It seems like a terrible situation to me. My wife, who's an attorney, says that the law is for the benefit of the child. Better to have somebody helping pay child support as well as the mother.

Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.

If you are in Michigan and a mother names you as the father for welfare benefits, you most likely will be forced to pay it. There have been many instances of men being declared fathers by default.

One man had won a court settlement when he was young and the woman applying for benefits remembered reading about him in the paper, so she put his name and address on the application to get the money. The court ordered him to start paying child support. He tried to fight it in court with a DNA test, but you need to serve the mother and neither the court nor the social welfare agency would release her address.

Leaving the legal issues out of it, if you were acting in the role of a parent, would you just abandon a child if you found out you're not biologically the father? Like one day you're taking them to sports, reading them bedtime stories, cuddling, all that stuff, the next day you just have nothing to do with them?

Really? Wouldn’t it be better to flee the country than die?