When Your Child Isn't Yours

  A man who paid child support for 11 years is owed more than $14,000 after he discovered the child he was told was his, wasn't really. A Georgia judge ruled in the case earlier this year, saying that the child's birth mother and biological father have to repay the money he's been paying since 1997. "We have seen it happen before," Sandra Jarrett of the state's Child Support Recovery Unit told The Augusta, Ga., Chronicle.

But that wasn't the case for Dr. Enrique Terrazas, who for 12 years thought he had two daughters. He loved them both, bought them Christmas and birthday gifts and raised them as his own — until he found out that wasn't true. While his older daughter was his biological child, his younger child, just 10, was not. She was the product of an affair that his wife had just before filing for divorce when his youngest was a baby. 

“I did suspect during our marriage that she was getting too friendly with one of her friends, but she told me nothing was happening and I thought she was being honest with me,” Terrazas says. In other words, he trusted her. It was precisely that trust that has Terrazas in his current situation: paying $3,000 a month to a child he knows not to be is, but with whom he no longer has regular visitation.

The case has left Terrazas “devastated.” And when he made the decision to tell his daughter that she was not his biological child, she was also distraught. “She needed to know,” Terrazas explains.
 
As a medical doctor, he is well aware that the implications of genetics are far-reaching, he says telling the story of a 6-year-old boy who was on a fishing trip with the man he thought to be his father. When the boy snagged himself on a rusty fishing hook, the father brought his son to the hospital where he told the doctors that there was no history of antibiotic allergies in his family history. The boy went into anaphylactic shock and died. 

Later, his ex-wife admitted that he was not the father and the real father had a severe antibiotic allergy. Luckily, nothing so tragic had happened to Terrazas, but still thought the truth needed to be told. “I had been giving her pediatrician the wrong family history all this time,” he says.   

Soon after he told the truth, Terrazas ceased contact with his non-biological daughter — a decision he regrets to this day. “I had this need to get some justice out of the situation,” he says. “But basically, there was none. Now I just want to direct my energy to repairing the relationship with the girls and to improving the system.” 

As painful as Terrazas’ situation is, he is far from alone. Recent cases like the Anna Nicole Smith, Larry Birkhead, Howard Stern situation have highlighted the issue of paternity fraud—naming the wrong man as father to a child--and brought it into the media spotlight.  But the problem is not a new one. An estimated one million men in the United States alone have been in similar situations, according to Carnell Smith, who runs a DNA-testing company and is founder of Atlanta-based US Citizens Against Paternity Fraud (http://paternityfraud.com/).   

Smith’s own mission started when he found out the daughter he had been raising — and supporting — as his own, was not. “I supported who I thought was my daughter for 11 years. I went to her school functions. I was a very involved parent,” Smith says. “My father told me that if I helped bring a child into this world, I was to help take care of them. I believed that.”