Shocked Parents Learn They're Half-Siblings

Irish couple struggles to cope with bombshell
By Marie Morris,  Newser Staff
Posted May 31, 2010 4:40 PM CDT
Shocked Parents Learn They're Half-Siblings
An Irish couple with a child have learned that they're also half-siblings.   (?Flavio@Flickr)

An Irish couple with a young son is reeling after learning that they're half-siblings. "We really hit it off," the man, who asked to be called James, tells the Irish Mail on Sunday about meeting his partner. "After a week it felt like we’d known each other forever." They hadn't—their mutual father had a fling with James' mother, who named a different man on her son's birth certificate. She was the one who eventually made the connection.

"I thought maybe she was saying these things because she was lonely and that this would get me to go and stay with her," he recalls. "But somehow in the back of my mind I knew it was true." The case has become a case celebre for fathers'-rights activists, who coincidentally enough have an ally in a Mail on Sunday columnist. Says James: "There are others like us and I think that if mothers were forced to name the child’s father on the birth certificate, then this would not happen."
(More Ireland stories.)

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