Dad blood: if DNA tests prove that you're not your children's father, do you still owe child support?

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns - Column

IMAGINE RAISING A family for years, only to find out one day that your children are not really yours.

Imagine, after the divorce, being told by the courts that you have to continue paying financial support for these children.

Is this a Kafkaesque nightmare, or an unfortunate necessity to protect the children's interests?

No one knows exactly how many men--and children--around the United States are confronting this question in their own lives, but the individual cases that have made it into the spotlight are wrenching.

One such story, told recently on NBC'S Dateline, is that of Morgan Wise, an engineer in Big Springs, Texas. Wise's fateful discovery, several years after his divorce, was prompted by the desire to help treat his 6-year-old son for cystic fibrosis: When he took a blood test to find out which cystic fibrosis gene he carried, it turned out that he didn't have the gene at all. Both parents have to be carriers for a child to inherit the gene.

Subsequent genetic tests showed that of the four children born to Wise's former wife during their 13-year marriage, only the eldest was his. "I never experienced a heart attack, and I can tell you, I had one that day;' Wise told Dateline. "I mean...a part of me died."

When Wise went to court asking to be relieved of the child support payments that consumed a third of his take-home pay, he was turned down. Wise was later barred from contact with all four children because he had discussed the issue of their parentage with them in violation of the judge's order, but he still had to keep the checks coming. In January the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Wise's appeal.

To some extent, Wise and others in his position are victims of a gap between law and technology. The law basically presumes, as in ancient Rome, that a woman's husband is the father of any child born during the marriage. While a court may rule in favor of the cuckolded husband, what legal precedent exists is not on his side. Rulings in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and California have also held that if the husband acknowledged the children as his for the duration of the marriage, he cannot deny paternity afterward.

When it comes to unmarried fathers, the law is more flexible, but a man who did not initially dispute a paternity claim may also find it tough to do anything about it later, particularly if he at some point acted as a father to the child. In Georgia, Carnell Smith, now 41, voluntarily assumed responsibility...