Trending:
- A New York City woman is suing a DNA testing center after she claims she was given incorrect paternity test results that led her to get an abortion
- The woman alleges that the false results caused her to incorrectly identify the father of her child, and she ended the pregnancy in an effort to “salvage her relationship” with her then-fiancé
- “These results were the reason why I decided to do what I did,” the woman, 28, told The New York Post
A New York City woman is taking legal action after she got an abortion because of alleged false paternity test results.
The anonymous woman, 28, filed an amended complaint against Winn Health Labs in the Bronx and Ohio’s DNA Diagnostics Center earlier this week, after she said she made the “excruciating decision” to get an abortion last year in an effort to “salvage her relationship” with her fiancée, after a paternity test allegedly said another man was likely her baby’s father.
In the lawsuit, the woman — who first took legal action in March — claimed an “IT error” led to the incorrect test results, and there was a “0.0%” chance that the other man was the father of her child. She said she discovered the error after getting the abortion.
“My daughter would have been born on the 17th,” the woman told The New York Post. “I’m grieving. I just have a lot of emotions. These results were the reason why I decided to do what I did.”
In a statement to the Post and NBC New York, a DNA Diagnostics Center spokesperson said that, over three decades, “DDC has provided reliable and accurate testing to millions of customers.”
“If any issue or concern is raised, we take immediate action, and DDC will perform a retest to validate the initial result,” the company representative added. “We have established industry-leading processes and best practices across our laboratory and company to ensure customers are rapidly notified of any issues and quality assurance steps are followed.”
Winn Health Labs and DNA Diagnostics Center did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on Saturday, April 12.
According to the documents obtained by PEOPLE, which were filed in New York on April 7, the woman was engaged to her partner, and they were trying to have a baby for “several months.” At one point, they separated for a period of time, in part due to their “inability to conceive,” the document states.
As the woman told the Post, she and her fiancé — identified as John Doe in the filing — broke up for a total of three weeks last summer. During that time, she had a “sexual encounter” with another man — identified as Jack Doe — before she and her then-fiancé got back together and tried again to start a family.
Around Aug. 11, the woman said she discovered she was pregnant, but an at-home DNA test she took later in the month with Jack Doe came back “inconclusive,” per the filing.
As a result, and in an effort to be “certain the baby was not Jack Doe’s baby,” the New York woman reached out to DDC around Oct. 19, paid for “in-person, Non-Invasive Prenatal Paternity testing” and took Jack Doe with her to Winn Health Labs, as she was “diligently searching for certainty,” according to the filing.
Two days later, the woman entered the location — of which a portion “was actually a hair salon,” she said, per the legal document — and had her blood drawn while Jack Doe did a buccal swab.
She and John Doe “continued working on their relationship” and had a “gender-reveal party” for the baby, a girl, on Oct. 26. Five days later, to her “utter surprise,” the woman discovered that the test “showed that Jack Doe, not her fiancé John Doe, was the father with 99.99% certainty,” according to the filing.
The news was a “devastating setback to her and John Doe’s relationship,” the documents state. They add the ordeal led to “a week of anxiety, stress, arguments, confrontations and conversations” with her partner and other family members, before the woman made the decision to end the pregnancy “in an attempt to salvage her relationship.”
The woman terminated her pregnancy on Nov. 7, before moving out of the apartment she shared with her fiancé, as they “struggled with the consequences of her decision,” despite trying “to get back to a healthy relationship.”
As the woman told NBC New York, she would not have ended her pregnancy had the results been correct the first time around.
“You took away the family I could have had. This was the person I was marrying. This is the person I wanted to build a family with,” she said. “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.”
Just over three months later, on Feb. 14, a DDC representative called the woman. When she and Jack Doe returned the call, they discovered “there had been ‘an IT error’ and that there was actually a 0.0% chance that Jack Doe was the father of her baby,” the filing alleges.
The document claims that the defendants “had a duty to properly collect specimens for testing, accurately label said specimens, properly ship and handle said specimens and ultimately provide accurate results for the DNA paternity testing for which the plaintiff paid,” as well as a responsibility to “timely and accurately verify testing results and employ quality control methods to prevent” such errors.
The woman and her fiancé ended their relationship last month, she told the Post.
Her lawyer, Craig Phemister, told the outlet that it “just doesn’t make sense,” adding, “When you know people are relying immediately on paternity tests to make life decisions, why did it take four months for them to call?”
Overall, the filing alleges that the defendants gave the woman, at five months pregnant, “inaccurate DNA paternity test results, knowing she would have very little time to make a decision on whether to keep her pregnancy or not,” before they “outrageously failed to inform” her of the error until months later.
The woman now claims she suffered “irreparable loss and injury,” as well as “mental distress,” “humiliation” and “economic loss,” per the legal document.
Read the full article here
