What are the pros and cons of making paternity tests compulsory after birth?

Advantages:

• It would reduce the risk that men believe that children who aren't theirs are theirs.
• It would put men and women on a more equal footing with respect to knowing about biological parenthood. Currently the case is that the woman generally always knows if the man is certainly the father or just possibly the father while the man doesn't necessarily know.
• It would eliminate doubt and uncertainty in those few men who for some reason today feel doubtful about being the biological father of a child.
  

Disadvantages:

• Some men might prefer not to know. I think that'd be fairly rare, but it may exist.
  
• Some women may prefer that the men are not told. Presumably this would primarily be true for women who have cheated on their partners and are pregnant with someone else, yet who haven't told their partners about this.
  

I think this is going to happen pretty soon. Not because of explicit paternity testing as such, but because sequencing the genome of a newly born baby and storing this as a part of that childs health-profile will be routine since that has real medical value when we start getting more medicine and treatments that are adapted especially for a individuals genetic profile.

Sequencing the genome will tell you about the paternity as a unintended side-effect at no extra cost, unless you take very deliberate special steps to AVOID learning about the paternity.

Such deliberate avoidance is actually already the case in some situations; for example schools in Norway deliberately stopped performing certain biological experiments on genetics in high-school, and text-books got edited to specifically de-emphasize information about certain recessive observable traits in humans that'd have the same effect. If both your biological parents have a recessive phenotype, but you do not, then assuming the observation is correct, those two people can't be your biological parents.

Sometimes the hospital discovers by accident that the person listed as father can't be the biological father; for example if the bloodtype of the child is an impossibility with him as dad; in such cases they deliberately AVOID informing him about it. Personally I think that's morally wrong, and he does have a moral right to be informed if/when someone has this knowledge, but that's not the current practice.

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