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The USA has 319 million people, that means every federal agency is going to have to deal with hundreds of "one in a million" cases, so handling something "rare"

The USA has 319 million people, that means every federal agency is going to have to deal with hundreds of "one in a million" cases, so handling something "rare" badly is still worthy of criticism. Chimerism in humans was reported on in medical journals, and as an issue for tests, since at least the 1950s and appears in the titles of all sorts of academic papers from the fields of biology and medicine from there to now. I would have thought that if the father is saying she's the mother, she's saying she's the mother, she has the birth certificates saying that she's the mother, witnesses to the births like her parents and there is no person missing those children or claiming to be the real mother it would be reasonable to consider the possibility it is an edge case even if you still thought fraud was more likely.

gojomo 12y ago
Wasn't a federal agency; instead a subdivision that has 2% of the US population. So, it's possible in a hundred years, most such bureaucracies won't see a single such case. Caseworkers don't Google extreme scenarios regarding obscure words ("chimerism") that they've probably never heard of before. Apparently, neither the mother nor her own obstetrician nor her lawyer came up with this theory, either, for quite a while, so who's fault is that? (The people with the most at stake couldn't find the magic research promptly, either.) It wasn't until after the 2002 paper about the Keegan case, and then other media coverage of this Fairchild case, and then followup stories/dramas and more recent research, that people outside of research had any idea anything like this could happen. No, low-level state caseworkers are not going to come up with the idea themselves. And the fact they kept running tests, including monitoring a live-birth-and-immediate-DNA-test, and deferring final judgement, indicates that the system was entertaining the possibility that this was an edge case. There's some serious hindsight bias in the know-it-all criticisms here.

gojomo 12y ago

Wasn't a federal agency; instead a subdivision that has 2% of the US population. So, it's possible in a hundred years, most such bureaucracies won't see a single such case. Caseworkers don't Google extreme scenarios regarding obscure words ("chimerism") that they've probably never heard of before. Apparently, neither the mother nor her own obstetrician nor her lawyer came up with this theory, either, for quite a while, so who's fault is that? (The people with the most at stake couldn't find the magic research promptly, either.) It wasn't until after the 2002 paper about the Keegan case, and then other media coverage of this Fairchild case, and then followup stories/dramas and more recent research, that people outside of research had any idea anything like this could happen. No, low-level state caseworkers are not going to come up with the idea themselves. And the fact they kept running tests, including monitoring a live-birth-and-immediate-DNA-test, and deferring final judgement, indicates that the system was entertaining the possibility that this was an edge case. There's some serious hindsight bias in the know-it-all criticisms here.