Today I Learned @lemmy.world jeffw @lemmy.world 3 mo. ago

TIL that up to 3.7% of pregnancies have misattributed paternity where the child (and possibly the mother) thought the father was someone else

www.newyorker.com The Paternity Reveal

Fatherhood used to be a matter of faith. What changes when science makes it a matter of fact?

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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.

That answered my question, quoted in case it answers others', too.
- That makes me feel strangely better about trust. Even those who were convinced the father of their child was someone else, it was only the case 1/10 to 3/10 of the time. That doesn't mean there wasn't infidelity, but I thought the numbers would be higher.
  
  I do personally think that trust shouldn't be necessary in a system as important as parental rights and birth. The hospital should do a mandatory paternity test before any paperwork is signed, just to eliminate any doubts of responsibility and possible infidelity.
  
  Guess that would put Maury out of a job though.
Why is it always the paternity that's questioned? Why does no one ever demand a maternity test to see who the real mother is??

(/s)
- I mean... The child never saw who gave birth to them, so there's that...
- Tbf it's worth asking if you are looking at a baby's phenotype and wondering if your partner was unfaithful. Mix-ups happen sometimes and it's possible that the hospital gave you back the wrong baby
  
  I was a mix-up that was quickly resolved because the baby they gave my mom had the wrong bits. It happened again with my sibling. And my other sibling. For the exact same reasons. We all joke that none of us are really related.
  
  But it really makes you think...
  
  Hopefully since covid forced a lot of hospitals to shut down their nurseries and switch to what's called "rooming in" where a baby stays with mom pretty much at all times, this happens less than it already did.
  
  Heck, I'm just out in podunk Oklahoma, where we are a bottom 10 state for women, but even here, the hospital we picked to have our kid does all procedures in the room right where you can see after baby is born, and hands them right back to mom. They never leave you (unless you elect for a circumcision for some god awful reason), which is a huge relief for me. I was gonna be ripping out that epidural and catheter so fast to follow my fucking infant if they took him from out of my sight for even a minute.
- When I was young I remember a slew of baby thieves getting arrested. They would steal babies in maternities and sell them, or sometimes a lone mother would steal the banner for herself. The person would grow up without knowing they were not with their biological mother.
  
  A while ago I saw a post on Lemmy about a baby abduction ring in Georgia. Apparently they abducted and sold thousands of babies throughout the years.
  
  They told the actual parents that their baby had just died and had already been incinerated
3.7% seems low

It would have been nice if they attributed this number to particular study. But they just said vaguely some studies
- Look around at work tomorrow. See 20 people? 1 of them is wrong about who their father is. That’s low?
  
  See 20 people?
  
  The math nerd in me needs to let ~~the world~~ 3 people in Lemmy know that it's actually 1 in 27 people.
- Most women remember who put a dick in them, and when.
And a good chunk of the 96.3% just wish it was.
- Me.
I've read that genetic-testing showed that in the poorest neighborhoods, it is over-50%,

and that the deliberately stopped doing the testing, because they didn't want to be liable for any problems this information would be producing.

Obviously, when you trash people's validity, & meaning, they become more sensation-seeking, & more careless.

Poverty is a manufactured on some populations condition.
TIL 3.7% of women are skanks.
- You might think that if rape weren't a thing. And it's almost always about power, and extremely often someone known by the victim. Strange how those facts change the dynamic a bit.
  
  downvotes - man up and explain your position, otherwise I'll just assume you're pro-rape.
- The headline is misleading. The actually statistic given in the article is "between 1 and 3.7%"
  
  Do you really have to jump to "women are skanks"? Some people are just so excited to throw out a slur when they think they can get away with it, eh?

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