Paternity Test Guide

Not so long ago any man could simply say that this is, or is not, my child and it was legally binding for their heritage. Today with the dawn of the new era in science and technology, everything seems to be possible under the sun. With high tech gadgets and state of the art innovative devices, one can easily do what might have been impossible decades ago, like detecting a fingerprint, a person lying, and even determine the father of your baby through paternity testing.

Paternity testing does not only help in finding who the real father of a child is, cases that involve child claims or when a mother's fidelity is in question, pregnancy and rape can also be solved especially nowadays where rape cases are high. There are a lot of reasons to perform paternity testing, but each reason can vary in different circumstances.

The cost of testing ranges from affordable, to very expensive, depending on the level of scrutiny and the kind of test that needs to be performed. Also, costs vary from lab to lab depending upon the size and category of the samples to be tested. So before you hire your lab to perform your DNA paternity test, make sure that the lab is accredited by an external body, know the percentage error rate of that lab and the degree of certainty the lab offers. Some expensive labs offer a 99.9999% accuracy while poorer quality labs may guarantee only 98% accuracy, which can be a huge difference.

But not all paternity tests are costly. A home paternity test is cheap and is accessible to use. Performing legal paternity testing is safe and easy to use, minus the discomfort to anyone involved. In fact, it can be performed in the luxury of your own home through a paternity test kit, which provides the entire equipment that is needed such as swabs, forms and containers.

A buccal swab is used from the inside cheeks in order to obtain DNA samples of each party involved. The child and the alleged father need to be tested, and it might be benefited to test the mother as well. The samples are then collected, labeled, and then sent to a laboratory for DNA analysis. Then the results are sent back to you as soon as the results come out.

DNA paternity testing is the comparison of the DNA samples of a child, a man, and in some cases along with the mother. Each one of us has 23 pairs of chromosome, half of it we inherit from our mother and half of it from our father. If a match is found between a child and a man, without a doubt he is the biological father. The DNA of the mother can help in testing by removing the mother's DNA from the equation.

In some cases, there are some who perform paternity testing during conception for legal issues or physiological reasons, such as in cases of rape. Or in cases like multiple partners, it may be beneficial to perform prenatal paternity test to start a proceeding for support for the infant, and medical bills when the child is born. Prenatal paternity testing is done during pregnancy, and depending on the way you choose, determines when the test is performed. You can choose between blood sample or amniocentesis. Although there are risks involved when performing the latter, like injuring the fetus, or aborting it and other risks.

A family can find out right away if there is a biological relationship between a child and a father with paternity testing. The most crucial thing about getting the results of the test is that you will finally know once and for all know whom the real father of the child is. And perhaps the most painful emotional thing is that when you finally realize that you are not raising your own child.