Before Birth, Dad’s ID. Nothing too surprising, if you can check for fetal abnormalities, it shouldn’t be too hard to ascertain paternity. Two issues of note in the piece. In the specific cases highlighted the author and the sources emphasized that unambiguous paternity reduced the stress of the expectant mother. But this seems like a double-edged sword. Of course that’s ultimately irrelevant, the technology and the procedure will probably become ubiquitous, because prenatal screening will become ubiquitous. Unless the analytic software is specifically designed to obscure paternity, it should simply drop out of the data as next generation genomic medical methodology attempts to phase and assess identity by descent of the in utero fetus. But the broader is the nature of parenthood itself. Rather than being legalistic or dogmatic, I think that a casuistical mode of assessment probably works best.
Finally, much of our customary law and tradition implicitly or explicitly assumes that father is at best probabilistic, while motherhood is assured. This prior condition no longer holds, so some of the laws should probably be updated. Ultimately exact knowledge of paternity is probably going to be a force for “good” rather than mischief. Last I checked paternity testing …