Thursday, November 1, 2007

Paternity Test Tips

Long ago it was legal for a child's heritage if a man claimed that he is the father of the child. Presently with the dawn of the new age in science and technology, everything seems to be attainable. With high tech gadgets and state of the art innovative devices, one can easily do what might be unimaginable decades ago, like detecting a fingerprint, a lying person, and even determining the father of your child 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.

Depending on what kind of test that needs to be performed and the level of investigation, the cost of testing ranges from affordable to very expensive. Also, depending upon the category and size of the samples to be tested, costs vary from lab to lab. You have to make sure that an external body accredits the lab; and you should also know the percentage error of that lab, and the degree of certainty the lab offers before you hire your lab to perform your DNA paternity test. Some poorer quality labs may guarantee only 98% certainty while some expensive labs offer a 99.9999% accuracy which can be a big 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 prior to childbirth for legal issues or physiological ground such as in cases of sexual abuse. Or in cases like numerous sexual partners, it may be useful to perform prenatal paternity test to start a proceeding for child support and medical bills when the child is born. Prenatal paternity testing is done while the mother is pregnant and depending on the way the mother chooses, determines when the test is performed. You can select between blood sample and amniocentesis. Although there are risks involved when performing the latter such as injuring the fetus or possibly aborting it and many other risks.

Through paternity testing, a family can find out right away if there is a biological relationship between an infant and a father. The most crucial thing about obtaining the results of the test is that you will finally be certain once and for all who the real father of the child is. And perhaps the most hurtful thing is that when you come to realize that you raised a child that's not your own.

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