Pregnant Clients
Today pregnant women have a number of choices concerning genetic
testing and parentage testing of their offspring.
Parentage testing can be performed before the birth of the child in
conjunction with other medical or genetic screening, such as Chorionic
Villas Sampling or Amniocentesis.
- Chorionic Villas Sampling (CVS) is a procedure that enables the accurate diagnosis of certain genetic disorders between the 6th and 10th weeks of pregnancy. In CVS, a small piece of the placenta is removed through the cervix or through the abdomen. The placenta contains the same genes as the embryo and can be tested for genetic disorders or parentage.
- Amniocentesis can
detect several serious genetic abnormalities. Amniocentesis is
a procedure that removes some of the amniotic fluid that surrounds
the fetus. In amniocentesis, a needle is inserted through the
abdomen and uterine wall into the amniotic sac and amniotic fluid
containing some embryo cells are removed. The cells can be cultured
and tested for genetic abnormalities and paternity.
It should be noted that these procedures are performed by an obstetrician or
doctor and have risks involved with them. Paternity testing can be done in
conjunction with other procedures. We do not recommend that these procedures
be performed solely for the determination of parentage.
Parentage testing can be performed from umbilical cord blood collected at
birth.
- In this procedure
the doctor collects the child’s blood at birth from the umbilical
cord. If a client wants this procedure to be performed, we will
send a collection kit to the hospital before birth of the child.
The mother and alleged father samples can be collected before
or after the birth of the child.
Parentage testing can be performed anytime after the birth of the child
- A buccal swab may
be collected from a child any time after birth.
