Brian Moran, chairman of the Democratic caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates, said the black vote will have played a “significant” role if Obama wins the state. Moran, who represents Northern Virginia’s 46th District, spent the last several days campaigning in the belt of heavily African-American communities along the North Carolina border, areas with a high concentration of first-time voters, even if their numbers aren’t big. The real influence of the black vote will come later tonight.

If the black vote ends up representing part of the margin in this state, that might also represent a neglected well of support for Virginia Democrats. Moran didn’t like that line of reasoning. He said the Democrats’ “message of opportunity for all” resonated with all Virginian voters, while the Republicans had been, he searched for the word, “inhospitable.”

The lines from earlier in the day did not reappear after work in Virginia, suggesting that nervous voters who thought that voting after work was too big a risk voted early in droves. At one Alexandria polling place, John Adams Elementary School, poll watchers told me that according to raw data, about 75 percent of the precinct’s registered voters voted either today or by absentee ballot. Despite some reports of problems at polls in Virginia, most of the campaign and party officials I’ve spoken with seem unconcerned. However, minutes after 7 p.m., when Virginia’s polls officially close, the Obama campaign sent a text message to supporters telling them to hustle to the polls: “If you are in line by 7 p.m. you have the right to vote!”

West Alexandria is an example of how changing demographics has changed the way the Old Dominion votes, and not just because rapid growth in the Washington suburbs has tipped the balance of power away from the redder downstate Virginia.

Despite its reputation as the land of soccer moms and government work-bots, much of Northern Virginia’s growth has come not from white suburbanites but from nonwhite immigrants. Northern Virginia has doubled its minority population in the past 20 years, mostly through immigration. Hispanics and Asians count for 21 and 15 percent, respectively, of the increase in the state’s voting population. Large enclaves of Ethiopians and the East Coast’s largest Vietnamese population have made close-in cities like Arlington and Alexandria a destination for Washington foodies — and a source of Democratic votes. While the Vietnamese skew Republican, most of the other burgeoning immigrant groups vote Democratic.

Turnout this morning in Virginia was roughly double past levels, with 40 percent of 5 million registered voters voting before noon. Democratic Party officials expect a record turnout at polls in traditional African-American enclaves, like Hampton Roads, and the areas that have seen the most new immigration, places likes Loudoun and Prince William counties, both among the nation’s fast growing counties, where some people waited for three hours to vote Tuesday morning. The wait was just as long at John Adams Elementary School in West Alexandria, where the line stretched around a long suburban block at 5 a.m.

In the rec center parking lot, I met Tefera Bezabeh, 38, who moved here from Ethiopia six years ago. He had just cast his vote, for Barack Obama, and was in a hurry to leave so he could start giving free rides to elderly and disabled voters. This is Bezabeh’s first time voting, ever. “In Ethiopia we don’t have such kind of democracy, ” he said. “It’s exciting, you know.” Bezabeh knows exactly why he supports Obama: healthcare. Like most cabdrivers, Bezabeh is a freelancer and doesn’t receive health or retirement benefits from his employer. He takes home about $9,000 a year, and there isn’t enough left over for healthcare. Medicare covers his two children, ages 5 and one and a half, but he and his wife just pray they don’t get sick. “God protect us,” he said. “It’s very scary.”

As many observers have noted, there has been an “enthusiasm gap” between the campaigns. Obama has an army on the ground in swing states. McCain is understaffed. Obama may have been the first to use an online phone bank manned by volunteers at home, but McCain, with less money and more trouble recruiting volunteers, actually needs the gadget to work. Especially in places like Virginia, the once-red state where I live, whose 13 electoral votes could be critical to Tuesday’s outcome, and where Obama is leading McCain.

I am not a McCain supporter. I am a freelance journalist. But in the next to last week of the campaign I took the McCain campaign up on its challenge to “reach out to voters.” I called 100 allegedly “persuadable” voters from my home phone, and made a good-faith effort to follow the rules they provided. I stuck to the script, hewing to the words on my screen at all times, no matter what happened. I did not try to impersonate a true believer; neither was I a saboteur.

With the opening of voting just hours away, many Republicans claim, and Democrats worry, that this election season the “undecided” percentage in various polls hides a wealth of McCain support. What I learned was that cold calling strangers is a frustrating business, and that “undecided” does not necessarily mean what Republicans or Democrats think it does.

