For most of history, one essential, immutable difference between men and women was that men could hide the fact that they had created a child and women could not. Pregnancy and childbirth showed the world who the mother was; paternity could only be assumed. Years ago, I saw a female standup do a routine in which she swaggered across the stage like a dude, telling the audience, “Yeah, I don’t have any kids”—pause—“that I know of.” It still makes me laugh. New parents are often told how much their babies look like the father. The research on whether most do or do not is ambiguous, but the fancy persists, in part because, consciously or unconsciously, people think that emphasizing the resemblance will set a man’s mind at ease, thus fortifying the paternal bond. As Nara Milanich, a professor of history at Barnard College, writes in her solidly researched and enlightening new book, “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father” (Harvard), a “common metaphor invoked by nineteenth-century jurists was that Nature had concealed fatherhood by an ‘impenetrable veil.’ ”
That veil was often a source of frustration, leading to domestic doubts and irresolvable courtroom conflicts. Literature gives us many a husband driven half mad by the suspicion that his child is not the fruit of his loins, as is King Leontes, in “The Winter’s Tale,” and women who deceive their husbands on this score, like the wife in Maupassant’s story “Useless Beauty,” who tells her husband that one of their seven children isn’t his, but won’t say which.
Paternal unknowability, however, was also enormously useful. Many legal traditions around the world, including the Anglo-American one, adhered to the marital presumption of legitimacy at least until the twentieth century: a child born to a married woman was considered to be the biological progeny of her husband. (A child born to an unmarried woman was, Milanich writes, “historically deemed a filius nullius, a child of nobody.”) Milanich tells the story of a man named Remo Cipolli, who, in 1945, sued his wife, Quinta Orsini, for adultery, and sought to deny paternity, after she gave birth to an infant who appeared to be black. Cipolli and his wife, who were both white Italians, lived in a small town near Pisa, where a number of African-American soldiers had been stationed at the end of the Second World War. The case became notorious—the baby was known as “the little Moor of Pisa.” In the end, although a civil court found Orsini guilty of adultery, it also concluded that her husband, Cipolli, was legally the baby’s father.
The marital presumption might not have been fair to some individual men, but it did help uphold the patriarchal family. Orsini’s conviction for adultery aside, the presumption denied the possibility that wives might have sex outside their marriage—the husband was the father of any children born to his wife, because who else would be?
Under the systems of slavery and colonialism, the opacity of paternity came in particularly handy. An enslaved woman living in the antebellum South could never have demanded proof of paternity for a child sired by a white owner, but, in any case, there was no means of obtaining such proof. Some of Thomas Jefferson’s descendants continued to deny that he had fathered children by the slave Sally Hemings, until, and even after, DNA tests conducted in 1998 confirmed the genetic link. “The law of slavery erased the father to the benefit of masters, their white kin, and the system of bondage generally,” Milanich writes. In 1912, when France ended a century-old ban on paternity suits brought by unmarried women, the new law did not apply in French colonies.
And then came the disintegration of that once impenetrable veil—partial, at first, and, by the end of the twentieth century, complete. Science was the catalyst. The discovery of ABO blood types at the turn of the century led, in the nineteen-tens, to research by the Polish microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld which showed that blood groups were heritable. In courtrooms, especially in Europe, blood typing of mother and child became a method of ruling out putative fathers. The strategy had resonance, since blood provides so many of our metaphors about family: blood ties, blood relations, blood is thicker than water, and so on. It was not, however, a fail-safe technique; it didn’t work, for example, if a mother and her child had the same blood type. Nor could blood typing identify an unknown father—it could only exclude an alleged one. For these and other, less scientific reasons, a lot of people seemed perfectly comfortable disregarding blood typing as evidence.
In the early nineteen-forties, a young actress named Joan Berry sued Charlie Chaplin, claiming that he was the father of her baby, Carol Ann. A lab test determined that Chaplin had an incompatible blood type and could not have sired the little girl. But the jury declared him the father, anyway, apparently concurring with Berry’s lawyer, who told the Los Angeles Superior Court, “To hold the blood test binding in this case would be to say, in effect, ‘you little tramp’ ”—that would be Berry, not Chaplin—“ ‘get out of here,’ and let the rich father do as he pleases.” In the jury’s view, Milanich writes, “Chaplin’s paternity derived not from his biological link to Carol Ann Berry but from his relationship to her mother.” This was a headline-grabbing case, since it involved a famous actor, but the outcome, Milanich says, was not especially unusual.
Genetic testing, which first emerged in the nineteen-sixties, was far more precise, and it became steadily more so. The first method used, which compared antigens on the white blood cells of parents and children, could establish paternity with an accuracy rate of eighty per cent. By the nineteen-nineties, when PCR (polymerase chain reaction) analysis became the standard technique of genetic paternity testing, the accuracy of results had climbed to 99.9 per cent. When it came to that age-old question “Who’s the father?,” virtual certainty had replaced plausible deniability.
