Paternity Test while Pregnant

Getting a Paternity Test while Pregnant.

Why would a paternity test while pregnant ever be needed? Well, with changing moral standards and greater openness and need-to-know young people today may find themselves facing issues which would not have been relevant in their grandparents time. Prince Charles of England was faced with just such a dilemma with all sorts of insinuations as to the parentage of his children, which he dealt with very maturely by simply accepting all children of the marriage as his. However this approach does not suit the needs of everyone in such a predicament and also does not satisfy the needs of the actual father, who might be very concerned to determine whether the child is his.

It might seem safer to delay DNA testing until after the child is born, and many choose this option: However there may be pressing personal, legal or other reasons why testing should be performed earlier. One might imagine that in the case of rape the mother might prefer to abort the fetus and so would need to test early enough to allow for this option to be exercised. There may be many other reasons as well which would make a paternity test while pregnant necessary. Whatever the reasons, a requirement for prenatal paternity testing does sometimes arise.

One of the concerns with prenatal paternity testing in the past was that it required some sort of invasive procedure such as amniocentesis which posed some level of risk to an innocent child. For this reason many who might otherwise have considered such a test might have been deterred. This option to obtain a blood sample for DNA testing by invasive testing of the fetus or placenta is still available, but there is a recent innovation in the field which has made prenatal DNA testing virtually risk-free and which allays the concerns parents might have had about the potential dangers.

It has been known that the child's blood is also present in the mothers bloodstream and recent advances have made it possible to obtain a DNA sample for the fetus from the mothers blood. So a potentially harmful procedure has now been replaced by simple blood tests drawn from the mother and the potential father which allow the paternity testing to be done without compromising the health of the child. The actual testing takes only a few days from when the sample is drawn. This sort of testing can be done anywhere from the 10th week of pregnancy onward.

It is therefore now possible for parents who need to determine the paternity of an unborn child for good and sufficient reasons to do so without offering any threat to an innocent life. This is one of the cases where scientific advances, which sometimes can seem so problematic, are clearly of benefit to society. Advances in DNA testing have enabled the righting of many wrongs. Now, not only do companies such as TESTING4DNA offer paternity testing while pregnant, but a very low-risk approach is available so that those concerned need not be deterred by considerations of safety.