Are You Raising Another Man's Child?

Rich Hailey links to an article in Men's Health Magazine from a few years ago. I've heard for a number of years about cases when men have been forced to pay for child support for children that are not their own. I found out that it's the law that if a child was conceived during a marriage, it is ASSUMED to be the husband, unless he can prove he could not have been physically present during conception (sterile, on military duty, etc). I thought this was the exception, not the rule, but from that article:

Some call this paternity fraud. But a more accurate term is "paternal discrepancy." Paternity fraud emphasizes the financial aspect of the phenomenon, but paternal discrepancy (PD) describes the anomaly itself--the disconnect between what men think is true and the genetic reality. And research shows that it's a lot more common than we might believe.
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After recently reviewing 67 studies on the subject, University of Oklahoma researchers found that PD rates tend to be much higher among men who have reason to believe there's been more than one dog in the yard. No surprise there. But leave out these men and you end up with a number that can safely be assumed to represent the rest of us. That number is 3.85 percent. Another review of 19 studies by a group at Liverpool John Moores University backs this up, putting the figure at 3.7 percent of dads. It may not seem like a lot--until you do the math. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, there are 27,940,000 fathers nationwide with a child under 18. That means over a million guys out there are taking care of some other man's kid.
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If there's any lesson here for a man, it's this: The medical establishment is not on your side, the legal establishment may or may not be on your side, and you can be damn sure that the woman who lied to you isn't on your side, which makes it all the more important that you stick up for yourself. More important, perhaps, asking a few painful questions in the beginning could save you--and the ones you love--a lot of pain later on. No man can be blamed for believing in the woman he loves. You can't go into love doubting. But nor can you live without truth.