THE SUN DOCTOR

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I had sexual intercourse with this lady a month ago and now she says she’s pregnant. I doubt it is mine since we used protection and besides that, I found out that the pregnancy is four weeks and a few days old. How do I get DNA done before that child is born?K

DEAR K,

In the first place, it is possible for a pregnancy to occur even when you have used a barrier method/protection such as a condom. This may be due to contact with pre-ejaculate fluid if the condom was not used throughout the encounter. The other reasons for this would be rupture of the condom or spillage during withdrawal/removal. It is possible to do paternity DNA testing during pregnancy by isolating the baby’s DNA from the mother’s blood between 15 and 20 weeks of pregnancy.

If the result is inconclusive, it needs to be confirmed by using amniotic fluid or chorionic villus sampling, where a sample is taken from the tissues surrounding the growing fetus. These procedures are invasive and may trigger a miscarriage so it is best to wait for the baby to be born. For any of these tests, you need the consent of the mother and the possible father(s) and you may require legal consent, and the tests require a complex medical procedure.

In regards to the reported age of the pregnancy, medical practitioners count the age of a pregnancy from the day the last periods started, not from the day someone got pregnant. For example, if someone got pregnant four weeks ago and they had their periods two weeks before that, the pregnancy is said to be six weeks old. This counting system, however, is not exact, so you cannot determine paternity definitively based on that.