How Does Prenatal Paternity Test Work?
Fetal DNA is present in the maternal blood during pregnancy. This is why paternity can be known by analyzing the cell-free fetal DNA from maternal blood. This prenatal paternity test is non-invasive and requires only a blood sample from the mother that is safe for both the mother as well as the unborn baby. Conversely, other paternity testing techniques are invasive and can come with serious risks such as leaking amniotic fluid and miscarriage.
Non-invasive prenatal paternity test analyzes more than five thousand genetic markers to know paternity with about 99.9% high accuracy. However, it is essential to know that this paternity testing is intended
for peace of mind purposes and is not legally enforceable in the court. For legal purposes, only legally admissible tests have to be performed after the child has been born to validate paternity.
If you are wondering how many weeks you should be pregnant to get an accurate prenatal paternity test result, the answer is seven weeks of gestational age. It can be as early as that , but optimal testing is usually taken from ten weeks of pregnancy, beginning from the first day of your last menstruation. The more weeks the gestational age is, the more accurate the calculation will be as more samples will be collected from maternal blood.
Finally, a non-invasive prenatal paternity test requires the same amount of blood samples (10 mL) both from the mother and the father when it comes to samples. The collection of samples must be done right so that the results would also be reliable. In cases when the baby is born through surrogacy, is conceived via IVF, or when there are two of them as twins, the testing is still possible to do , but samples needed may be different. You can talk to us if you are in this unique pregnancy situation.
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