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FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (CNN) -- 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. Francisco Rodriguez is fighting for leniency in his paternity case. "It's not right. I'm not the father, " he said. Rodriguez, who is married with two daughters and a son from his wife's previous marriage, is fighting for leniency. "It's not right. I'm not the father, " he said at a recent court hearing. He says he knew nothing about the other girl...

Here’s a Delphic riddle for our times: When is your father not your father? Answer: when he’s a sperm donor. Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman in her early thirties decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, one thing led to another, which led to a syringe of his sperm, which led to the birth of twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned...

JEFFERSON CITY — David Salazar is what many would call a "duped dad." Repeatedly, courts have ordered him to pay child support for a 5-year-old girl, even though no one — not a judge and not the child's mother — claims he's the father. In the eyes of many, Salazar, of Buchanan County, is the victim of a law that traps men into the child support payments, even though they can prove they're not the dads. -snip- That kind of statement angers Sen. Chris Koster, who is sponsoring the Missouri bill. Koster, R-Harrisonville, said he knew children would be harmed...

Why we are closer to cousins from our mother's side By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 1:51am GMT 28/02/2007 We tend to help cousins on our mother's side more than cousins on our father's, according to a study published today. Evolution by natural selection has shaped us to mistrust paternity, say researchers, and their findings confirm a prediction by evolutionary scientists that we tend to be kinder – altruistic – to the children of our mother's sister than those of our father's brother. Evolutionary biologists say that the more likely we are to have genes in common with our...

Gabor husband may be Smith's baby's dad LOS ANGELES - The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor said Friday that he had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her infant daughter's father. The claim by Prince Frederick von Anhalt comes amid a paternity suit over Smith's 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, but former Smith boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father. "If you go back from September, she wasn't with one of those guys, she was with me," von Anhalt told...

LITTLE ROCK Even though a paternity test ruled out Anthony L- Parker as the father of a child in a child-support dispute, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled today he still has to pay support owed the mother before he took the test. The opinion, written by Associate Justice Donald L- Corbin, says state law and prior court cases make it clear that an "acknowledged father" cannot be relieved of past-due child support. Associate Justice Robert L. Brown wrote in a dissent that the opinion reached "a grossly unfair result." In her original ruling, McGowan wrote that forcing Parker to pay...

Child support enforcement programs are supported by all sides of the political spectrum, from women’s advocates on the left to traditionalists on the right. While this popularity is sometimes understandable, it has also allowed glaring and inexcusable abuses to fester and grow. Of these, none is more egregious than when men are forced to pay 18 years of child support for children who are not theirs, and who in many cases they’ve never even met. In “The Innocent Third Party: Victims of Paternity Fraud,” a new article in the American Bar Association's Family Law Quarterly, Washington DC attorney Ronald K....

(CBS) CHICAGO It's a trend that some fear may have long-term consequences. More unmarried women over the age of 25 are not waiting for Mr. Right. As CBS 2's Alita Guillen reports, these ladies are having children on their own. The fantasy father at their fingertips is a sperm donor with all the right stuff. Katherine Gehl and April Lashbrook had successful careers and dated, but they didn't have husbands. They heard their biological clocks ticking loudly. "It was like a time bomb," April said. "I need to go and have a baby and be a mother, and so I...

<p>In the United States, men confident about their paternity are almost always right, but those who insist that children are not their own are correct only 30 percent of the time, a new study finds.</p> <p>A review of more than 65 studies of paternity has concluded that actual rates of nonpaternity — cases in which a man incorrectly believes he is biologically related to a child — are much lower than the widely cited 10 percent.</p>

By: Steve Patterson (Chicago Sun-Times Reporter) ... Michael Wilford says he was simply a sperm donor. Christin Harris says he was much more than that to her. Now, the Glenview woman wants him to provide child support and college fund and pay medical expenses for the 2-year-old twin daughters he fathered. But the Downers Grove man says it's a case of "involuntary parentage" as he had no intention of doing anything more than provide his ex-girlfriend with the semen she needed to conceive. "No good deed goes unpunished," his attorney Enrico Mirabelli, said in court Tuesday. 'I Just Want Your...

