QuestionQUESTION: i slept with my boyfrend several times early hours of saturday 19th may...the followin week i made the biggest mistake ever an had a one nite stand it was early hours on the 26th may both occasions were un protected as me n my boyfrend are startin to try for a baby..on the 28th may i went and got the emergency pill it was roughly 56 hours later..they told me at the clinic if i had not had a period in three weeks to do a pregnancy test but she thort i wud be fine as to where i was in my cycle...i told the nurse my last period was on the 5th may...i did a test on the 16th june and it was posotive...i went to a pregnancy advice service on the 25th june where i had a scan an she said the baby was very small an then she said i was 6weeks and two days pregnant? when i looked on a calendar it worked out from this that my last period was on the 11th may..and not on the 5thmay like id thort...please please could you tell me is there any way i can tell who is the father of my unborn child or am i doomed.. im desperate please help the best u can ?
ANSWER: Ultrasound dating does not calculate your last period; rather, it calculates the date of conception, then adds two weeks. This is a carryover from the days when the only way to date a pregnancy was using the last period, and we knew that the average woman had a 28-day cycle and gave birth 40 weeks after her last period. We know now that every woman's cycle is different, and every woman ovulates at a different point in her cycle, so that due dates calculated using LMP alone can be off by a month or more in some cases. However, the 40-week dating convention has not gone away, which means that your baby is 2 weeks old the very day he/she is conceived.
An ultrasound done at 6 weeks would, at most, be off by only a few days. The scan you had, which dated you at 6 weeks 2 days on June 25th, means that you conceived sometime around May 26th. Because sperm can survive up to 5 days in a fertile environment, and the ultrasound could be off by a day or two, you should consider the entire period from May 19 to June 2 to be candidates for conception.
It seems like your best course would be to pursue DNA testing to establish paternity, if you cannot do so based on appearance or blood typing alone.
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QUESTION: does that mean even though i took the emergency pill on the 28th that this baby could still be the persons i had the one nite stand with? and is there any way a paternity test can be done before the baby is born?
AnswerYes. Like all contraceptives, the emergency pill has a failure rate. In this case, the failure rate can be as high as 25%. As for prenatal paternity testing, this could be done if you have either amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS); however, be aware that both of these procedures carry a significant risk of miscarriage.
