By Isaac Osei-Owusu
Introduction
A storm is brewing in Ghana’s Parliament — one that touches on biology, identity, family, and the very architecture of constitutional rights. In April 2026, two Private Member’s Bills
emerged from the legislature proposing, among other things, that every child born in a
Ghanaian healthcare facility be subjected to compulsory DNA paternity testing before a
birth certificate is issued. The proposals have ignited fierce public debate, drawing support
from those who see them as a weapon against “paternity fraud” and fierce condemnation
from legal scholars, constitutional lawyers, and child rights advocates who argue the bills
are discriminatory, legally incoherent, and constitutionally untenable.
This article examines the legal implications of the proposed legislation from a Ghanaian and
comparative constitutional law perspective — analysing its potential impact on constitutional rights, the existing legal framework for parentage, the rights of children, and the broader rule-of-law considerations that must inform this debate.
Background: The Bills in Parliament
The debate traces its origins to two separate legislative initiatives. The first was introduced
by Yakubu Mohammed, MP for Ahafo Ano South East, proposing that every child born in
Ghana receive a paternity test before a birth certificate is issued, on the stated ground of
“enhancing trust between partners” and ensuring fathers take responsibility. The second, by Kwame Asare Obeng (popularly known as A Plus), the MP for Gomoa Central, goes further still — seeking to criminalise “paternity fraud” and impose prison terms on women who“deliberately impose pregnancies on innocent men.”
It is important to clarify one significant fact that has been obscured in widespread social
media coverage: a fact-check by DUBAWA Ghana found that the Paternity Fraud
(Criminalisation) Bill, 2026 — the A Plus bill — contains no provision explicitly mandating
DNA testing for all newborns. The bill’s own sponsor has stated, “I am advocating for the
criminalisation of paternity fraud, not mandatory paternity testing.” Much of the public alarm has therefore been driven by the MP’s earlier public statements and media coverage, rather than the bill’s actual text. Nonetheless, the Mohammed bill — which does explicitly call for universal paternity testing at birth — remains live, and the totality of the legislative debate demands serious legal scrutiny.
Constitutional Concerns
- The Right to Privacy and Bodily Autonomy
Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, under Article 18(2), guarantees every person the right to privacy
of “home, property, correspondence, or communication.” Courts and scholars have long
extended the principle of privacy to bodily integrity. A mandatory DNA test imposed on
every newborn — and by extension on the mother whose biological material is necessarily
implicated — constitutes a non-consensual extraction of sensitive genetic information by
the state. This is not a trivial intrusion. Genetic data is among the most intimate categories
of personal information that exist, capable of revealing not only parentage but susceptibility
to disease, ethnic lineage, and other deeply personal characteristics.
No compelling state interest — certainly not one as broadly and vaguely defined as
“enhancing trust between partners” — is capable of overriding so fundamental a right in a
manner consistent with constitutional proportionality. The bill does not target specific
circumstances of doubt or dispute; it targets every birth, on every occasion, everywhere in
Ghana. This blanket imposition fails the basic test of necessity: a far less restrictive
alternative already exists, as Ghana’s courts are available to resolve genuine paternity
disputes on a case-by-case basis.
- Structural Discrimination Against Women
The proposal is structurally discriminatory on its face. It mandates proof of paternity while
treating maternity as presumptively unquestionable — a distinction that, in practice,
operates as a legislative presumption of maternal deceit. The bill does not impose any
equivalent burden on fathers; it imposes a singular suspicion on mothers, enforced by the
full coercive apparatus of the state at the very moment of birth.
Ghana’s Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender under Article 17. A law
that selectively imposes the burden of biological proof on mothers, requiring them to
vindicate their own honesty before the state will issue their child a birth certificate, is on its
face incompatible with that prohibition. Critics have aptly characterised it as an
“institutionalisation of distrust directed at women.”
- The Rights of the Child
This may be the most compelling legal objection of all. Ghana is a signatory to the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the African Charter on the
Rights and Welfare of the Child, both of which require that the best interests of the child be
the primary consideration in all legislative and administrative action concerning children.
The Children’s Act, 1998 (Act 560) enshrines the same principle in domestic law.
Subjecting every newborn to genetic testing as a precondition for birth registration directly
subordinates the interests of children to the interests of adult men who harbour doubts
about paternity. The child has committed no wrong. The child has no say. Yet it is the child
who, under this scheme, begins life not with a presumption of belonging and identity but
with a bureaucratic question mark hanging over its legal existence until biology is verified by the state. This is not a child-centred framework — it is an adult-dispute mechanism imposed on the most vulnerable persons in the legal system.
