An anonymous New York woman is suing a lab and DNA testing business after receiving false paternity test results, which she claims led her to have an abortion that she now regrets.
The New York Post reported that the woman became pregnant during a temporary break-up with her fiancé, which lasted for three weeks. The two had been struggling to get pregnant and the woman said the stress of their infertility led to the split.
During that time, she slept with someone else, and after she and her fiancé reunited, she found out she was pregnant. Initially, she thought her fiancé had to be the father. “I was tracking my ovulation,” she said. But she wanted to be sure – and so she requested a paternity test from Winn Health Labs in the Bronx and Ohio-based DNA Diagnostics Center.
She spent $1,000 for the first two tests at the DNA Diagnostics Center, the results of which were inconclusive. So she then turned to Winn Health Labs. Still confident that her fiancé was the father, she threw a gender reveal party, during which she found out her baby was a girl. Afterward, the lab results came in and revealed that her fiancé was not the baby’s father.
“He just cried,” she said. “He asked, ‘Why would you go through a gender reveal?’ I told him, ‘Because I was positive it was yours.’”
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By that point, the woman was 20 weeks pregnant and chose to move forward with an abortion.
The most common abortion procedure at that point in pregnancy is a dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion; this procedure typically takes several days to complete, which was the case for this woman. The procedure begins with the abortionist inserting laminaria into the woman’s cervix; these seaweed sticks will absorb moisture and begin dilating her cervix. After one to two days, the mother will return to the abortion facility, where the abortionist will tear the baby’s arms and legs from his or her body using a Sopher clamp, before crushing the child’s skull.
The woman said she changed her mind halfway through the two-day abortion process, but the abortion facility told her it was too late, and her baby couldn’t be saved. “I wish I could reverse this,” she said.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, the lab called and told her they had made an error: her fiancé was the father of her child. That ended up being the final nail in the coffin of their relationship, and the two broke it off for good. “When you know people are relying immediately on paternity tests to make life decisions, why did it take four months for them to call? It just doesn’t make sense,” her lawyer, Craig Phemister, said.
There is no denying the tragedy that took place; however, the bigger question is not how a lab gave the wrong results, but how an innocent child could be stripped of her right to life and brutally killed because she had the “wrong” father.
Her inherent worth and right to life were not dependent on who her father was — yet that is exactly how her life was perceived, at least to begin with. The anonymous mother said she still grapples with what she has lost.
“My daughter would have been born on the 17th” of April, she told The Post, crying. “I’m grieving.”