Paternity fraud is rampant in the United States, triggering legislation and legal challenges in more than a dozen states, according to family law attorneys and fathers' rights activists. At issue: Men claim women are getting away with trickery -- DNA evidence may show a man is not the father, but the courts are still forcing him to pay child support anyway. "This is the new underdog," said Michigan family law attorney Michele Kelly, who represents mostly men tangled in paternity disputes. "I was a staunch feminist. I marched with Gloria Steinem. But the new victims in America are working men....

Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child. The National Center for Men has prepared a lawsuit -- nicknamed Roe v. Wade for Men -- to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of a 25-year-old computer programmer ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriend's daughter. The suit addresses the issue of male reproductive rights, contending that lack of such rights...

NEW YORK -- Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men's rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child. The National Center for Men has prepared a lawsuit -- nicknamed Roe v. Wade for Men -- to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of a 25-year-old computer programmer ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriend's daughter. The suit addresses the issue of male reproductive rights, contending that lack...

Saturday, February 18, 2006 Paternity fraud rampant in U.S. 30% of those named as fathers bilked of child support unjustly Posted: February 18, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com WASHINGTON – More than three years ago, a Maine district court judge ruled that Geoffrey Fisher no longer had to pay child support for a child that wasn't his. But that didn't stop the state from revoking Fisher's driver's license and coming after him for thousands of dollars it says he owes in back payments. Last year, Maine sent Fisher, 35, a letter seeking $11,450 in child support, even though...

A former Broward County man has been ordered to continue to pay child support for a child he did not father. He said his wife cheated on him; she denies it.Richard Parker said he never suspected that his wife had been cheating on him when she got pregnant seven years ago.When the Hollywood couple divorced in 2001, he agreed to pay her $1,200 a month in child support.But less than two years later, when his son was 5, he says he learned the awful truth: The boy he had raised as his own wasn't his.Parker sued his ex-wife, Margaret Parker,...

The confusing world of family law has taken an even more surreal turn with a Saskatchewan Court of Appeal decision ordering a man to pay child support for his stepdaughter. The twist? His ex-wife has married the child's biological father. You'd think this would let the guy off the hook. After all, his ex is now playing house with the kid's real dad. It made sense to the Court of Queen's Bench judge who ruled a year ago that the man wasn't required to pay support for his stepdaughter. That judge reduced the child-support arrears to $2,604 from $12,144. But...

Michael Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe has told an Irish newspaper the singer is not the biological father of their children, Prince Michael Jr. and Paris. Rowe, who was married to Jackson for three years between 1996 and 1999, claims her 8-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were both conceived using anonymous semen brought from a sperm bank. She tells the Sunday World, "Michael knows the truth -- that he is not the natural father of Prince Michael Jr. and Paris. He has to come clean. "I have no information whatsoever about the identity of the donor

We can usually sympathize with one or another party to a dispute: one is usually more in the right—or less in the wrong—than the other. But with the breakdown of accepted conventions, it increasingly happens that neither side arouses our sympathies. Take a recent case in Sweden, where a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up. The mother of the children found herself...

A Swedish man who donated sperm to a lesbian couple will have to pay child support, the Supreme Court has ruled. The man, from Örebro, is biological father to three children with the couple. The Supreme Court has now confirmed rulings by two lower courts that he is liable to support them. The 39-year old man donated his sperm to the lesbian couple at the beginning of the nineties. Three sons were born between 1992 and 1996. The man claims that it was never intended that he should take reponsibility for the children, but rather that the women would be...

It seems like a simple question — the kid’s mom and dad, right? The people who made the baby. But for decades, legal and technological changes have been reshaping families, as reproductive techniques like sperm donation, egg donation, and surrogate motherhood become far more embedded in our culture than most of us realize. Now we have kids with two moms, four moms, or none at all. These technologies, and the legal tangles they create, have shifted us to an understanding of family that pretends bodies don’t matter, and denies children’s need for their own mother and father. Here are only...

