She had an abortion after a botched paternity test. Now she’s suing the DNA company.

Who was the father: Her fiancé, or the man with whom she had a brief fling?

In Oct. 2024, that was the urgent question for a New York City woman. 

She thought she got her answer when a paternity test showed there was a 99.9% probability her unborn baby was the product of that short-lived fling. The results, she says, prompted her to have an abortion in order to preserve her relationship with her fiancé. 

“I decided to save my marriage,” she said. “I was already five months pregnant. I decided to terminate the pregnancy.”

Four months later, the woman, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, says she got a startling message from DNA Diagnostics Center, the testing company, which was now seeking to amend its original paternity results. 

The company had just issued a new, corrected report which showed there was now a 0% chance the other man from that fling was the father. 

Speaking exclusively to the NBC New York I-Team, the woman said she would never have ended her pregnancy if the genetics company had gotten the results correct the first time. She’s now suing DNA Diagnostics Center, claiming the company’s negligence left her relationship in ruins.

“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.”

DNA Diagnostics Center, declined to answer questions about the paternity test mix-up. Instead, the company sent the I-Team a statement emphasizing its genetics testing methods are sound.

“Over the past 30 years, DDC has provided reliable and accurate testing to millions of customers,” the statement read. “If any issue or concern is raised, we take immediate action, and DDC will perform a retest to validate the initial result. 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.”

The company also declined to explain how it came to review the woman’s initial genetic results months after they were issued — or whether that review included other paternity tests which might also have suffered problems.

The woman told the I-Team she was uncomfortable about the paternity test almost from the beginning, because she says DNA Diagnostics directed her to have blood drawn at a Bronx address which appears to also house a beauty salon that offers cosmetic procedures like facials, body contouring, eyelash, and hair/scalp treatments. 

“If you’re going in to ask for a paternity test, you don’t want to go do that in front of people who are getting their hair done,” said Craig Phemister, the woman’s attorney. 

The third-party Bronx company which collected the woman’s genetic sample declined comment.

According to the DNA Diagnostics website, the Ohio company is “the World’s Leading Relationship DNA Testing Center,” having conducted more than 20 million DNA tests since 1995.

Phemister said he believes the sheer number of genetic tests completed by the company suggests there could be more errors.

“The field this company is in is a field that cannot have mistakes like this,” he said. “I’m sure we’re going to find, and time will tell, there will be other people that come forward and learn that these same things have happened to them.”

This is not the first time DNA Diagnostics Center has been accused of making genetics testing errors which have enormous ripple effects for families and relationships. 

In 2018, Joel Santiago, a parent from Connecticut, sued the firm after one of its paternity tests concluded he was not the biological father of his first-born child. 

About 18 months later, Santiago says he got amended results from DNA Diagnostics Center showing the opposite conclusion — that he actually was her dad. But by that time, he said his relationship with the child’s biological mother had ended, effectively depriving him of participating in the first two years of his daughter’s childhood.

“It completely changed the trajectory of my life,” Santiago said. “Precious moments like naming my child, witnessing her birth, watching her first steps, were all erased.”

Joel Santiago’s lawsuit against DNA Diagnostics ended with a jury awarding him $2.5 million in damages.

Steven Errante, the attorney who won that award, said — because the company admitted liability for the laboratory error — the trial mostly focused on damages. Thus, he said he was limited in his ability to get to the bottom of exactly how the DNA testing firm discovered there was an issue with Joel’s original results. 

“It was always mystifying to us because, in Joel’s case, it was almost eighteen months later that they called him to say they’ve made a mistake,” Errante said. “Why would you be looking at these results eighteen months later? We never really got an answer.”

DNA Diagnostics declined to answer questions about Joel Santiago’s paternity test or how the decision was made to issue corrected results.

Paternity tests make up only part of the company’s business. According to the DNA Diagnostics Center website, the firm also provides DNA testing for government agencies, including genetic testing for law enforcement in criminal cases and immigration proceedings.

Phemister believes his client’s experience with mistaken paternity results raises questions about DNA Diagnostics facilities which may provide results in a whole host of civil and criminal contexts.

“The same DNA labs are doing testing that is relied on by the court systems,” Phemister said. “If they make errors and then not discover those errors for months or years later, that’s it. These people’s lives are devastated.”