A couple were seeking IVF with pre-implantation diagnosis to avoid the birth of a second child with a rare genetic condition which led to a short painful life with a distressing end.
Examination of the fertilised embryos demonstrated, beyond doubt, that the first child could not have been the offspring of the 2 parents presenting for treatment.
There is a story dating from the 1970s or early 1980s (before we had most of the modern DNA techniques) which regularly does the rounds – sometimes cited as fact (by some very eminent authors), sometimes dismissed as urban myth.
A team in Birmingham wished to study the inheritance patterns of the immune system. They started to recruit a large sample of families with children.
The research plan had to be abandoned because fully 30% of the children recruited could not possibly be the offspring of the putative father.
Even old fashioned ABO had its (limited) ability to uncover family secrets. Still has. Radio 5 recently spoke to a young woman who learned that she had been donor conceived after she realised her dad could not be her father because of her blood group (established as a normal part of early ante-natal screening).
When I was a youngster, if an unmarried girl got pregnant there was no form of support other than from your parents or charity. You could try to pursue the father through the courts for maintenance. The popular myth was that he would just get one or more of his mates who shared his ABO blood group to come to court & testify that, well, yes, he might also be the father. Your reputation would be irreparably shattered. So best just stay a good girl.
There used to be many cases where the mother would take on an unmarried daughter’s baby, pass it off as her own, with the child growing up in the belief that his mother was his sister. I knew somebody who did this in the 1970s- though I was incredibly slow on the uptake. A neighbour in the same flats, I had not seen her for ages, & next time I did she was manoeuvring a pram. I blush even now at the memory of my gushed Gosh! I never guessed
I am not at all clear how easy it might have been to get away with this on the official registration of the birth, or if the child might have had to be told eventually when the certificate needed to be used.
There have always of course been cases where a husband has accepted – with greater or less equanimity – a child born to his wife by another man, often for the sake of keeping the family together. And in fact it could be extremely difficult to have paternity legally denied, in the days before DNA.
There have even been plenty of cases where a man has married a pregnant woman in the full knowledge that the child was not his, for the admirably simple reason that he loved her.
Still, in my youth, it was not unknown for adoption to be a guilty secret – for the parents, that is; a public admission of infertility. People would go to extraordinary lengths, if not actually to deceive neighbours & family, then at least to allow them to assume that the birth had taken place somewhere away from home. It could be hard on the husband, but infertility was somehow even more shameful for a woman, because of course it was always her fault.
For Queen Soraya of Persia however such deception was not an option. I can still remember my proto-feminist outrage at the idea that the Shah ‘had to’ divorce her because of her inability to provide an heir – that & the way most adult women in this country seemed to go along with the idea that it was ‘sad but necessary’.
The idea that DNA defines family is undoubtedly likely to be every bit as distressing, if we are suddenly to make & remake the family we have known all our life on the basis of a barcode. It brings back the old fashioned romantic in me – surely love is more important?
Even perfectly ‘legal’ children often go through at least a phase of believing that they cannot possibly be the child of their parents – they must be a foundling or a secret adoptee.
And I return to an earlier question – do we really believe that the younger sibling of Baby Peter should be told the truth, the whole truth, about his DNA parents once he reaches 18?
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