Who's your lying daddy?
2004-07-29 10:59
Stockholm - A number of Swedish men each year manage to escape their fatherly responsibilities by sending an impostor in their place to take a paternity test, a Swedish newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Each year Sweden conducts about 2 000 paternity tests, in which healthcare workers around the country draw a blood sample from the presumed father of a child and send the blood in for analysis.
The presumed father is required to show identification, but there are no rules calling for healthcare workers to keep copies of the men's papers, and numerous men manage to trick the system by sending an impostor carrying fake ID, Dagens Nyheter reported.
"Each year we discover a number of cases like this. How many we're dealing with is hard to say, since we only know about the cases that are uncovered," Bertil Lindblom from the forensics division at the Linkoeping hospital, which carries out the blood tests, told Dagens Nyheter.
The identity control is undeniably a weak link," he added.
When impostors do manage to pass off as the father, their test results can cause huge headaches for the mother of the child, who has to convince the courts that a new test is needed.
That is no easy feat once a man has been "cleared" of having fathered a child, according to the paper.
"The court can demand that the test be taken again, but I would think that the woman in such a case would have to somehow prove that the identity control hadn't been conducted correctly, since blood tests are viewed as an encroachment on the individual," Swedish attorney Adrian Engman said.