Happy 'Baby Daddy Day' -- if test says you ARE the father

Nothing says "Happy Father's Day" like a warning that you might not be your kid's dad.

"For fathers all across the county, June 15th will be a special day to celebrate the joys of fatherhood -- but not for all," reads a press release headlined "Father's Day Fraud: One third of all paternity tests prove negative."

This will come as no surprise to people who watch "The Maury Show," where host Maury Povich uses paternity testing as a crass entertainment gimmick.

On a typical Maury offering, a woman insists a former lover fathered her baby and won't take responsibility. The man denies he is the dad and notes the mom slept with lots of guys. If the paternity test comes back positive, the mom cheers and does an "I told you so" dance in the face of the new dad. When the results are negative, the man raises his arms in triumph while the broken woman may come back on a later show/shows to test another lover, or two or three or eight or 13.

"We do the collections for 'The Maury Show,' " says Joe Krauchunas, president of DNA People Diagnostics, which has paternity testing clinics throughout the suburbs. "Here is the sad part -- those stories are true."

Local DNA People Diagnostics labs, including ones in Elgin, Naperville and Bolingbrook, conduct about 3,500 paternity tests a year.

"One out of every 10 men between the ages of 18 and 32 question the paternity of a child … which is kind of scary," Krauchunas says.

Business increases around holidays such as Father's Day, he adds.

"A lot of it is spurred by emotion," Krauchunas says. "A guy wants to pick up his child on Father's Day, and she (the mom) won't let him."

But, just as happens on "The Maury Show," tests don't always show what people hope they'll show. It seems that men who don't want the responsibilities of fatherhood often are legally bound after positive paternity tests, Krauchunas says.

"The ones who want to be the biological father are the ones who turn out not to be," Krauchunas says. "I had a man crying with me on the phone today. He raised a child for seven years."

An ugly rumor that the mother's ex-hubby fathered that girl compelled the dad to take the test to prove he was the biological father, "and unfortunately, he is not," Krauchunas says. "We might not know if the other man is the biological father, but we know he (the acting father) isn't."

With married couples, the husband is "legally presumed" to be the father according to Illinois law, says James M. Quigley, a lawyer and partner with the firm Beermann Swerdlove, who has seen paternity cases while practicing family law in Cook, Lake and DuPage counties since 1992.

While most paternity cases involve men who have to be forced into taking financial responsibility, Quigley says he's also represented men who need his help getting custody or visitation rights. There are stories of women fraudulently trying to get child support from any former lover with a job.

But it's not all sad news.

"For every 20 bad stories there is the beautiful story," says Krauchunas. He remembers a corrections officer who used a paternity test to confirm his suspicions that a prisoner was the son he'd never met.

(That might not be as "happy" as you thought, but it turned out well.)

In some cases, the truth comes out long after men assume a kid is theirs.

"They have no reason to believe anyone is seeing anyone on the side," Quigley says. "He acknowledges paternity, because whose else would it be?"

In one case, a family argument led an in-law to tell a man that his teenage daughter was fathered by another guy. A paternity test showed she was right. But Quigley says the presumed dad kept paying child support because he loved that girl the same way he would have had she been his biological child.

It is that bond, that love and that care that makes fatherhood so much more than just a case of matching DNA.