Among the most enthusiastic adopters of the new paternity testing were federal and state governments. In the United States, the welfare-reform bill of 1996 included provisions that encouraged state child-support agencies to order DNA testing when paternity was disputed. Successfully chasing down fathers had long been a cost-saving goal of modern welfare states. Milanich quotes a Norwegian statesman in the early twentieth century who declared that anonymous paternity was “an offense against the child and against the State.” But DNA testing was a particular boon to Clintonian welfare reform. In the political rhetoric of personal responsibility, fatherhood often became synonymous with financial support. Meanwhile, the complex reasons (domestic abuse, rape) that a woman might not always want the man who impregnated her disclosed were neglected.
Those were also the years during which paternity reveals became a staple of reality TV—most notoriously on the tabloid talk show “Maury,” which, in 1998, launched a segment called “Who’s the Daddy?” Its formula—a lurid compound of domestic dysfunction, gleeful racial stereotypes, and live-audience jeering—has proved remarkably durable. Incredibly, “Maury” is still airing in 2019, still featuring “Who’s the Daddy?,” still naming and showing children whose paternity is contested. The hundreds of times that the host, Maury Povich, sombrely pulled DNA test results from a manila envelope—often eliciting sobs from the mothers and victory dances from the men who’d been let off the hook—helped, in its own tacky way, to prepare us for the modern era of consumer genetics, with its more wholesome sheen.
In 2007, 23andMe became the first company to offer direct-to-consumer DNA tests, using mail-order kits and saliva samples that people could easily collect at home. 23andMe, like AncestryDNA and dozens of other companies pitching such services, produced clever, upbeat marketing campaigns that promised consumers a new sense of themselves, where they were from, and to whom they belonged. A recent 23andMe ad shows a lovely young woman on a round-the-world trip inspired by the knowledge that she is three per cent Scandinavian (we see her swimming in a Nordic lake), twenty-nine per cent East Asian, and forty-six per cent West African (we see her dancing and taking selfies with new friends in Asia and Africa). With the new mail-order kits, you can learn about your ethnic ancestry by pie-chart percentage, a topic that holds boundless fascination for a lot of people, as it turns out. You can learn at least some strong probabilities about your health and your genetic traits, including rather peculiar ones—whether you have the genes that make cilantro taste like soap, for instance, or render you bunion-prone, or likely to sport a unibrow. And occasionally, and sometimes accidentally, you can find siblings you didn’t know you had, or a biological father who is not the father who reared you.
Direct-to-consumer DNA testing—or what is sometimes called recreational genetics—is now a multibillion-dollar business. By February, 2019, twenty-six million people had added their DNA to the databases of the four main companies in the field. According to an analysis by MIT Technology Review, the number could climb to a hundred million in the next two years.
The ubiquity of DNA testing has caused a huge shift in the history of paternity: from a legal and moral question that often simply could not be answered to a biomedical matter subject to highly accurate proof. That’s the major through line in Milanich’s book, which covers developments in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. “Modern paternity’s promise that biological kinship can and should be known has, almost a century after its emergence, come to full fruition,” she writes. “Science has definitively vanquished social and legal (mis)understandings of paternity, kinship, and identity. Commercialization has provided unfettered access to testing. The will to biological truth has displaced other social values once and for all.”
Except, as Milanich herself goes on to say, that is the picture at only a theoretical level—the lived reality is a lot more complicated. In fact, reading “Paternity,” I was struck by how little the DNA revolution has done to change our understanding of fatherhood and family.
Compared with other ways in which we’ve expanded the concept of family in recent years—the wide acceptance of same-sex marriage and parenting, the proliferation of new reproductive technologies, the rise of open adoption, the idea of chosen families—the ability to prove paternity doesn’t seem that transformative. As a society, we’re less inclined than ever to view connection by blood as the foundation of love and family, just at the moment when we are able to prove that connection most definitively. Besides, the marital presumption, though rebuttable, still holds sway in our legal system—not, these days, so much to preserve the institution of family as to protect the best interests of children. Were DNA testing to reveal that a man wasn’t the biological father of a child he’d already been caring for as his own, we would consider him to be cruel if he withdrew from parenting.
Nor has the new era of genetic testing revealed a tsunami of misattributed paternity, despite the impression you get from daytime TV or from men’s-rights groups, which conjure up an epidemic of paternity fraud perpetrated by scheming, birth-control-eschewing women. (Advertising is another fomenter of anxiety on this sensitive point: billboards put up by a company called Labs to Go a couple of years ago, in the military community of Hampton Roads, Virginia, showed two men—a grave-looking guy in Army camo and a grinning mailman—next to the words “Who’s the Daddy?”) Some frequently cited statistics—that cases of wrongly assigned paternity make up between ten and thirty per cent of all births—are misleading, since they are often based on data from tests requested by people who already have doubts about paternity. When the data are based on studies done for other reasons (for example, to look at inherited predispositions to conditions like cystic fibrosis), the rates of misattributed paternity come in at between one and 3.7 per cent. In the early years of this century, an Australian company, Genetic Technologies, reported that even in so-called motherless tests—those requested by men without informing the mother, presumably because they harbored realistic suspicions—ostensible paternity had been falsified in only ten per cent of the cases.
