Whose Right to Know? The Subjectivity of Mothers in Mandatory Paternity Testing

Abstract

Although anonymous gamete donation is the norm in the United States (US), recent scholarship has queried whether Western European prohibitions on anonymity could or should be applied in the states (Cohen 2012, Cahn 2012). Most recently, An Ravelingien and Guido Pennings’ “The Right to Know Your Genetic Parents: From Open-Identity Gamete Donation to Routine Paternity Testing,” uses the argument for open-identity sperm donation as the premise for broader social policy regarding paternity identification. The authors argue that if anonymous sperm donation is forbidden, then anonymous or misattributed paternity in coital reproduction should also be forbidden. Ravelingien and Pennings recognize that paternity testing concerns the rights of all of the members of a family unit, yet they assert that potential benefits for a child—in genetic information and potential family formation—outweigh any incursions on other individuals’ rights. While we agree that knowledge of one’s genetic origins should not be dependent on the mode of conception, we argue that Ravelingien and Pennings’ analysis of rights creates a problematic hierarchy of interests as their analysis fails to locate a central subject in mandatory paternity testing: the mother. This absence of the mother is especially troubling in light of institutional enforcement of paternity identification in welfare programs in US political history.