When a child is born, the world should pause. In that fragile moment between first cry and first touch, something larger than science occurs. Trust. A mother’s body, a father’s presence, a family’s breath converging in relief and joy. That is the ceremony of life, one that does not need certification or laboratory confirmation.
To replace that moment with a swab and a form, to turn delivery rooms into places of investigation, is to tell every newborn in Zimbabwe: welcome to a country that doubts your mother. Welcome to a home where family is not assumed but interrogated.
That, in essence, is what some of our leaders are proposing. Bridget Nyandoro, a Citizens’ Coalition for Change legislator, has said she intends to bring a motion before Parliament for compulsory DNA testing at birth. She frames it as a measure against gender-based violence, suggesting that if paternity is clarified from the very beginning, men will not discover decades later that the children they raised are not biologically theirs. In her view, this clarity would save lives.
The activist Linda Masarira has echoed that idea, adding that compulsory testing would protect men from being manipulated into caring for children who are not theirs and would shield children from the shock of discovering, years later, that their identities rested on deception.
It is an argument that resonates emotionally, especially in an environment where stories of paternity fraud have gone viral and private testing centers report alarming statistics. Numbers like “72 percent of tested men are not the father” are repeated as if they reflect the entire nation. But they do not. They reflect the anxieties of men who already doubted, as Tendai Ruben Mbofana wrote this week. International studies tell a very different story: rates of misattributed paternity are typically between one and three percent in the general population. That is still painful for those affected, but it is far from the epidemic these headlines suggest. Policy made from suspicion is policy made in error.
Even if the statistics were higher, the remedy being proposed is a blunt instrument. To test every child at birth is not science in service of health. It is surveillance, disguised in clinical white. It is not a celebration of truth but the manufacture of doubt. It takes one of the most intimate human experiences and subjects it to the cold gaze of the state. Trust does not survive such interventions. Trust is suffocated when a delivery ward becomes a tribunal, when the bond between parent and child is treated as provisional until the lab confirms it.
Imagine what such a law would do to our families. A father’s first embrace would be shadowed by suspicion. A mother’s word would mean nothing without certification. A child would grow up knowing their belonging was conditional, documented, and stored in some bureaucratic archive. Every family would become a file. Every relationship would begin with proof, not belief. We would be training citizens to doubt before they love, to measure care in molecules rather than in years of devotion. That is not justice, or healing. That is bureaucracy at the expense of humanity.
Proponents say this will help curb gender-based violence. But gender-based violence in Zimbabwe is not a matter of DNA. It is rooted in patriarchy, in poverty, in cultures of control and silence. It stems from the belief that women are property, that children are leverage, that suspicion and jealousy can justify brutality. You do not dismantle that with paperwork. You do not prevent murder with a test tube. If anything, compulsory testing may provoke more violence. A man who learns in the hospital that the baby is not biologically his may not walk away quietly. He may lash out then and there. A revelation delivered at birth is not a shield, it may well be a spark.
There are also the complications nobody seems eager to discuss. What happens when the biological father identified by a DNA test does not want involvement? Is he forced into parenthood against his will? What happens in blended families where a stepfather raises children knowingly and lovingly. Does the state erase that bond because the lab says otherwise? What about cases where affairs are revealed unnecessarily, destroying marriages that might otherwise have endured? Bureaucracy cannot account for the messiness of human relationships. A cotton swab cannot hold mercy, or forgiveness, or the complexity of family life.
Then there is the question of cost. Nationwide DNA testing would require sophisticated laboratories, trained personnel, secure systems, and ongoing funding. Zimbabwe’s health system struggles even to provide basic medicines and maternity care. To divert resources toward policing paternity would be obscene.
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Why should money that could fund vaccines or prevent maternal deaths be redirected into suspicion? We would be choosing to finance mistrust while neglecting survival. The priorities could not be more misplaced.
There are also ethical problems to consider. Compulsory DNA testing strips away consent and privacy. A newborn cannot consent. Parents should not be forced into procedures without cause. To mandate it is to declare all mothers dishonest until proven otherwise, all fathers deceived until certified, every family guilty until cleared. It is collective suspicion disguised as protection. What kind of nation begins its relationship with every child by asking for evidence of bloodlines? It is the language of colonial bureaucracy dressed in biotech: the state playing both midwife and accuser, welcoming a child and interrogating their origins in the same breath.
None of this is to deny that paternity disputes cause anguish. They do. Men deceived into raising children not biologically theirs feel humiliated and betrayed. Women caught in those revelations are sometimes subjected to horrific violence. Children, too, bear the scars of learning late in life that the man they called father is not related to them by blood. These are real tragedies. But they are not the majority of families. And they cannot justify making every single birth an investigation.
Better solutions exist. If the issue is fraudulent maintenance claims, then the law can require proof of paternity only when it is disputed, as some petitioners in Parliament have already suggested. If the issue is deception, then criminal statutes addressing fraud can be strengthened. If the issue is gender-based violence, then resources should go into shelters, counseling, education, and tougher enforcement of existing laws. The roots of abuse lie not in DNA but in inequality, in anger, in economic despair. A test result cannot solve that.
The High Court has already ruled against requiring DNA tests for birth certificates, declaring such demands unconstitutional and harmful. Justice Nokuthula Moyo called out the Registrar’s office for violating children’s right to identity by insisting on DNA in disputed cases. That ruling should have settled the matter. And yet the idea has been resurrected, given new life by political figures eager to appear decisive. It is easier, after all, to propose a dramatic policy than to confront the entrenched realities of gender violence. But drama is not governance, and suspicion is not safety.
Look around the world and you will not find democratic nations mandating DNA testing at birth. Courts allow it when disputes arise, but no state has dared to impose it universally. They understand the dangers. They understand that once DNA is collected, the temptation to expand its use grows.
Today it is about paternity; tomorrow it could be about surveillance, about cataloging citizens for purposes far removed from family law. That is how intrusion works — always justified in the name of protection, always expanded beyond its first rationale. Governments everywhere have learned this trick. Security agencies claim mass surveillance protects citizens from terrorism. Censors claim speech restrictions protect us from harm. Biometric databases are rolled out in the name of efficiency. And every time, freedoms recede, never to be fully restored. Zimbabwe should not be eager to join that march.
In the end, the question is simple. Do we want to build a society where families are founded on trust, or one where they are founded on suspicion? Do we want to spend our scarce resources nurturing health and safety, or policing intimacy? Do we believe that love is proved by years of care, or by a lab report? A nation that doubts its mothers will one day doubt itself. And a nation that confuses biology with belonging will find both slipping through its fingers.
Compulsory paternity DNA testing at birth is not the solution to Zimbabwe’s gender-based violence woes. It is a distraction, a performance, a policy that promises protection but delivers intrusion. Families are more than bloodlines. Parenthood is more than genes. Justice requires more than swabs. We should be building trust, not legislating suspicion; protecting women, not criminalizing them; nurturing children, not barcoding them.
Mandatory DNA testing is a slippery slope to state intrusion.
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