Patrick Connaro, a 42-year-old robotics engineer living in
Colorado Springs, was sitting in the bleachers one warm Saturday afternoon in 2003, watching his son’s Little League game, when the ground opened beneath him.
“My little boy was there, he was up at bat, and I started yelling for him, ‘Go Matthew! Knock it
out of the park!’ And another man started screaming for Matthew. Louder than me. I looked over, and I looked at him, and I was like, Who is this guy? And I looked at my son, and I looked at him … and they were identical.”
After the ball game, Connaro ordered a
paternity test. The results came back 2 weeks later. “I opened up the letter from Labcorp, and it said, ‘ … 99.9 percent chance you are not the
biological father of this child.’ I started crying. My head started spinning.”
Connaro admits that the possibility had crossed his mind before, given his son’s dissimilar facial features, but each time he questioned his wife about it, she vehemently denied the suggestion. Even when he showed her the test results, she still denied it. “She said, ‘You forged this,’ ” Connaro recalls, shaking his head in amazement.
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.
