Israeli Men Fight “Unwanted” Fatherhood

A group of Israeli men have founded the legally registered association, Fathers By Force, to combat cases where unmarried women “trick” their mates into impregnating them.

Shmuel Baniel, a Tel Aviv family lawyer, founded the organization after he noticed a pattern emerging among his clients’ “tales of woe.” Many pregnancies were not accidental, he claims, but were engineered by the women from the beginning.

Ten years ago, Baniel says, most of these women “would not have thought of making a child without marriage, because there was no way of proving paternity, only of proving that someone was not the father.” But advances in blood testing now allows it to be determined with 90 percent accuracy whether a man who denies paternity is the father Courts in Israel automatically award the mother child support from the father if the test proves positive.

Only about 750 children a year — one percent of all babies born in Israel — are born to unwed mothers. Baniel believes that of these, about 500 are born to mothers who “tricked” men into fathering them.