On Aug. 31, a small but precedent-setting case was decided in the Superior Court of New Jersey. The plaintiff discovered he was not the biological father of his eldest 'son', now in his 30s. The court affirmed the duped dad's legal right to sue the natural father for the cost of raising the 'child' and removed some limitations imposed by a lower court. The precedent: for the first time, New Jersey has extended a clear statutory deadline for filing on paternity cases. For the first time, a biological parent may be forced to pay child support for an offspring emancipated...

A man who found out 30 years after his youngest child's birth that he was not the father had the right to sue the biological father for nearly $110,000, the cost of raising the child, an appeals court ruled yesterday. In the first ruling to extend a statutory deadline in a paternity case, the appellate panel said the man could collect the money even though he missed the deadline under New Jersey's Parentage Act by eight years. The court said it made sense because the biological father, along with the duped man's wife, never told him he was not the...

http://www.canadiancrc.com/articles/Patriot_News_Sperm_donor_loses_appeal_child_support_23JUL04.htm Sperm donor loses appeal on child support The Patriot News, Friday, July 23, 2004, BY REGGIE SHEFFIELD of The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, PA, U.S.A. The state Superior Court yesterday ruled that a man must pay child support to a woman who conceived twin boys with his sperm through in vitro fertilization.The opinion upholds a Dauphin County Court order filed in 2002. Joel L. McKiernan now must pay up to $1,500 each month, but he argued that an oral agreement he had with Ivonne V. Ferguson protected him from any payments, according to court papers. When McKiernan agreed to be a...

About 4 percent of men may unknowingly be raising a child that really belongs to the mailman or some other guy, researchers speculate in a new study. Here's the real news: With modern methods, the truth will become known more frequently. Researchers pawed through a host of scientific articles published around the world from 1950 through last year. The perceived "paternal discrepancy rate," as it is called, ranges from less than 1 percent to as high as 30 percent in the various studies. Most researchers believe the rate is less than 10 percent. The author's settled on four percent --...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Perhaps one out of every 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man's child, a finding that has huge health and social implications, according to report released Wednesday. Exposing so-called paternal discrepancy -- when a child is identified as being biologically fathered by someone other than the man who believes he is the father -- could lead to family violence and the breakup of many families. On the other hand, leaving paternal discrepancy hidden means having the wrong genetic information, which could have health consequences. A UK-based research team reviewed scientific research dealing with paternity...

Up to one in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man's child, UK health researchers estimate. Increasing use of genetic testing for medical and legal reasons means more couples are discovering the biological proof of who fathered the child. The Liverpool John Moores University team reached its estimate based on research findings published between 1950 and 2004. The study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Biological father Professor Mark Bellis and his team said that the implications of so-called paternal discrepancy were huge and largely ignored, even though the incidence was increasing. In the US, the...

Widespread paternity fraud is an urban myth - that is the finding of research published today which says claims up to 30 per cent of Australian men had not fathered children they believed to be theirs are wide of the mark. A more realistic figure is 1 to 3 per cent, according to Michael Gilding, a professor of sociology at Swinburne University. "The most outlandish figures have been quoted," he said. "But they have their origin in some very questionable research." When news broke that the federal Health Minister, Tony Abbott, was not the biological father of his alleged son,...

July 4, 2005 7:35 PM No more illegitimate children in France - ministry PARIS (Reuters) - France abolished the legal terms "legitimate" and "illegitimate" for children Monday with a decree saying the distinction dating back to the Napoleonic Code of 1804 made no sense anymore. Abolishing the terms brings France's civil code in line with laws passed in recent years banning discrimination -- especially for inheritance -- between children born in or outside of a marriage, a Justice Ministry communique said. About 46 percent of French babies are now born out of wedlock, compared to about 10 percent in the...

LONDON (AFP) - Britain's royal family forced the late Princess Diana to blood test her younger son, Prince Harry, to prove he was not the offspring of an affair with an army officer, according to a newspaper report. Diana, who died in 1997, did not tell Harry why his blood was being taken, the Sun newspaper said in extracts from a book by Simone Simmons, an "energy healer" billed as a former close friend and confidante of the princess. Senior royals, notably Queen Elizabeth's husband Prince Philip, feared that their son, Prince Charles, who was married to Diana, might not...