On a Saturday afternoon in October, I go to www.johnmccain.com. I fill in my e-mail address and ZIP code — no name or address required — thus gaining access to the Campaign Action Center, where I can earn points for recruiting friends, making calls or giving money. I click “Make Phone Calls.” The instructions are simple: I have to use a home phone, and I can’t make long-distance calls if my phone company will charge me extra. I can choose the state where I want to call, but I can’t call before 10 a.m. or after 10 p.m.

The names and numbers on my computer screen come from the Voter Vault, the Republican National Committee’s gigantic database of information on 150 million or so voters, and the brainchild of one Karl Rove. Much of the information comes from public records and data collections that can be purchased in bulk, plus any other tidbits netted through the party’s own surveys. The mix includes voter registration and property records, magazine subscriptions, vehicle registrations, and membership lists for civic and professional organizations. Whatever metric is used to sort and slice all the facts and figures is a closely held secret. I am able, however, to confirm with a GOP source that the list of numbers I’m using is for likely McCain voters and undecideds — “persuadable” voters.

The Web site feeds me numbers from Ohio and Virginia. The numbers are concentrated in three areas of Virginia, all of them heavily populated by transplants from the rest of the country: the Northern Virginia suburbs, affluent, educated and trending blue; liberal Charlottesville and environs, home of the University of Virginia; and Hampton Roads, the tangle of cities and military bases in the state’s southeast corner. It is a vote-rich swing district.

I decide I should practice my script a few times before I start.

“Hello, my name is Angela and I am a volunteer calling on behalf of the McCain-Palin campaign …”

The money paragraph goes like this:

“John McCain is the candidate with the experience I trust to bring real change to Washington. He and Sarah Palin have a plan to get our economy back on track by lowering taxes, freezing government spending, and creating new jobs for America. They’ll reform Washington and Wall Street, fix our economy and break our dependence on foreign oil, which will cut prices at the pump, help keep our families safe and move our economy forward.”

The speech is clunky and dry, the sort of summation you’d expect from a high school debater. But I’m glad no one’s asking me to improvise. Actually, the Web site offers no instruction at all other than reading the script; no advice on how to deal with sass, or how to keep people on the phone. I just have to make sure I ask three questions, select the answers from a list of options, and record the outcome of my call using another list of options.

My hands tremble as I dial the first number. A moment passes before I wince from the familiar screech of a disconnected line “ooo wee ooo.”

And that’s the first trend I discover. Not just that this particular land line is dead, but that land lines in general are dead. In my first half-hour, I make 20 calls and speak to two live people. Mostly, I leave messages. Over a period of several days I make a total of 100 calls for McCain. I reach eight disconnected numbers, 12 wrong numbers (including three fax machines) and 12 unanswered lines. I get a busy signal just three times. I leave 35 messages and reach one line that will not accept incoming calls and can only be used for outgoing calls. I speak with just 26 people. Fifteen of them hang up on me within the first 30 seconds and six others last a little longer but still beg off before I can finish my spiel.

Regardless of your politics, a call from me is an intrusion. We’ve become accustomed to filtering all incoming communication. The plastic trinket in the kitchen is a reminder of the days when you couldn’t press “ignore.” And it’s really, really annoying.

Most of the people you really want to hear from have your cellphone number. Twenty million American households now rely solely on cellphones, which have outnumbered land lines since 2005. And these cellphone-only voters, the folks who are missing from my call list of undecideds, may skew Democratic. Some pollsters, like Paul Maslin in this article for Salon a few months back, have suggested that the cellphone-only voters who are missing from polls are more likely to be young and minority and therefore more likely to support Obama. In Virginia, they might be among the new residents who have helped turn a red state purple in recent years.

I also discover, within my first few calls, that if I do get a live person on the other end of the call, I can’t guarantee that person will understand what I’m saying. At least three times in my 100 calls I get either children or immigrants. My instructions don’t say what to do when a kid answers. They also don’t say what to do when you frighten and confuse an old Russian lady.

When the phone picks up I hear the crackling lilt of an elderly immigrant woman. The last name on the screen, for a home in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, is Russian. I plow ahead, sticking zealously to my script. I get to “reform Washington” when the woman finally interrupts. “Washington?” she asks, clearly alarmed. “Excuse me. Excuse me. I no understand. My son come home two hours. What is problem?”

