New blood test can determine paternity before birth

Michigan Radio Newsroom — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:39:31 +0000

Pregnant women in Michigan can now use a simple blood test to identify the father of their unborn child.

Three labs across the state now offer the noninvasive prenatal paternity test. The Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Lansing sites are part of the ArcPoint Franchise Group.

With only a blood sample from the mother and a cheek swab from the potential father, paternity can be determined as early as five weeks after conception.

At that time, the pregnant woman's blood starts carrying fragments of the fetus' DNA.

The labs send the mother's blood samples and potential father's cheek swab to a different lab in Columbia, Md., where technicians compare genetic markers to determine paternity.

Michigan making progress in collecting child support

Laura Weber — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:10:46 +0000

A new report says about 70% of children in Michigan who are eligible for child support do receive the payments. An Auditor General’s report on Michigan’s child support system says about $3 billion in child support payments were collected over the last two years.

Marilyn Stephen is the director of Child Support with the Department of Human Services. She says the number of eligible kids who receive child support payments could always be better.

“I don’t know that I’d categorize it as either good or bad. It’s great that there are 70% of children who are receiving the support that they are entitled to, but that means that there’s 30% that we spend probably 90 percent of our time looking for and trying to identify income and assets.”

Stephen doubts the state will never be able to make every parent pay child support.

“I would submit that we’ll probably never be at zero, because there will probably always be individuals who lack the education and the job history and frankly the employment to pay their child support. So that’s a persistent problem, and not just in Michigan, but across the nation, and really across the world.”

Stephen says the state’s child support program is a great return on investment for taxpayers, with more than $6 in child support collected for every dollar spent.