Walgreens — the largest drugstore chain in America — announced this week that they are selling over-the-counter DNA home paternity tests.
The “DNA Test Paternity Collection Kit” will cost you $30.00USD at the drugstore and you’ll have to pay an additional $119.00USD as a lab-processing fee.
If you want to use the test in court, you’ll have to set up a special “chain of command” with the lab to protect the integrity of the test, and that fee will run you $319.00USD.
The fact that we even need to determine paternity in an over-the-counter drugstore purchase is overwhelming and disappointing.
How did we so quickly come to lose the connection between man, woman and child — let alone the destruction of husband, wife and baby?
Why is paternity so uncertain today that a niche economy of DNA paternity testing can flourish across 4,785 Walgreens stores and over 15,000 other resale outlets in 48 states?
Are we bothered that over 60,000 paternity kits have already been sold?
We’ve had eight years of harsh republican rule and teen pregnancies are up and DNA parental tests can now be bought at the corner drugstore. It seems promiscuity is the reason, David. These girls must be taking in multiple sex parters and that’s why they have no idea who their baby daddy is.
There is a strange disconnect in the not knowing, Anne — but maybe these young women know the daddy but the daddy claims he isn’t the daddy — and so this DNA test presses the father into an appropriate behavior and action?
Justice isn’t cheap, and paying $400 to legally prove paternity is a high price to require the resurrection of a failed morality.
Sadly enough David, it doesn’t come to me as a surprise.
We tend to do things which we deny later probably to escape the responsibility, this is a sure-fire way to prove it.
The question is do we really want to keep the connection alive among the man, woman and child which has been being denied once?
It might come handy for a court case but does it create a bond? That’s what is needed most!
You’re right that bonds cannot be coerced, Katha, even if they are there, but invisible. We’ve lost our way when it comes to human responsibility to each other — especially in the denial of fathered children — we have gaping holes in the warp and woof of society that is stretching larger instead of self-healing. I wish we had a way to repair the damage.
True David, if not for any one else – for the kid atleast.
That’s the low road the courts take, Katha — at least force by law the monetary support of the created, but unwanted, life.
Right David.
Acknowledging the fatherhood should be a cause for celebration, not a try to avoid it – in that case, no test matters – really.
Yes, Katha. Right on point. You can force a payment, but you can’t force fatherhood.
David!
Who knew that a paternity test would become a mass market over-the-counter product? It is a little disturbing.
It is disturbing, and disappointing, Dananjay and it points to the utter failure of pregnancy prevention and safer sex. More condoms + Common Sense = Less DNA Paternity Tests.
Quite telling that the most popular Maury Povich topic in the last 8 years has been paternity testing and revealing who the father is or is not.
It does seem “paternity test results” on television are a big deal, Gordon. In addition to Maury and Springer, several TV court shows — but not Judge Judy, yay! — rely on these test surprises. 99% of the time the denying father is the father. Sad.
It makes me sadder, though, when you see these cases of women who bring in man after man after man – some upwards of 12 or 13 men – not sure which one fathered her child. That is to say, in a very small window of time, she knows she was with all of those men.
Promiscuity in young women, Gordon, is usually always a cry for the love of an absent father figure. The girls are searching for a permanent male connection and they are willing to give up the ultimate prize in order to try to win the true affection of one man that will love her unconditionally.