MediaCorp actor Terence Cao is not the first man to face baby woes.

It’s not just celebrities who have been embroiled in paternity dramas; others also want paternity tests for various reasons.

Men may want to know if their partners have cheated on them, says one paternity testing company in Singapore.

Or, a woman may want to ascertain who has fathered her child so they can ask the man to marry her.

The Paternity Testing Corporation (PTC), which has been operating from the US since 1996, offers paternity tests for children after they are born, or prenatal paternity tests for fetuses from as early as nine weeks after conception.

In an e-mail interview with The New Paper on Sunday, PTC’s Scott Wein explains that those who seek prenatal testing are usually young pregnant women who want to marry the man they believe is the child’s biological father.

The man typically asks for paternity to be proved and that’s when the test comes in.

Mr Wein, PTC’s area manager for Asia, says: “A prenatal paternity test has resulted in many happy marriages, from what could have been a disaster of marrying someone who is not the child’s father.

“Without a test, the men may wish to refuse paternity of the child, causing many young women to look towards abortion since they cannot support the child on their own.”

PTC conducts over 20,000 paternity tests each year, which works out to hundreds of tests a day.

Mr Wein says such tests have brought joy to the lives of their clients on many occasions.

Some instances:

- A woman in Japan had a one-night stand in a club and struggled to raise her daughter on her own for 12 years. The man she had sex with turned out to be a millionaire. When his paternity was proven, he offered to support them and mother and daughter were then financially stable.

- During World War II, two toddlers in Japan were separated from each other and lost their family during the war. When they became adults, both were interviewed by a TV channel. As their memories were so similar, they decided to get a DNA test. The result showed they were actually cousins and did have some living relatives after all.

There are, of course, stories where clients were unhappy with the test results.

Click on the thumbnails for celebrities who have been embroiled in paternity scandals, or read the full story here.