“No problem,” I say. “No problem.” I try to sound friendly and offer lighthearted reassurances of “no problem.” Then I hang up the phone. She will now wait two hours for her son to show up so he can try to explain to her what happened. I feel like a jerk.

But the most important thing I take away from this whole exercise is how squishy this whole “undecided” concept turns out to be.

On my list of persuadable voters there are plenty of folks who’ve been persuaded that they don’t like John McCain.

Some people laugh when they hear his name. A guy in Virginia Beach thinks it’s funny McCain would have the gall to call him. “Oh wow,” he says. “Hee, hee. You are so wrong. OK. Thank you. Bye.” (Listen to this call here.)

Very few voters are outright rude. A man in Charlottesville, which voted 72 percent for Kerry in 2004, stops me in the middle of my introductory sentence. “Before you go on,” he says, speaking slowly and with great self-importance, “I would never vote for John McCain or Sarah Palin. We are Democrats and I can’t stand both of them.” (Listen to this call here.)

Sometimes I do get real, live Republicans on the line. But they’re not more likely to stay and chat. A woman in Cape Charles dispatches me with, “Honey, you already got our vote.” Same thing, without the “honey,” from a woman in Alexandria.

I ask a creaky-voiced man in Virginia Beach if we can count on his vote. He grunts something that sounds like “why.”

“‘Scuse me?” I ask.

“I say, ‘Right,’” he repeats, halfway to Foghorn Leghorn. “I’m'a vote for him.”

As the script instructs, I check McCain on my computer screen, and then I ask him how he’d rate his support.

“Strong!”

Invigorated by his gruff but positive attitude, I start to ask the third and final question: “Which of the following issues will be the key issues you will be considering when you vote this November?” Before I begin the list, he interjects, “All of ‘em!” I tell him he has to choose one and start reading my list. He stops me at “Economy and the Federal Budget,” before I can get to “Gas Prices, National Security, Healthcare or Other.” I thank him for his time, he hustles off the phone. (Listen to this call here.)

Another Virginia Beach voter is equally pro-McCain and anti-waiting for me to interview him. When I start to ask about his key issues, he interjects his two-word rationale for supporting McCain. “He’s conservative!”

But I also get a number of people who seem too polite to tell me what they really think, even though what they really think is quite obvious. The first “undecided” voter I reach is not undecided.

At a number in Virginia, a woman answers. Her first and last name appear at the top of the screen, but the directions don’t say whether I should make sure I have the right person, so I plunge into my speech.

The woman doesn’t indulge me with a response. As I speak into silence, I wonder if she has already hung up. To myself, I sound especially nervous, lispy and young. Finally, I arrive at my first question.

“Can John McCain and Sarah Palin count on your vote this November?”

“Uh. We’re not positive yet,” she says. “Usually we tend to vote Democratic … we’re not entirely …” She trails off and it’s hard to make out her words. It’s a strategy I will come to recognize, as voters slur their answers in the hopes that mumbling will disguise their annoyance.

But in this moment, I have a prize: my first undecided voter. On my computer screen, I click “Undecided” from the three choices on my pull-down menu, then realize the selection makes the next question hard to answer.

“Would you say that your support for your choice is strong, weak or average?”

To my surprise, she has a quick response.

“Uh … probably strong,” she says.

Yeah, right you’re undecided.

She must have heard my thoughts, because she laughs and then confides, “We’re probably not a good household for McCain.” Then she cuts me off. “I’ve gotta run, OK?” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Even the one person I reach who seems genuinely interested in conversation doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. She answers the phone in Middletown, Ohio. When I introduce myself as a McCain volunteer, she offers her condolences.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “This is what you’re doing on a Monday night?”

Yep. I stifle a giggle and start reading, but she quickly interrupts. She says McCain wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, “and I have an issue with that.” He also opposes stem cell research, she says, “and I have an issue with that.”

I feel like I know this woman. She wears clogs, listens to NPR; she’s been recycling since the ’70s. I imagine her sitting over tea in her funky kitchen when I call. Perhaps she’s just joking when she tells me, “Yes, I’m still an undecided at this point.” I don’t believe it for a second, but she defends her status. “I know what my pros are and I know what my cons are on each one,” she says. I don’t ask what she likes about McCain. Chitchat is not in the script.