It would be illuminating to know how often consumers using DNA services in the United States find out that they are not biologically related to the man they’ve considered to be their father. The 23andMe Web site warns that, in availing yourself of its product, you may “discover relatives who were previously unknown to you,” or “learn that someone you thought you were related to is not your biological relative.” But, as far as I can tell, no systematic study of such discoveries has been published. In a 2005 paper, “Rampant Misattributed Paternity: The Creation of an Urban Myth,” Michael Gilding, an Australian sociologist, argues that several forces sustain our inflated sense of the phenomenon: media attention to chronicles of paternity unmasked (sex! secrets! weird character traits finally explained!), campaigning by men’s-rights groups, and the influence of evolutionary biologists who assume, in their just-so-story way, that men will always seek to spread their genetic material far and wide and that women will always seek the best genetic material for their offspring, in or out of marriage.
Maybe, too, the new science of paternity has had less impact than you might think, because the information it produces is ecumenical and anarchic—marshalled in service of remarkably different goals. “Biological essentialism,” Milanich writes, can be deeply retrograde—deployed to shore up “murderous racial ideology,” as in Nazi Germany, the privatization of social welfare, misogynistic assumptions about women, or a pinched idea of family. But DNA findings—and the acknowledgment that people often have a powerful desire to know where they came from biologically—can also undergird more progressive developments: the adoptee-rights’ movement, or the quest, by the Abuelas of Argentina, to find grandchildren who were lost when the children’s parents were tortured and killed by the Argentine junta. Neither the “social constructivist” nor the biological view of kinship has a monopoly on virtue. Historically, as Milanich points out, the former approach has often reinforced “patriarchal privilege, privacy, and property and at the expense of unmarried women and their children.” Still, it doesn’t necessarily serve those purposes today, and, like many people, I’m a sucker for stories in which parental love triumphs over genetics.
Of course, if you are one of those people whose idle interest in your Irish ancestry or the shape of your earlobes ended up dismantling lifelong assumptions about you and your origins, you may feel that innovations in DNA testing have created a powerful force indeed. In part because this knowledge often comes as the unintended by-product of a larky little project—armchair genealogy, fun for the whole family—the shocks it delivers seem ironic. Home DNA tests aren’t designed to serve as paternity tests, and the companies that produce them aren’t in the business of providing legal or psychological counselling in the wake of accidental revelations. If you opt for the health report, you might learn that you’re prone to certain cancers, but in general the information gathered is supposed to be fun, maybe even uplifting. The companies promote their kits as good Christmas and Father’s Day gifts.
“With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce” was the headline of a 2014 piece that appeared on Vox, in which a reproductive biologist recounted learning through 23andMe that he had a half brother who was adopted at birth, the secret progeny of his father. At first, the biologist thought this new knowledge was kind of cool—he had a professional interest in genes, after all—but his family didn’t share that take: “Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. My parents divorced. No one is talking to my dad.”
Stories of the fallout from such discoveries—some of it good, a lot of it profoundly disruptive—have become something of a genre unto themselves. A few of these works even seem likely to last. The novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro’s artful 2019 book, “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love” (Knopf), is one of them. Shapiro tells the story of finding out, as a fiftysomething wife and mother, that she was not biologically related to her now dead father, the melancholy man she’d grown up with, loved, and derived a lot of her strong Jewish identity from. Instead, she was conceived with sperm from a (non-Jewish) donor who was a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. With help from her husband, she tracks the formerly anonymous donor down in short order—family secrets that would once have been the stuff of deathbed confessions can now yield to a determined Google search—and tentatively builds a friendship with him, driven by curiosity about how this disclosure makes her life look different in retrospect (and surely also by a writer’s sense that she has a great story by the tail here). The actor and director Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary, “Stories We Tell,” is a beautiful autobiographical film that explores the mystery of her own paternity, handling the answers she finds with grace, honesty, and respect for the many perspectives she presents: those of her remarkably thoughtful siblings; of the idiosyncratic father who brought her up; of her loving biological father, a film producer; and of her glamorous and giddy mother, dead for more than twenty years.
Paternity reveals are a gift to good storytellers, a phenomenon that Polley’s film strongly evokes. Most striking, perhaps, her father, rather than being crushed by the revelations of his wife’s long-ago infidelity, sees a story there and is inspired to write it himself. Reading his work aloud for Sarah and the camera, Michael Polley notes his “growing enthusiasm for the narrative itself.” One of the greatest benefits the rest of us derive from the current age of DNA testing is that, even as it forcefully uncovers the indisputable bases of biological relatedness, it also shows us a multiplicity of nuanced stories about how people can hold in their head different truths, and different understandings of family, all at the same time.
In “Stories We Tell,” Michael Polley says that, with the knowledge that his youngest child was his wife’s with another man, “a certain cord that runs between Sarah and me has been severed, and I am powerless to join it together.” And yet he realizes that had he “been her biological father she would have been entirely different. She might have been better or worse. But she would definitely not have been the Sarah she is today. And that’s the one I love. Of the other possible outcome, there is nothing.” ♦