His name is Mike Rubino, but until recently none of the women who bought his sperm to get pregnant had ever seen him or known him as anything other than Donor 929. Rubino left the sperm business for good a few years ago, thinking it would be another decade at least before any children found him. Now he is standing inside the Los Angeles International Airport, staring at an arrivals gate, awaiting the appearance of two children he has fathered but never met, along with their single mother, a Massachusetts psychotherapist named Raechel McGhee. At that moment, 44-year-old McGhee and...

W.Va. Supreme Court Gives Custody of 5-Year-Old Boy to Dead Mom's PartnerBy Pam Ramsey Associated Press Writer Published: Jun 17, 2005 CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - The state's highest court on Friday gave custody of a 5-year-old boy to his dead mother's lesbian partner, despite the protests of the woman's blood relatives. Tina Burch had appealed to the West Virginia Supreme Court for custody of the son of her partner, Christina Smarr, who died in a 2002 car accident. Within hours of her death, Smarr's relatives had given the child to his grandparents. A family court gave custody to Burch, but...

A FRENCHMAN has won a ground-breaking ruling against his former wife and her lover, ordering them to pay back the money that he had spent on bringing up a child he had mistakenly assumed to be his own. The man, named as G in the ruling, was awarded €23,000 (£15,600) after a DNA test revealed that he was not the father of the 13-year-old child, Astrid. He had raised her as his own daughter, paying for her food, clothing, toys, schoolbooks and holidays, the Caen Appeal Court in Normandy said. It added that his former wife, B, from Cherbourg, had...

HOW strange that Parliament's most famous Catholic, Tony Abbott, is now a symbol of the once-forgotten dangers of sin. I feel for the poor bloke, because the humiliating news that he isn't, after all, the father of the boy he gave away 27 years ago doesn't make life easier for him. Indeed, it makes it worse -- and not just for Abbott, but for his "son" and his former girlfriend, Kath Donnelly, too. What only weeks ago was being sold -- not least by Abbott -- as their happily-ever-after story has instantly become a biblical morality play instead. Abbott has...

"TRUTH is stranger than fiction," Tony Abbott thought to himself on Christmas Eve after a phone call with his long-lost son. Yesterday the old maxim came back to floor him. "Truth is stranger than fiction, this story has certainly developed some pretty surreal twists," he said. The son who lived in the mind of Tony Abbott for 27 years has turned out to be a phantom, the boy who never was. Twenty seven years of guilt, secrecy and most of all wondering about the boy he knew for just a couple of hours after he was born on July 26,...

CHICAGO - An appeals court said a man can press a claim for emotional distress after learning a former lover had used his sperm to have a baby. But he can't claim theft, the ruling said, because the sperm were hers to keep. The ruling Wednesday by the Illinois Appellate Court sends Dr. Richard O. Phillips' distress case back to trial court. Phillips accuses Dr. Sharon Irons of a "calculated, profound personal betrayal" after their affair six years ago, saying she secretly kept semen after they had oral sex, then used it to get pregnant. He said he didn't find...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The Bush administration in Tallahassee wants to launch a new crackdown on "deadbeat dads." Gov. Jeb Bush said there are too many kids born to single mothers, WESH NewsChannel 2 reported. Many of the fathers are never identified, so they can never be forced to pay child support.

A state lawmaker from northeast Georgia has introduced a bill that would require hospitals to ask unmarried women who their baby's father is. Representative Ben Bridges -- a Republican from Cleveland introduced the so-called Baby's Right to Know Act yesterday. It would require hospitals to ask women: Who's the father? Bridges says his goal is to give children access to their full medical history by identifying the biological father and getting his name on the birth certificate. The bill would NOT legally require the new mother to name the man. Bridges says House Bill Four is NOT meant to punish...

The results of paternity tests can't be used in court unless the mother gave her consent for the test, the German Supreme Court ruled today behind closed doors. The child's personal rights would be violated, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe said in an e-mailed statement.