I ask how she would rate her support. For, um, “undecided.”

“Average.”

By the end of my experiment, I am grateful to those folks who are simply polite enough to listen, and who think of gracious ways to end our mutual discomfort.

When I ask a woman in Crozet, outside Charlottesville, if I can count on her vote, she says, “‘Fraid not.” The same question gets, “I’ll think about it, thank you,” from a man in Virginia Beach. The most inspired response is the inscrutable, “We are voting, thank you,” from a woman in Ohio.

And I know that these allegedly persuadable voters, a hot commodity this November, are trying to be nice to me even though I’m probably not the first person to jangle that hard plastic antique on their kitchen wall. The last of my 100 calls that actually reaches a live person is answered by a man in Charlottesville. He cuts me off before I can say my name. “Is this about the McCain thing again?” he asks. “‘Cause we’re not interested. OK?” (Listen to this call here.)

This fall, Hayes filed two lawsuits in Multnomah County Circuit Court. One seeks to determine whether a child was born, and if so, whether it’s his. If it is, he is asking the court to declare him the legal father; Hayes has said he is willing to negotiate the terms of custody. His malpractice suit asks for $2 million from Oregon Health and Science University, which houses the fertility clinic, for worry and emotional distress. Hayes and his fiancie agreed to talk on the condition that their real names not be used. The second couple, referred to in court papers as Jane Doe and John Roe, declined requests for interviews through their attorney.

In past cases, say legal experts, most sperm donors who have sued for custody have lost their cases. That’s because they signed away rights to custody when they made their donations. But this is far from a typical case. It raises the issue of what constitutes paternity in the cases of botched treatments, which may happen rarely — and be discovered even less frequently — but have happened in the past and are bound to happen again. Hayes was at the fertility clinic that day not to offer sperm to another couple as an anonymous donor, but to have his sperm delivered — explicitly and only — into his girlfriend’s body. Yet he has legally become an anonymous donor against his will. In the case of a screw-up like this one, who gets to be the father of the baby?

Hayes’ lawsuits comes amid a growing, yet unformed debate over how to regulate the fertility industry, which accounts for about 50,000 births through artificial insemination alone each year in the United States. Right now, federal scrutiny of the field is limited to regulation from the Food and Drug Administration over the handling of donated tissue, and the collection of clinic success-rate data by the Centers for Disease Control. Fertility industry associations lobby to maintain self-regulation in a field of medicine that may be changing too fast for the law to keep up with it.

The Oregon suits are the most recent example to reemphasize America’s difficulty with talking about reproductive issues, whether the conversation is about abortion, cloning, fertility treatment or stem-cell research. Most Americans hew to one clearly defined argument, but as the Oregon case reveals, people experience these matters in less stark terms. Confronted with real-life dilemmas, personal and political philosophies devolve into complex outlooks that often appear contradictory: a pro-choice woman may consider the disposal of frozen embryos immoral; a woman who chose to have an abortion in her youth may mourn a miscarriage; or, as in this instance, a devout Catholic couple may rebel against their church to seek fertility treatment.

Estimates of fertility treatment malpractice are vague at best. Hayes’ attorney points out that there’s no way to measure the frequency of fertility mix-ups because usually there’s no reason for suspicion. Cases involving different races are the most commonly exposed, with predictably complicated results. In 1998, a white Staten Island couple, inseminated with the wrong embryo, gave birth to two boys, one white and one black. They gave up custody of the black boy but fought to keep visitation rights, which a judge terminated in 2000. In 2004, a black nurse from Connecticut filed suit against a fertility clinic for inseminating her with sperm from a white man. Her fianci, also black, left her when she decided to carry the baby to term. Each of these cases point to the complex and deeply personal choices people make when they learn the child they have isn’t the one they planned to have.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Both couples — Hayes and his fiancie and Roe and his wife — had appointments scheduled at OHSU’s fertility clinic on an overcast Saturday morning in September 2005. While they came for the same reason — a low sperm count — in many ways, the partners were very different. Doe and Roe were married; Hayes and his fiancie were not. Roe had to concede to using a donor’s sperm; Hayes was able to use his own. Doe and Roe, who came from a county an hour away, were devout conservative Catholics; Hayes and his fiancie, who lived in the city, were pro-choice liberals and didn’t belong to a church.

