A New York City woman is taking legal action after a botched paternity test influenced her decision to get an abortion when she was around five months pregnant because it led her to believe her fiancé wasn’t the father of her child.
The unnamed woman filed an amended complaint against Winn Health Labs in the Bronx and Ohio’s DNA Diagnostics Center earlier this month, People reported.
According to the 28-year-old administrative assistant, who first took legal action in March, the mistake led to the death of her daughter and the end of a long-term relationship.
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“My daughter would have been born on the 17th of April,” the mother told The New York Post this month. “I’m grieving. I just have a lot of emotions. These results were the reason why I decided to do what I did.”
The woman revealed that she is now in therapy and that her relationship with her fiancé ended last month. She told The Post she wants to see the labs in the suit held accountable for their mistake.
Winn Health Labs in the Bronx and the DNA Diagnostics Center did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
According to legal documents obtained by People, the woman and her fiancé, referred to as John Doe in the filing, broke up for three weeks last summer due to the stress and frustration over their struggle to conceive a child.
During the couple’s brief separation, the woman had a “sexual encounter” with another man, identified as Jack Doe in the suit. She eventually resumed her relationship with John Doe, discovering in August that she was pregnant.
After the results of an at-home test that she took with Jack Doe came back as “inconclusive,” according to the filing, the woman wanted to make sure that John Doe was the baby’s father. In October, Jack Doe and the woman contacted the DNA Diagnostics Center and paid for “in-person, Non-Invasive Prenatal Paternity testing.”
The DNA Diagnostics Center provided the address for Winn Health Labs, where she and Jack Doe had to give samples for the test. Upon arriving at Winn Health Labs, the woman noticed that one portion of the lab where she went to have blood drawn housed a beauty salon.
Confident that the test would prove John Doe was the baby’s father, the woman hosted a gender reveal party for her unborn daughter on Oct. 26. To her surprise, the test results she received five days later showed there was a 99.9% certainty that Jack Doe was the father, according to the filing.
In an attempt to “salvage” her relationship with John Doe, the woman had an abortion on Nov. 7. Months later, a representative with the DNA Diagnostics Center called to say that there had been an “IT error,” and there was actually a 0% chance that Jack Doe was the father.
The woman claims that she would never have had an abortion if the company had provided her with the correct results in the first place. In her complaint, the woman claims that she has suffered “irreparable loss and injury” and “mental distress” as a result of the incident.
“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,” the woman said in a statement to NBC New York last month.
“The reason I took action was because I believed in these results,” she added. “I thought this was something that was one hundred percent true. And it led me to the abortion.”
In a statement to NBC News, the DNA Diagnostics Center stressed that it had provided millions of customers with “reliable and accurate testing” for over 30 years.
“If any issue or concern is raised, we take immediate action, and DDC will perform a retest to validate the initial result,” the company stated. “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.”
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
