Fact-checking the Prenatal Science in Bridget Jones’s Baby Laura June & Anna Silman | The Cut – September 14, 2016 In Bridget Jones’s Baby,
Bridget (Renée Zellweger) finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at the age
of 43 after having one-night stands with handsome dating guru Jack Quant
(Patrick Dempsey) and old flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) in quick
succession. Early on, Bridget visits her doctor (Emma Thompson) to find
out the paternity of the baby via amniocentesis, but chooses not to have
the procedure when she learns there’s a risk of miscarriage. This
means Bridget has to wait until the baby is born to find out who the
father is, thereby forcing both Jack and Mark to be active participants in
her pregnancy. Is this just a convenient narrative device to set up the
film’s love triangle, or is Bridget’s decision rooted in science? We
called up a doctor to find out. There
are basically two ways of doing paternity tests during pregnancy, says Dr.
Jacques Moritz, affiliate associate professor ob-gyn at Weill Cornell.
They are CVS (chorionic villus sampling) and amniocentesis. CVS is
considered an invasive procedure and can be done about ten weeks into the
pregnancy, making it the earliest available chance to determine paternity
of a fetus. It is done by removing cells from the placenta, and is usually
painless. Amniocentesis,
which figures so heavily into Bridget
Jones’s Baby, is a procedure in which a large needle is inserted
into the belly to remove a small amount of amniotic fluid. It is usually
performed between 14 and 16 weeks into the pregnancy, and is most commonly
used to test for chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. Both
procedures carry small risks of miscarriage – CVS results in miscarriage
about once in 100 times, while amniocentesis results in miscarriage about
once in 1,600 procedures, according to the most recent study. (Previous
estimates for pregnancy loss from amniocentesis were a lot higher.) One in
100, or even 1 in 1,600, when it’s your pregnancy, isn’t really very
low at all: It’s actually fairly high! And
those risks are very real, so these procedures are done only when
necessary. Dr. Moritz says that CVS and amniocentesis performed for
paternity is “always for legal issues” – like when there’s a court
order. So, yeah, Bridget probably wouldn’t get an amnio to find out
which hunk is the father of her baby.
|