This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Five & Dime

On the shelf at my local chain drugstore, nestled between the desensitizing ejaculation-delaying product Mandelay and a pleasure-enhancing female condom, sits a DNA paternity test — “for the alleged father, mother and child.” For $19.99. Heartwarming stuff, just in time for Father’s Day.

The creams and gels meant to enhance or tame arousal, facilitate or prevent conception, don’t bother me. If someone is willing to drive to a drugstore far from home, where he or she isn’t a familiar face to the clerks, and buy one of these products, more power to him or her. It’s good these items are easily available. Some people might even be willing to buy them from the friendly gals who regularly sell them toilet paper and milk.

That DNA test, though, is another story. When ya gotta know, ya gotta know, I suppose. And I guess it’s good that Joe Q Public can take his saliva into his own hands and find out if he’s a father or merely alleged, without having to subject himself to a clinic or hospital and red tape. It’s a sad commentary on the American family and culture, however, when the paternity of so many “alleged” children is in doubt that mainstream retailers carry products to determine it.

The box bears an abstract, sweepy drawing of a woman happily lifting a baby into the air.

I don’t want to think about the conversations surrounding the purchase, the sample-taking, the waiting for results. The mistrust. The eagerness, fears, anxiety. Regardless of the outcome, does any of it spell happy, wanted, nurtured baby? Stable environment? Maybe?