How to Know Who is the Father of Your Baby

Video Transcript

"Mother's baby, father's maybe, learned that in medical school. I'm Dr. Jill Hechtman here to tell you how to know who the baby's father is. Paternity is it important? well yes. Obviously for social reasons it's important to know who the baby's dad is. But occasionally there's been times when there's two partners within a ten day period of time and you're not really sure when conception occurred. That's when paternity testing becomes important. Let's start in the beginning. You can test in pregnancy or you can test outside of pregnancy, so before the baby's born or after. Before you can test as early as ten weeks with whats called ChorionicVillus sampling. And that's where we take a small catheter into the uterus and remove some placental cells. We can also do this with an amnio where they put the needle inside the belly and draw am amniotic fluid. This enables us to send fetal cells for testing to see who the dad is. After the baby's born if you don't want to incur the risks during pregnancy you can have test done on the baby itself. Like direct blood draw, buckle smear which is the cheek, you can also get hair, cut nails all those can give you samples of the baby's DNA and help determine who the father is. Remember you had two partners around the time of ovulation within ten days it's important. Sperm can live for about three to five days and no woman ever ovulates the same time every month. So that's why coming to find out who the father really is can be difficult but important. I'm Dr. Jill answering for you how to know who the father of the baby is. Good Luck."