Hayes went to the clinic on his own early in the morning, dropping off a sample he had prepared at home so a tech could take it to be washed, a process that separates the sperm from the rest of the semen. Around the same time, Roe and Doe waited in a room with a bed with stirrups. Desperate after seven years of trying, they had decided to try insemination using sperm from an anonymous donor. Their choice — which would set them back $815 — violated a 20-year-old ruling from the Catholic Church forbidding the use of assisted reproductive technology.

Before the procedure began, court records show, the couple and their doctor signed a “sperm wash” form, indicating a transfer of fresh sperm from a man to his female partner. In fact, the form belonged to Hayes and his fiancie. Doe was inseminated with Hayes’ sperm, and drove home with her husband.

Later that morning, according to Hayes, he and his fiancie returned to the clinic, prepared to undergo their third cycle of intrauterine insemination. A nurse came in and informed them that their sample had been dropped and spilled. Hayes says he later learned that was untrue. The sperm had not been spilled but had been inserted into Doe’s body. But at the time, Hayes and his fiancée just looked at each other, knowing they’d have to suffer through another month of testing and hormones before they could try again.

That night, Doe and Roe got a call asking them to return to the fertility clinic. When they came back the next day, the woman registered positive on a pregnancy test. In a detailed affidavit, the couple claims a doctor forced Doe to take a morning-after pill (it’s unclear whether she took a second dose), and offered the fiercely religious Catholic a free abortion if she became pregnant and two free fertility sessions if she didn’t. It’s still unknown if she had the abortion; verification that a child was born is part of what Hayes is suing to learn.

Kathleen McFall, senior communication coordinator for Oregon Health and Science University, would not comment on either couple’s visits to the clinic. “This is a sensitive and ethically complex situation,” she says. “Like all healthcare providers, OHSU is prohibited from talking about any patient by a federal law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.”

Today, Hayes and his attorney believe it is unlikely that the couple aborted the fetus. In court papers, Doe and Roe repeatedly emphasize their devotion to their conservative Catholicism. It’s clear that their decision to visit OHSU came as a last resort — a choice they wouldn’t dare reveal to their family or the church. Roe testified that “the only individuals on the planet with whom he has discussed his infertility problems are his wife, his doctors at OHSU, employees of OHSU  and his attorney.” He said he hadn’t told anyone else in his family about his infertility, or the fact that he and his wife had sought treatment. Revelations of that information, he said, would cause “him and his family irreparable harm.”

More than two months passed before Hayes and his fiancie learned about the mix-up. On Nov. 22, Hayes received a letter by certified mail, asking him to visit the hospital alone. Barbara Glidewell, OHSU’s ethicist and patient advocate, met him in the lobby. She led the way to a conference room where the hospital’s chief medical officer, Roy Magnusson, explained that Hayes’ sperm had been used to inseminate another woman. He told Hayes she wasn’t pregnant.

Late that night, his fiancie called on the way home from a class. “So how’d it go?” she asked. He promised to explain when she got home. “He was all flipped out,” she says. “I’ve never seen him so upset. Never seen him crying like a baby. I tried to calm him by saying at least she’s not pregnant.”

The next day, at a second meeting with Glidewell and Magnusson, the story changed. The woman was pregnant.

“It was a moment I’ll never forget,” Swift says. “I thought he [Hayes] was going to kill that doctor. He slammed his fist down into the table, and he’s a big guy.” They both stood up, started yelling. Swift says she got in the doctor’s face, told him he’d be hearing from their attorney, and left with her fianci. The hospital later offered them $25,000, she says, to let the issue lie. The couple didn’t want the money, but they struggled with what to do for several months. Should they go to a lawyer? The media? Meanwhile, the state board of medical examiners opened an investigation into the case. As with most medical licensing boards, the investigation will not be made public unless and until discipline is imposed.

By the time Hayes lodged his complaints in Multnomah County court, his maybe-child, referred to as Baby Doe in court papers, would have been 3 months old. His legal claim begins with the assumption that genetics equals a sort of quasi-property claim, that depositing sperm in a cup holds at least as much sway in determining parenthood as having sexual intercourse with the baby’s mother. “There could be a kid in the world that is half mine or part mine,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t even know how to describe this. I’ll always be looking at every child I pass, checking its age, features and wondering.”