Actor Wesley Snipes denies being the father of a child belonging to a Michigan City woman, who claims she met the action film star at a crack house in Chicago. And, in a court complaint calling the mother "a mentally ill former crack addict" who made claims about other celebrities, the lead actor in "Blade" and other major box office hits feels it's ludicrous that authorities in LaPorte County and elsewhere want a sample of his DNA to verify or disprove the claims. Snipes is suing LaPorte County Prosecutor Rob Beckman and his wife, Priscilla Jo, who runs the child...

Despite the fact that the cause of Ol' Dirty Bastard's death may not be known for several days, it seems that some of his survivors are already bracing for battle over his assets. The rapper, whose real name was Russell Jones, has been widely reported to have fathered more than a dozen children with different mothers over the years.

Hip-hop mogul Sean Combs was ordered to pay $35,000 a month in child support for the 10-year-old son he had with fashion stylist Misa Brim, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday. Combs, also known now as P. Diddy and formerly as Puff Daddy, got the news in a 13-page decision by Westchester County Family Court Judge David Klein, who upheld an earlier ruling. The judge in the earlier case set the monthly amount based on a yearly income for Combs of $50 million and Klein said he had not presented sufficient evidence that his income was less...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Dads 'by default' hail new lawBy Cheryl WetzsteinTHE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished October 5, 2004 Bert Riddick plans to go to a California court this year to try, once again, to escape a child-support order for a girl he has never met and says he has proof he didn't father.     This time, the law likely will back him up.     Last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill to allow men to challenge the paternity of children for whom they owe support.     "I don't feel there's any way for the system to fight it anymore," said Mr. Riddick of...

On June 30, a California man being forced to pay child support for a child he had not fathered got his day in court when the Second District Court of Appeal of California overturned a paternity judgment against him. Los Angeles County, which had imposed the judgment, knew that Manuel Navarro was not the father of the child in question because DNA testing had proved so. Yet under both federal and state child-support laws, the county was still able to demand Navarro pay child support. The court's landmark decision in Navarro’s favor may well become the controlling authority for contested...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish man who paid alimony for 13 years for a child he knew was not his has been proven right and now wants half a million crowns ($65,000) in compensation, a newspaper reported on Thursday. The man, 70, had a brief affair with the boy's mother in the late 1960s, the daily Expressen said. After giving birth, the woman told a court the man was the father. A blood test did not rule out paternity and the court ordered alimony. For 13 years the man paid up and met the boy regularly. He remained convinced he...

Modern science is wreaking havoc on an age-old paternity rule. Two key court decisions on Kent County cases have state lawmakers considering the growing conflict between the certainty of DNA testing and the practicality of a decision issued by an English judge more than 200 years ago. While courts today routinely rely on DNA testing in all other paternity disputes, state law sometimes referred to as the Bastardy Statute or by its British common law origin, Lord Mansfield's Rule, defines a child born into a marriage to be a product of that marriage. The husband of the mother is legally...

<p>In one of the first legal cases in Massachusetts involving the largely unregulated field of fertility treatment, a Middlesex County jury awarded more than $100,000 yesterday to a Dennis man who said that a Boston fertility clinic impregnated his estranged wife without his permission and should pay his share of child support for his now 7-year-old daughter.</p>

<p>Thurmond, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, died in June at age 100. His illegitimate daughter's story was published Sunday by the Washington Post.</p> <p>Essie Mae Washington-Williams, now 78 and a retired school teacher in Los Angeles, publicly revealed her relationship to the former segregationist after a lifetime of silence.</p>

A 13-year-old boy has discovered that the man he always called his father was not related to him and that their assumed relationship arose from another fertility treatment mistake. The boy's five-year battle for the truth ended in victory after the Family Division of the High Court ruled that "his father", since divorced from his mother, should take a DNA test. According to reports, when he was five, the boy began to question whether the man was his real father because he did not resemble him. By the time he was 11, he was convinced that he had the wrong...

<p>Many find it astonishing that men are forced by court order to pay child support for other men's children. Yet in California, thousands of men are erroneously assigned paternity in default judgments and have been ordered by courts to pay child support for children whom DNA tests have proven aren't theirs. Men are not being properly served notice of paternity proceedings and have no idea they are "fathers" until the day their wages are garnished.</p>