Last night my wife and I were watching a Forensic Files episode where a husband murdered his wife after she: 1) Decided to divorce him and take half of their assets and 2) Revealed that his oldest son wasn’t really his, and that she was going to announce this to the son and everyone at the son’s graduation party. The episode is titled Hell’s Kitchen. Skip to 3:30 to see the details of her despicable plan:

After seeing this my wife pointed out that if there is ever a reason for murder, this was a very good one. Not only was the wife intentionally humiliating her husband (who did nothing wrong other than trust her), but she was planning on humiliating the son as well. What young man wants his mother to announce that she is a whore and he is a bastard at his graduation party?

As has been mentioned many times on the manosphere, cuckoldry is an extremely vicious act, and roughly equivalent to forcible rape in the rage and humiliation it imposes on the victims. Both the child and the man tricked into false paternity are deeply harmed when the truth ultimately comes out.

My wife is a huge UFC fan, and her favorite fighter is Randy Couture. In his autobiography he talks about the impact his uncertain paternity has had on both his father and himself. His father had gone to his grave not wanting a paternity test, because he was too afraid to know the answer. This pain haunted the son as well, even though he is arguably one of the toughest men in the world. Cuckoldry is absolutely devastating.

We’ve seen another high profile example of this recently with the highly publicized Arnold Schwarzenegger case. While there is much deserved derision for Arnold and hand wringing for his wronged wife and bizarrely the woman he cheated with, there is little attention given to the maid’s cuckolded ex husband or her son (click for video of ex husband).

All of this raises the question of how often this kind of thing occurs. I’ve seen all sorts of estimates referenced in the manosphere, but very seldom is there a link to an actual study. The best article I’ve been able to find on the issue is from Psychology Today. According to the article, The standard nonpaternity rate that is most commonly mentioned across cultural settings is 10%. The article references a study which took this a step further, and looked at cuckoldry rates based on the confidence of the father:

Dr. Anderson gathered nonpaternity rates from 67 published sources, with a broad spectrum of countries covered. Prior to reading on, any guesses as to the nonpaternity rates of men who had high paternity confidence versus their low confidence counterparts? Here are the nonpaternity rates for the two groups: US & Canada Europe Elsewhere High paternity confidence 1.9 1.6 2.9 Low paternity confidence 29.4 29.8 30.5 There you have it. Note that for each of the two groups of men, the rates are roughly the same around the various global regions. The bottom line is as follows: If you commission a DNA paternity test, you have roughly a one-third chance of the child not being yours. On the other hand, if you are confident that your wife has not had any extramarital dalliances then the probability of your having been cuckolded is very low (but still far from negligible).

Whichever statistic you look at, obviously this is a huge problem. Furthermore, it is a huge problem which can largely be avoided. The bulk of financial fraud and the humiliation for both the child and the presumed father occurs due to the deception which is continued for years after birth. Additionally, men are further punished by the court systems and are forced to pay child support for children they can prove are not theirs. The current system is designed such that it inflicts maximum suffering on men and children, while offering the maximum incentive for women to be deceitful.

This isn’t just a problem of men having money fraudulently taken from them, they also face the risk of being sent to jail. Consider the case of Francisco Rodriguez (emphasis mine):

Francisco Rodriguez owes more than $10,000 in back child support payments in a paternity case involving a 15-year-old girl who, according to DNA results and the girl’s mother, is not his daughter… Yet the state of Florida is continuing to push him to pay $305 a month to support the girl, as well as the more than $10,000 already owed. He spent a night in jail because of his delinquent payments. Why is he in such a bind? He missed the deadline to legally contest paternity. That’s because, he says, the paperwork didn’t reach him until after the deadline had passed.

The obvious answer to the problem is to positively identify paternity via DNA when filling out the birth certificate. A lawmaker in Georgia proposed a bill which would have done exactly this back in 2008. I don’t see any reference to it passing so I am assuming it failed. In the article on the bill, they quote two women who are adamantly against making such testing mandatory:

“I do not support a paternity bill,” said state Rep. Sherry Jones, a Nashville Democrat. “I think it’s a real affront to women to say that every baby born has to have a paternity test.” Rebecca Kopp agrees. She recently finished filling out the birth certificate paperwork for her three-month-old son. “I think it’s offensive because I am married,” Kopp said. “Even for women who aren’t married, if they want to get a birth certificate, I think that that should be their right. I don’t think they should have to prove who the father is.”

Ironically it is married men who are most legally susceptible to false paternity in the state of Georgia:

Right now, if a woman has been married for 300 days before their baby was born, the husband’s name automatically goes on the birth certificate. If a woman is not married and wants the father’s name on the paperwork, she has to get a paternity test and have it notarized before the father’s name is listed.

If you aren’t outraged after reading all of this, you are one cold and calculating person.

Taking this back to the conversation I had with my wife, while she was very sympathetic to the husband who murdered his cuckolding wife, she was very much against the idea of mandatory paternity testing. She felt that it was accusing honest women of being whores (she had the same objection to the mandatory blood test for AIDS when our son was born, but did submit to it). I pointed out that cuckolding occurs because honest women are inadvertantly giving shelter to dishonest women by reacting this way. Any man who asks for a paternity test is risking massive strife with the presumed mother of his child. Honest women will be enraged because their honor is being challenged, and dishonest women will act the same way to prevent from being caught. After a fairly spirited discussion she changed her view and agreed that mandatory testing made sense, but she was very frustrated that we lived in a society where this was needed in the first place.

Part of what I explained when discussing this with my wife is how suspicious the attitude of most women on this is to men. Country Lawyer’s comment on my post on conservative women wanting to ensure hookups were satisfying to women probably best states this view:

It is quite simple Dalrock. Does it advantage the man or the woman? That is all it takes. I don’t care if its conservative, religious, secular, feminist, or moonbat witchery women, that is all the math they do. If it advances women they are all for it (because they place themselves in the position of the woman) if it doesn’t they are against it. That’s it. that’s as high as their moral development climbs.

This had me thinking of how one might prove this one way or another. Is this a case of honest women sheltering the dishonest in their midst, at great cost to innocent men and children? With this in mind, I propose an alternate policy as a sort of litmus test. The birth certificate application section filled out by the mother should include an optional box for her to check if she swears under penalty of law that it is absolutely impossible that another man could be the child’s father. The law should require a minimum penalty of 5 years prison for checking this box if the child is later shown to not be related to the father. If the box is unchecked, a paternity test is required to put the father’s name on the certificate. Furthermore a man should never be jailed or forced to pay child support for a child he can prove he didn’t father. The man should also have legal recourse against the mother for any financial support he was tricked or legally forced into providing.

This would overturn the current dynamic. Women who declined to check the optional absolutely certain of paternity box would not be able to play the but don’t you trust me? card.

I ran this idea past my wife and she accepted it without hesitation. Her reply was:

If a woman isn’t a whore, she won’t have any problems with the law or with checking the box.