Paternity Testing and Its Implications

How many of us have ever watched an episode of daytime talk show Maury where host Maury Povich brings on two men and a woman who has sexually transgressed, and conducts DNA tests to determine which man is “the real father” of her baby? How many of us have watched a young man celebrate on camera his newfound legal and social freedom from obligation of parenthood? And how many of us have ever questioned the history and meaning of a mere cheek swab having such vast social, legal and medical implications?

On Thursday, September 27^th, as part of the BCRW Lunchtime Lecture Series, Associate Professor of History at Barnard Nara Milanich gave a presentation called “A Global History of the Paternity Test.” Milanich traced the concept of questioning and determining paternity from Roman laws all the way up to Maury, perhaps not globally, but in multiple contexts around the world. According to Milanich, paternity testing is very much tied into discourses on immigration and eugenics, and is itself an important intersection of socially constructed ideologies of race, gender and identity.  It is, as she stated, a scientific, legal and social phenomenon. Paternity testing has historically and continues to determine who can receive certain benefits or welfare, who can be allowed into the country, who is of what race, who is considered “family,” etc…

It’s a simple procedure, and yet it can have profound effects on the lives involved. What, then, was done to determine paternity before the invention of the “infallible” DNA test? According to Milanich, once marriage was institutionalized, many legal structures around the world determined that the father was simply the husband of the mother of the baby. However, with the rise of various paternity determining technologies (some were more legitimate than others, such as dental morphology, finger prints and foot prints, paternal resemblance, blood type), different legal jurisdictions reacted differently to this new access to “true” paternity. Such technological developments undermined the once-considered fixed nature of the marriage union as determining parenthood, and also create and perpetuate ideas of women as untrustworthy or deceitful.

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