A woman is suing a paternity test laboratory after it mistakenly stated that her fiancé wasn’t the father of her unborn child. She only learned about the “technical error” after she had an abortion. “My daughter would have been born on the 17th [of April]… I’m grieving. I just have a lot of emotions. These results were the reason why I decided to do what I did.”
The anonymous woman, 28, from New York had been trying to get pregnant with her fiancé for several months until they broke up. After their split, she had a sexual relationship with another man.
When the woman found out she was pregnant, though she was “certain” the child was her fiancé’s, she had a paternity test to make sure. Despite this, she held a gender reveal party with her fiancé, and they got back together.
The test was undertaken by DNA Diagnostics Center, which informed her with “99.99% certainty” that her fiancé was not the father. “He just cried”, the woman said.
It was a “devastating setback” for their relationship, court documents state, and the woman had an abortion at around 20 weeks “in an attempt to salvage her relationship”. She said that during the abortion she changed her mind, but it was too late.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, the woman received a call from DNA Diagnostics telling her that the baby was her fiancé’s and that an “IT error” had resulted in the false report.
She is now suing the lab for giving her “inaccurate DNA paternity test results, knowing she would have very little time to make a decision on whether to keep her pregnancy or not…
“The reason I took action was because I believed in these results. I thought this was something that was one hundred percent true. And it led me to the abortion…
“How many other people did it happen to?”
After the abortion and finding out the true paternity, the couple ended the relationship conclusively, and the woman is now in therapy. “You took away the family I could have had”, her filings against the lab state. “This was the person I was marrying. This is the person I wanted to build a family with.”
A groundbreaking study published in 2023 found that abortion has a “significant negative impact” on mental health.
“There is a very large risk and likelihood of extended stays for psychiatric admissions following induced abortion”, the study’s authors concluded.
Compared to women whose first pregnancy outcome was a live birth, women who had abortions were 3.4x more likely to experience an increase in outpatient visits, 5.7x more likely to have an increase in inpatient admissions – as well as 19.6x more likely to have an increase in days spent in admission.
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