🧬 Fertility Doctors' Sperm: DNA Reveals Vintage Ethical Violations
Genetic testing reveals disturbing family trees for some early IVF babies
Note: This article references disturbing content related to sexual assault and physician misconduct.
A Boston reporter reached out to me about a “very bizarre medical malpractice allegation” - retired Harvard physician Dr. Merle Berger is facing a lawsuit for secretly impregnating a former patient with his own sperm.
I horrified her when I said, “That was not atypical early on when you didn't have sperm banks.”
While the practice was not commonplace, hundreds of cases of sperm donor fraud by physicians have been exposed in recent years.
Fresh Sperm Donations
In the early days of IVF, prior to sperm banking and the routine use of frozen sperm, donors were asked to provide fresh sperm. Frozen sperm wasn’t recommended for IVF until the late 1980s. The stakes were high to have fresh sperm available when the patient was ovulating. Usually, physicians found donors themselves, relying on donations from medical students and residents in their clinics.
Rather than obtain fresh sperm from anonymous donors, it’s clear now that some fertility doctors used their own sperm - without asking patients for permission.
The physicians providing incredibly personal insemination procedures were absolutely not anonymous to their patients.
Secrets Revealed by Genetic Testing
Parents and donor-conceived children were blissfully unaware of their fertility doctors’ ethical violations until they took home genetic tests.
Families hoping to find relatives and build a family tree have found branches they did not expect. For some people, this meant finding out their father was not an anonymous sperm donor, but - disturbingly - their mother’s doctor.
Combine a lack of donors on a particular day with a “doctor knows best” mentality, and I can see how some physicians felt justified using their own sperm. But genetic testing proves that some of these physicians did this ten, twenty, fifty, or more times, demonstrating particularly egregious patterns of abusing patients’ trust.
Vintage Physician Donor Fraud
We know of hundreds of similar cases - most from the early days of fertility care.
In 1992, Dr. Cecil Jacobson admitted to fathering as many as 75 children through artificial insemination between 1976 and 1988. He was convicted in 1992.
Colorado physician, Dr. Paul Brennan Jones, was the fraudulent sperm donor for at least 17 people born between 1976 and 1997. In 2022, a jury awarded $8.75 million to his victims.
Indiana Ob/Gyn Donald Cline was initially believed to have fathered 50 of his patients’ children. But by the time the Netflix documentary Our Father was released, that number had grown to at least 94 babies to unknowing patients.
The BBC documentary Seeds of Deceit tells the story of renowned Dutch fertility doctor, Jan Karbaat. At least 71 ‘Karbaat children’ have been identified. Not only did he secretly use his sperm on hundreds of women, but he also sexually assaulted many during the fertility treatment process.
One victim, Traci Portugal, started the site DonorDeceived.org to provide information and support to families who discover they experienced fertility donor fraud. The site includes an interactive map of known American doctor donor fraud cases.
“The Sperminator”
In a 1992 Saturday Night Live skit “My 75 Kids” (S17,E15), John Goodman played Dr. Cecil Jacobson in a sitcom-style show where Jacobson’s conviction is overturned and he is instead required to raise the 75 children. (Chris Farley plays one of the older kids, rattling off a series of sibling names.)
Comedy highlights how gross these stories are beyond the headlines. The scene opens in a living room flooded with similar-looking kids wearing wigs to match Goodman’s. When kids are teased at school for their dad being “The Sperminator,” the doctor confides that the girl making fun of them is secretly his daughter too, with a big wink. Goodman regales the kids with stories about which magazine he used when he produced the sperm that led to their existence: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, a Sears catalog, and once on accident - Newsweek.
He tells them, “You’re the best kids any fertility doctor could trick his patients into having!”
No one wants to imagine their physician masturbating, let alone secretly using the sperm to impregnate them.
Many victims have found out about these fertility violations after their children became adults. But the SNL skit gives us an insight into how messed up it would be to try to explain this sort of situation to your own kid.
Not Illegal, but Definitely Unethical
Doctors who secretly use their own sperm may be accused of a myriad of non-specific crimes like medical negligence, lack of informed consent, fraud, and battery. However, a physician using their own sperm is not in and of itself illegal in many states. In response to Donald Cline’s abuse of patients, Indiana became the first state to designate fertility fraud as a felony in 2019. In recent years, other states have followed suit. Colorado banned anonymous sperm and egg donation altogether.
Some patients and attorneys describe it as medical rape. There’s often little recourse for patients or their children.
Physicians who secretly impregnate unknowing and unwilling patients commit a horrible kind of ethical violation. Telling a patient you will use an anonymous donor, but actually using your own sperm is a breach of the patient-physician relationship with far-reaching consequences. Patients trust their fertility physicians to take care of them as they try to build a family - not to lie to them and abuse their position of power.
Complex Feelings for Patients and their Children
Patients face complex feelings about the news. They went to a fertility doctor to help make a baby, and they got that. They raised very wanted children. They were able to build families.
Just as in The Retrievals, having a live baby at the end of an infertility journey is not the only outcome that matters.
Years later, patients and their children are facing a shattering of their beliefs about their family history. Patients, sometimes many decades after the fact, are finding out that they were duped and assaulted by a trusted physician.
Are patients safe from these violations today?
There are many more safeguards in place today compared to the early days of fertility care. I think of physician donor fraud as an antiquated problem, but I may be wrong.
Just last week, former fertility doctor Christopher Herndon in Washington state surrendered his medical license amid accusations he impregnated a patient with his sperm back in 2009. What’s perhaps most surprising about this case is how recently this took place. The DTC genetic testing market really took off in 2007/2008. Herndon must have been living under a rock not to recognize the threat this testing would have to his secret sperm use.
If there are physicians engaging in these perverse violations, we may not know until these kids grow up and start testing their genes to find long-lost relatives.
Nowhere to Hide
I hope the widespread coverage and documentaries about these egregious cases serve as an extra layer of protection. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing means no physician should ever believe they could get away with this kind of violation. If anyone knows the power of genetic testing, it should be fertility doctors who routinely offer pre-implantation genetic testing on embryos.
Thankfully, these cases are rare.
Easily accessible, affordable genetic testing and the proliferation of databases for folks to find genetic relatives have allowed these egregious ethical violations by physicians to be exposed.
Infertility patients deserve honesty and integrity, not secret physician sperm.