Aside from his supposed-baby’s filial rights, Hayes raises a raft of practical what-ifs. What if the child wants to know his biological father? What if he needs to know about genetic disease risks? What if he sees a familiar face in the grocery store? “It’s so layered. It’s unbelievable,” his fiancie says. “There could be a million different stories.”

Although Hayes has sought to protect his own privacy, his paternity suit ultimately aims to undermine another couple’s claim to a very similar desire for anonymity. Doe and Roe argue that their privacy rights trump biology. “That is it. There is nothing further to decide,” writes their lawyer in a rather venomous brief. “Any child born as a result of the alleged artificial insemination would be the son or daughter of John Roe and Jane Doe as a matter of law.” And indeed, state and federal laws most likely side with Roe and Doe. Under Oregon artificial insemination law, and similar laws in many other states, a child born in wedlock belongs to the man married to the woman who gave birth. The law ensures that a man married to an artificially inseminated woman is the father. There is no space on a birth certificate form for genetic fathers.

Hayes’ paternity suit is based on the same idea that lies behind bans against anonymous donation — which exist in Australia and the United Kingdom — the idea that children ought to know the identities of their genetic parents. But if the U.S. had a similar law requiring children to know their genetic parents, Doe and Roe might not have felt free to make the reproductive choice they wanted to make.

“We have to be extremely cautious about calling for government regulation on the basis of other people’s choices,” cautions Alta Charo, a bioethicist from the University of Wisconsin Law School. “The worry is that we’re going to get in the business of letting the government say what kinds of choices are morally sufficient.”

As much as this story is about whether a donor has the right to know if he has a child — and can parent that child — it is also about the opposite right: whether hopeful parents have the right to remain anonymous. In this case, one couple needed the assurance of that right to make their preferred reproductive choice.

The industry itself has latched onto suggestions that more rules signal an erosion of reproductive choice. “Some religious conservatives would like to have the government decide who has a child and why,” says Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Anyway, he says, there’s no need for more rules: “There’s a ton of regulation!” Actually, there is about as much regulation of the fertility business as there is of the rest of medicine. Doctors in all fields face two main sources of oversight: the state licensing boards that can sanction doctors for violating ethics rules, and malpractice lawsuits, which, theoretically, keep doctors in line with the threat of monetary damages.

Should the fertility industry be subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than other medical fields? Simply by virtue of creating new life, the field sets itself apart; using medicine to solve one problem, infertility treatment invariably creates new, non-medical problems, such as debates over parental rights.

Leslie Bender, a law professor at Syracuse University, has explored the statutory options for hemming in fertility treatment. She says beefed-up rules about levels of scrutiny in clinics might have prevented this case from occurring; she also recommends forming legal guidelines for how to settle disputes in specific cases of genetic mix-ups. “There are circumstances in which the government has the right to regulate the reporting of mistakes, like this case,” Bender says. Consider, for example, the interests of a child who, under the law, may never even know he or she was conceived in a clinic. “There’s the potential for such ripples of damage. Look at all the people who are messed up in this. I don’t think that’s an interference with reproductive choice.”

While Hayes and Swift have said their situation bolsters the argument for ratcheting up the rules, another solution may be something less tangible: a reordering of how we view the family. With or without stricter enforcement and better practices, mix-ups will continue to happen, donors will change their minds, children will demand to know their parents. In that view, many ethicists, including Charo, believe it’s time to stop thinking about families as simple equations of two parents plus X children — especially if we , as a society, want to take advantage of the solutions offered by the fertility industry.

“People should know about all the adults involved in their conception,” Charo says. “We need to recognize multi-parent situations. It’s messy, but from my perspective, it’s just legal fiction to write rules that erase people from personal histories.” Charo is hopeful that the conflict will work itself out as the industry adjusts and family law adapts. She seems less optimistic about the fate of Oregon’s Baby Doe. “This is a case,” she says, “that just doesn’t have a happy resolution.”

Hayes and Swift have enrolled in a new fertility clinic and are still trying — so far unsuccessfully — to get pregnant. And although Hayes is frustrated with his legal opponents for refusing to cooperate with the paternity test, he believes the couple is basically in the same position as he is — thrown into an impossible situation by human error; a mistake that surely will occur again.