Parentage Testing

Not too long after the discovery of blood types, it became clear that they were inherited. The ability to test for discrete, inherited characteristics opened the way to using genetic testing as a means of trying to establish (or disprove) parentage.

A child’s mother is usually known because there is some record of the child being born to her, so most disputed parentage cases involve disputed paternity. Most of these cases are brought in family courts and attempt to establish paternity in order to give the court a basis for ordering a man to pay support for his child. Today, with DNA-typing methods the chances of falsely including a true nonfather are exceedingly small; in other words, if DNA testing results provide a high probability that a particular man is a child’s father, then he almost certainly is. For the family courts a DNA parentage inclusion is equivalent to proof of parentage. By the same token DNA typing will virtually always exclude a true nonfather.