Paternity Test Shows he’s 50% a Dad (sort of…)

September 1st, 2015. By LucyC

A night on the town recently got a whole lot more expensive for one unsuspecting father. This is certainly a weird one—in fact it’s been called precedent setting. The whole thing started out routinely enough—a mother of twins filed for public assistance in Passaic County, N.J., claiming that one man—her romantic partner—was the father of her twins. But, no, not so much, DNA testing proved—the twins have separate fathers. Yes, you read that correctly.

The New Jersey Law Journal reported on this case in May, stating that Judge Sohail Mohammed of State Superior Court in Passaic County found that the man who the woman claimed was the father of her twins was deemed to have fathered only one of the children. Not surprisingly, there are only a few cases of this reported in the US.

What happened—apart of from the obvious? Well, Mom, who was referred to only as T.M., while filing for benefits, had revealed during testimony that she had indulged in a little extra curricular the same week she had liaised with her “romantic partner.”  So, the Passaic County Board of Social Services filed an application to establish the paternity of A.S. (the father) and force him to pay child support for the twins, who were born in January 2013.

But Whoa Nelly!—not so fast. When the paternity test results came back last November, everything went pear shaped, and the case became one for the legal textbooks.

Karl-Hans Wurzinger, the laboratory director of the Identity Testing Division at Laboratory Corporation of America, provided expert testimony, stating that basically the woman’s twins were fertilized by different fathers during the same menstrual cycle. Yes. You read that correctly.

Dr. Wurzinger, it turns out, has published a study on this phenomenon, showing that one in 13,000 reported paternity cases involved twins with separate fathers. This case, he testified, was one of those. Talk about luck of the draw.

So, how does all this work medically? According to Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, it’s called superfecundation, a rare phenomenon classically illustrated in medical textbooks with a black baby and a white baby who are twins. (They might need to revisit that illustration at some point.)

What Mom likely didn’t know when she had her tryst, is that a sperm can be viable for up to five days. So, in this case, if T.M. had sex with one of the men, ovulated, and then had sex with the other, all within five days, one egg could have been fertilized by one man, while the other’s fertilized another, Dr. Wu said.

Interestingly, thanks to the spread of assistive reproductive technologies, Dr. Wu said, this phenomenon has become more common. She reportedly gave the example of men in gay couples sometimes both contributing sperm to a pregnancy.

“That’s why we’re seeing it more often than we were in the past,” Dr. Wu said, “when we were relying on nature and women who have more than one sexual partner in the same cycle around the time of ovulation.” (New York Times)

Oh boy. Sex is already complicated enough—but this just adds a whole new layer of “are you kidding?” Not to mention additional grounds for lawsuits.

As for the man originally named as father of both twin? He will now have to pay child support for the toddler whom a DNA test proved his paternity—which, according to USAToday, is a whopping $28 per week.

This was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2015 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Crazy Sh*t Lawyers See . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.