Establishing paternity is important if you want to have parental rights to your child in Florida. Having the court name you as the legal father of a child means you have rights to visitation and the ability to play a role in the child’s life and make decisions regarding him or her. The main way that the courts do this is through a DNA test. These tests are rather simple to do and allow the father to be determined with up to 99 percent accuracy. According to Health-Link, the first step in any test is doing a swab to collect the DNA.
This swab is done on the inside of your cheek. Your child also must be swabbed. The mother may be swabbed as well since having all three DNA profiles helps with ensuring the accuracy of the test. All three DNA profiles are needed to make a match. These samples are then sent to the lab.
At the lab, testing begins to pull up the DNA profiles on each of you. The lab technicians look for certain locations within the DNA that can be matched to determine paternity. The needed information is extracted and it creates a DNA fingerprint that is unique to each of you. The DNA fingerprints are then compared to determine if you are the father.
Because such testing requires a very high, almost perfect level of matching between the DNA samples, it is considered to be adequate proof for the courts whether you are or are not the father of a child. This information is for education and is not legal advice.