or mistress into an abortion. That’s obviously gotten much harder in some places.
Finally, this argument depends on courts actually making fathers pay. That might not always happen, but then again it might happen to well off, powerful men who in the past would have had opted for an abortion. This scenario makes abortion a man’s issue in a way that I am interested to see play out in red states.
mathbabe 
I was surprised not to see any math content here. This could have been an opportunity to discuss statistics, including Bayes Rule, as it pertains to false positives and false negatives in testing.
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Go for it!
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Some alignment with Vivek? https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1750646160212005294?s=20
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You know what they say about a broken clock! 🙂
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What do you think of mandatory, universal paternity tests? ie, always trying to find out, by law, who is the father (to the extent it’s possible), so that there are no doubts about paternity. That’s been the case with mothers forever (for obvious biological reasons), so there should be no reason not to make that information public on the side of fathers, too.
That would solve another set of issues that we have had forever, like paternity fraud (mothers lying about who’s the father), women aborting without telling the prospective father, women aborting without even telling the unknowing father that they were pregnant in the first place, or women tricking men into getting their pregnant (eg on a one-night stand).
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Way to spin this back into the deceitful Eve narrative! Less sarcastically, I’d like to see some data around how big of a problem these things you mention really are, relative to the topic at hand. Especially the last one … women tricking men into getting them pregnant (???).
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We don’t have good data on many of these issues (and that’s an issue in itself).
I don’t know the figures in particular about women lying on purpose about contraception, about their fertility, or about their menstrual cycle, in order to get pregnant.
About parental fraud, apparently studies indicate that even in the countries where it’s less common, one out of every hundred fathers (or “fathers”) has been lied to about their offspring. And it gets as high as 30% of fathers in some places.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1733152/
So even with the most conservative lower bound, it’s a very consequential problem that affects millions of fathers, men who think they are fathers, or men who don’t know that they are fathers.
That’s why I welcome universal mandatory paternity testing for the sake of men *as well*.
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it’s fortunate that condoms are an easily accessible form of contraception that can men who adamantly do not want to be fathers can use, which one would suspect must be involved in those discussions.
I could see there also being a downside to mandatory paternity testing, such as instances where rape was involved, or the biological father is an otherwise dangerous or incompetent father. Of course, mothers are capable of this too, but at the end of the day they are the ones carrying the child, and have control over who they inform of that.
besides paternity testing, I would also be interested to see how many people who did not want to conceive a child, but had intercourse that resulted in the birth of a child, were using condoms.
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The NCBI review you cite includes studies of fathers disputing their paternity, which, the authors admit, will be heavily skewed towards high rates of “paternal discrepancy”. The only nearly reliable studies, the authors conclude, are the ones done for other purposes than discovering paternity, like studying inheritable diseases. Those have a median rate of 3.7%. The authors mention that artificial insemination may not be accounted for in such studies and, though the authors are silent on this, it is probable that those studies could not track when the pregnancy occurred, so it’s possible that those pregnancies were all long prior to marriage. IOW, 3.7% is very likely an overestimate.
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The problem is that men are now in control. Men are trying to do all the things that are comfortable for them. Men don’t want women to be in control of when they can reproduce. Ultimately is just about control. With abortion, women could be in control of denying reproduction with the male having no say in it. Now they have control.
Gregg
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Ha ha ha I love it. I always thought that those against abortion should be made to pay for the upbringing of unwanted children.
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I could not agree more. When men are held accountable for the costs of raising a child to adulthood, then the conversation on abortion will change. A gal can dream …
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Please delete my previous comment
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The US socialization of women’s responsibilities for any & all reproductive matters is unacceptable. It’s high time for men to “cover up” and march along all to stand up to the INSANITY of the anti RvW HUNTING of girls and women. As long as we walk wearing pink pussy hats, and only interview women on TV, we own it 100% – we also own the victim hood of being the victims of. En’s abuse of power! We are dying, folks!
Gabrielle Blair wrote a NYT Best Seller: EJACULATE RESPONSIBLY. A MUST READ! BTW— she’s a mother of 6 kids.Great present for the boys & men in your circle.
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How will it play out in red states? Since paternity tests are a double-edged sword — quite aside from Tripu’s hypothetical mandate, whether serious or sarcastic and rhetorical, the mere availability of paternity tests curtails the privacy, freedom and safety of wives, for example — I’d guess that however issues regarding tests play out in red states the consequences will benefit white men and the well-to-do and disregard the interests of anyone else, given current trends in those states (at least as I perceive them from my urban perch in NYC). Or am I unfairly misrepresenting red states? .
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