Family Law

Paternity Tests: Not Just for the Rich

Paternity Tests: Not Just for the Rich
By Nancy Shute
US News and World Report

Not so very long ago, fatherhood had a bit of mystery to it. No more. Advances in genetics have made paternity tests one of the most simple and reliable medical tests available.

Being able to be 99.99 percent sure has helped fuel the frenzy over the fate of little Dannielynn, the late Anna Nicole Smith's infant daughter, and her four would-be daddies. It also made Tuesday's announcement that DNA samples would be taken from the body of the late soul legend James Brown before burial to settle several new paternity claims seem almost commonplace.

Far from Hollywood, DNA-based paternity tests are used every day to determine child support and custody, or to put a worried mind at ease.

"It was a relief," says Mandy, 32, of Kansas, who asked that her last name not be used. Her father had died at age 16 and hadn't told his parents he'd gotten a girl pregnant. A few months ago, Mandy decided she wanted a family medical history for her two children, ages 8 and 11. She asked her father's parents, and they said they'd like to do DNA testing first. On Wednesday, she found out that they are indeed her grandparents.

"I was scared to death that maybe my mom wasn't honest with me," she says. "It's neat having the confirmation that everything I had been told was in fact the situation."

As DNA technology has become more precise, paternity tests like Mandy's, which could be done without her father's DNA, are becoming cheaper and easier. It's now possible to determine paternity using DNA from grandparents or cousins, or from a discarded coffee cup. Procedures such as amniocentesis can be used to determine paternity well before a baby's birth. Sometime soon, noninvasive tests may be able to ID Dad through bits of fetal DNA floating in a pregnant woman's blood.

Paternity testing first hit the headlines in 1943, when starlet Joan Berry sued Charlie Chaplin, claiming he was the father of her child. A simple blood-type test proved Chaplin could not be the father, but at the time such tests weren't admissible in court, and Chaplin was ordered to pay child support. The case prompted new laws allowing blood tests in paternity cases, but those tests could eliminate just 40 percent of males as father. In the 1970s, new tests based on variations in white blood cells raised the exclusion rate to 80 percent. DNA testing, which entered the market in the late 1980s, has made paternity testing almost foolproof, raising the accuracy rate to 99.99 percent for the most common tests. Further testing can raise the odds to astronomical levels in contested cases. "The accuracy has greatly increased," says David Gjertson, a professor of biostatistics at the University of California–Los Angeles.

Then there's the CSI approach. "Discreet" paternity testing relies on DNA collected not from the man but from random cells on his razor or toothbrush, or even from earwax on a used Q-tip. Sometimes dental floss tells the tale. In 2003, millionaire Steve Bing alleged that MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian, then 84, had hired private investigators to go through the trash can outside Bing's London home. Bing had been romantically linked with Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, Kerkorian's ex-wife. DNA on Bing's dental floss fingered Bing as 4-year-old Kira's father.

"You can send us almost anything, and we can get DNA out of it," says Howard Coleman, CEO of Genelex, a paternity-testing lab in Seattle. "Anything that someone's had contact with, and we can give you a very conclusive answer."

The simplicity of gathering DNA, and the public's growing knowledge that every used coffee cup tells a story, has increased the opportunity for fraud in paternity cases. Kerkorian's former wife admitted using saliva from one of his grown daughters to try to prove that Kerkorian was Kira's father. State child-support programs, which pay for the bulk of paternity testing, require the parties being tested to appear in person at a designated testing site in order to establish a "chain of custody." Labs certified by the American Association of Blood Banks follow standards to assure a chain of custody. Still, fraud happens. Men will send a buddy in to give a sample, or a woman will bring in a child other than the one in question.

Parents-to-be who aren't willing to wait can find out their baby's status before the wee one is born. The process isn't cheap or easy. Chorionic villi sampling and amniocentesis, which are used to test fetal DNA for genetic disorders such as Down syndrome, can also be used to identify the baby's father in the first or second trimester. Dawn, who asked that her last name not be used, found herself shopping for prenatal paternity testing after she went through a rough patch in her life, had a one-night stand, and found out she was pregnant.

"My husband was worried that it wasn't his," she says. "I knew it was my husband's baby, but he wanted to be 100 percent sure that it was his, so he could be excited through the pregnancy."

The couple found GeneTree, a DNA-testing company that offered prenatal genetic testing, on the Internet, and paid $445 for the test. Dawn's obstetrician agreed to do an amniocentesis and send the genetic material to GeneTree, which compared the sample with those sent in by Dawn and her husband. The baby, to be born this summer, is his.

"It would be nicer if it wasn't so expensive," says Dawn, 27, "but it meant more to us to relieve that anxiety and worry."

From San Francisco Family Law Blog posted 2007-03-01.