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Last May, when she was 10 weeks pregnant, Eunice Lee took a blood test to screen for diseases in her baby.

The test, called MaterniT21 PLUS, promised clear answers about the sex of her fetus as well an array of disorders, including Down syndrome. At 40 years old, Lee knew her baby had an elevated risk of genetic disease, and so she wanted this information as soon as possible.

Two weeks later Lee went to her obstetrician’s office to get the results. But instead of hearing about her baby’s genome, she got a shock about her own health.

“My OB walked into my room and was holding the sheet of paper in her hand,” Lee, an anesthesiologist in Santa Barbara, California, told BuzzFeed News. The doctor had just hung up the phone with Sequenom Laboratories, the San Diego company that performs the test.

“The director of the laboratory called my obstetrician and told her I needed to be worked up for cancer,” Lee said, “which was just alarming, to her and also to myself, because I had no...