Who's YOUR Daddy?
Heteropaternal superfecundation is on everyone’s lips
UNLESS YOU’RE THE SON OF GOD, or maybe the Sun God, it’s quite normal to question your own paternity.
Mothers are easily identified — especially in the birthing room — but only DNA can accurately pinpoint a father. Life is like that.
In the words of the immortal Willy Nelson:
After my father passed away some years ago, a cousin telephoned with the news that he and his sister - both registered nurses and therefore educated in the sciences - had determined that their father (my father’s older brother) wasn’t actually their father. It was my own father, they insisted, who’d done the deed.
I wouldn’t have put it past him but WTF. Why now, six decades later? I could guess why. They were fishing for an inheritance. Families are like that.
“How do you know this,” I asked, feigning shock at such a bold assertion.
“We checked the blood types. My sister and I are type B. Both our parents are type A. Your dad was type B” Also, both our parents have blue eyes and ours are brown. Blue eyed parents always have blue-eyed children. It’s genetics, see?” [1]
My cousin is best known as defendant in “State of Illinois vs …”. You probably get the picture.
“Sure,” I said. “But my dad’s blood was type O. You guys need to dig deeper.”
WE WERE LOOKING AT year-end photos from my wife’s third-grade class. There’s a pair of twin boys who don’t resemble one another in any discernable way. One is short and dark with a moon-shaped face, the other tall, blonde, and thoroughly Nordic.
“Perhaps they have different fathers,” I ventured coyly.
“But they’re twins!” she shot back.
How could I be so stupid?
Of course, their esteemed mother would never have enjoyed unprotected sex with two different men, back-to-back, so to speak; therefore even fraternal (dizygotic) twins — wherein two eggs are produced and separately fertilized — must have the same sire, right?
Wrong.
While I’m a card-carrying member of the Flat Earth Society (“Dolce Far Niente”), my long-suffering, Left-leaning wife remains a firm believer in virgin birth. Or rather, she struggles to deflect any and all criticisms of women. They’re all goddesses.
We’re both products of the Catholic school system, although I prefer to err on the side of science.
“Superfecundation describes a situation in which each of the eggs are fertilized by sperm from different men, leading them to have different biological fathers (making the twins half-siblings). The appropriate term to describe this situation is heteropaternal superfecundation.” (Source)
Heteropaternal superfecundation isn’t as rare as one might think. Unless a woman has conceived twins with men of different races, the deed is easily camouflaged. For some practitioners, however, DNA profiling has revealed a closet stuffed with soiled laundry.
Paternity testing is sometimes required when a mother applies for social assistance. The New York Times reported on how a New Jersey woman who applied for assistance was confronted with some shocking results. This kind of news generally wreaks nuclear holocaust on a marriage, bringing loyalty and trust into question, especially after a couple has been together for years. The Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences reports that 2.4% of paternity suit cases in a sample of 39,000 involved heteropaternal superfecundation.
More commonly, siblings of varying ages are conceived by different fathers without the husband’s knowledge. The phenomenon is explored in my short story entitled “Adriana’s Underwear.”
Sussex Syndrome
This is Zone of Sulphur where the unmentionable is dragged into the light and dissected. Sort of.
The fuss over Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry isn’t about race. It’s about paternity. His paternity, not baby Archie’s or Lillibet’s.
Frog Prince Charles (now King Charles II) let the cat out of the bag when he enquired as to baby Archie’s skin colour, but it wasn’t meant as a racial slur. We’re sure that Charles finds Meghan as intriguing as the rest of us scandalmongers in her thoroughly American way.
What the King can’t suppress is the corrosive notion that somebody was banging his late wife and that young Harry may not have any royal blood in his veins, hence neither would Archie and Lillibet. They’d be commoners. The throne’s un-Woke comment about Archie was metaphoric rather than literal.
This barely concealed secret has been at the root of Harry’s psychological and emotional turmoil all along, Oprah notwithstanding. The Sussex’s split from the Windsor clan is simply a matter of housecleaning on both sides, Harry being no more the spawn of Charles than are the late Queen’s Corgis.
But wait, didn’t Charles have a thing about dogs?
Loose lipped Captain James Hewitt spilled the beans regarding lonely Princess Diana’s sexual proclivities but he can’t definitively confirm that he sired Prince Harry, as many media sources insist, not without DNA profiling. Hewitt was Princess Diana’s “riding instructor.” Oh, yeah!
Mehera Bonner’s devastatingly candid exposé in Yahoo!Life offers more than enough photo exhibits and eyewitness testimony for tabloid readers to form their own jaded opinions.
DNI profiling should settle the matter quite nicely; but hey, who would even dare? The late Queen Elizabeth II didn’t need to open any more cans of worms as Britain reels from the triple whammee of Brexit, Starmer, and the inevitable coronation of King Troll.
More Lessons from Literature
In Daniel Dafoe’s classic novel “Moll Flanders,” the protagonist carries on a love affair with the elder son of a wealthy family that shelters her. When she becomes pregnant, her lover endeavours to marry her off to his younger brother who is also in love with her, intervening with the parents on their behalf. She marries the brother who remains none the wiser about her pregnancy. Their MFM threesome goes on for years.
Later in the narrative, after her lover marries another woman and her husband suffers an early death, she ends up marrying and bearing four children with her own brother, their kinship unbeknownst to either of them, of course.
Ah, the lusty 17th-century!
IT’S GENERALLY CONSIDERED easier for a man to adopt another man’s offspring than for a woman to adopt the offspring of another woman after marrying their father. Fairytales and folklore are rife with accounts of the evil stepmother and for good reason: there are so many of them.
The life of author Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley is an excellent example of a jealous stepmother’s abuse of an innocent child simply because she resembles what the woman perceives to be a rival, although long dead. Mary Shelley wrote the thinly veiled novel “Frankenstein,” alluding to her own abusive upbringing at the hands of her famous father’s second wife. The moral of the story is that humans are quick to abandon the consequences of their lusty escapades whom others are loath to accept.
After all, the tried and true way to get one’s lunch hooks into a dude (and the next dude, and the next) is to become pregnant with his child.
The tragedy of Frankenstein is that the newly assembled (from grave-robbed parts) entity only became a monster after it’s creator reneged on his obligation to parent it and give it a good life. It became vengeful and decided to wreak murder and mayhem. Yeah, it’s a really complex story that deserves rereading.
Because it’s still with us…
Laurence Stern expressed similar misgivings in the opening to his 18th-century novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” when he wrote:
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
Sterne’s sage advice applies equally well to contemporary women, especially while hyperovulating. If you’re determined to sleep around, then mind what you’re about when you beget.
Footnotes
Recessive Genes: Blue eyes are typically a result of recessive genes. If both parents are blue-eyed, they are usually homozygous recessive (bb), meaning they can only pass on the blue allele (b). However, eye color is influenced by many genes. Variations in these genes can lead to unexpected outcomes. For example, if both parents carry a hidden gene for brown or green eyes, it is theoretically possible for them to have a child with a different eye colour; therefore, eye colour does not constitute reliable proof of adultery, however compelling.
This is one of those fascinating biological phenomena that sounds like science fiction but is very real! Heteropaternal superfecundation is such a wild example of how nature doesn't always follow our expectations. The genetic lottery gets even more complex when you consider that two siblings can literally have different fathers. It's a great reminder that biology is full of edge cases and exceptions that challenge our understanding of paternity and reproduction. Thanks for sharing this intriguing topic!