The Existing Legal Framework: Why the Bill Is Unnecessary
Ghana already possesses a coherent, child-centred legal architecture for determining
parentage. Section 32 of the Evidence Act, 1975 (NRCD 323) establishes a presumption
that a child born within marriage is the husband’s child — a presumption designed not to
deny biology, but to protect the child from legal uncertainty at birth. Sections 40 to 42 of
the Children’s Act, 1998, and Section 47(1)(f) of the Courts Act, 1993 (Act 459) provide
judicially supervised mechanisms through which genuine disputes over parentage may be
resolved. These provisions place the welfare of the child at the centre of any determination.
Men who harbour sincere doubts about paternity are not without remedy. Private DNA
testing is accessible, and the courts stand ready to resolve disputes. What the bill proposes
— mandatory state-administered testing of every newborn — is not a gap-filler. It is an
entirely unnecessary disruption of a well-functioning legal framework, driven not by
evidence of systemic failure but by social media anxiety and political theatre.
The Criminalisation Dimension: A Deeply Troubled Concept
The A Plus bill’s proposal to criminalise “paternity fraud” introduces a further set of
profound legal difficulties. Criminal liability requires, as a foundational principle, proof of a
guilty mind (mens rea). A woman who is genuinely uncertain of paternity — who may herself
be unaware that a biological discrepancy exists — cannot, in any principled legal sense, be
said to have committed fraud. Criminalising the mere fact of a biological mismatch, without
proof of deliberate deception, would expose women to imprisonment for circumstances that are not, by any orthodox definition, criminal.
There is also a dangerous ambiguity in the phrase “deliberately impose pregnancies on
innocent men.” Pregnancy is a biological condition, not a legal act. Attaching criminal liability to it — without narrowly and carefully defining the prohibited conduct — risks criminalising a vast range of intimate behaviour and reproductive decisions in ways that would be both repugnant to constitutional values and unenforceable in practice.
Furthermore, the concept of “paternity fraud” as currently framed conflates biological fact
with deliberate deception. A woman who genuinely does not know the identity of a child’s
biological father has not committed fraud in any legally recognisable sense. The criminal law must not be weaponised to punish uncertainty.
Practical and Fiscal Implications
Beyond the constitutional objections lies a profound practical one. Universal DNA testing of
every newborn born in a Ghanaian healthcare facility would impose an enormous fiscal
burden. As a Private Member’s Bill, such legislation cannot lawfully draw on the
Consolidated Fund under Ghana’s constitutional rules on money bills. This means the cost
would fall either on the state through a separate appropriation or — more troublingly — on
new parents themselves, who are already bearing hospital and postnatal expenses.
Forcing families to finance the biological verification of their own integrity as a condition of
their child receiving a birth certificate is not merely administratively absurd. It is regressive.
It would fall most heavily on the poorest Ghanaians and risks incentivising births outside
formal healthcare facilities, with devastating consequences for maternal and child health
outcomes. Ghana has spent decades expanding institutional delivery rates; a policy that
creates a financial or psychological deterrent to hospital births would undo much of that
hard-won progress.
The Cultural Context: Social Media, Moral Panic, and Legislative Responsibility
It would be a disservice to this debate to ignore the cultural forces driving it. The proposals
did not emerge from a careful review of evidence or a documented pattern of legal failure.
They emerged, in significant part, from the amplifying effects of social media. TikTok and
YouTube have turned paternity disputes into public spectacles, and in February 2026
Parliament itself trended as a “DNA lab” following unverified rumours about two MPs.
Ghana’s legislature risks legislating in response to viral content rather than demonstrated
legal need.
This is a troubling pattern. The role of Parliament is not to validate social media outrage but
to deliberate carefully, weigh evidence, and enact laws that are constitutionally sound,
practically workable, and genuinely in the public interest. The rush to criminalise and
mandate in this area reflects a failure of that deliberative function.
Conclusion: What Ghana Actually Needs
The legal case against mandatory universal DNA testing at birth is compelling on multiple
fronts: it violates constitutional privacy rights, is structurally discriminatory against women,
subordinates the best interests of children to the grievances of adults, disrupts a coherent
existing legal framework, is fiscally unworkable, and creates criminal liability without a
principled legal foundation.
None of this means that the concerns motivating the bills are entirely without merit.
Paternity disputes can cause genuine harm — emotional, financial, and relational. But the
remedy must be proportionate, targeted, and constitutionally grounded. That means
strengthening access to judicial dispute resolution, not imposing blanket suspicion on every
mother at the moment of birth. It means crafting a narrow, carefully defined criminal offence for proven deliberate deception — not a sweeping provision that criminalises the biological complexity of human reproduction.
Ghana’s legal tradition is a proud one. Its Constitution is a sophisticated document; its
judiciary has shown itself capable of principled reasoning on difficult matters. The
legislature owes it to that tradition — and above all to the children who will be born under
whatever law it enacts — to reject these proposals in their current form and pursue reform
that is worthy of the Constitution they are sworn to uphold.
Isaac Osei-Owusu is a legal analyst writing on Ghanaian constitutional and family law. The
views expressed in this article are his own.