Sarah Depoian, a 73-year-old woman from Maine, has filed a lawsuit against former Harvard Medical School fertility clinic founder and reproductive biology professor Dr. Merle Berger after she discovered that her daughter, Carolyn Bester, was conceived using Berger's own sperm and not an anonymous sperm donor, as she was told.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday (December 13), stated that Depoian and her husband first went to Berger in 1979 to discuss intrauterine insemination. She also said Berger told her that the sperm would come from a donor "who resembled her husband, who did not know her, and whom she did not know," the Associated Press reported.
The insemination was successful, which resulted in the birth of Bester in 1981. Earlier this year, Bester conducted a home DNA test with Ancestry.com and 23andMe and discovered that Berger was her biological father, the lawsuit added.
A spokesperson for Harvard Medical School said Berger was academically affiliated with the medical school, but his primary place of employment was at various Harvard-affiliated hospitals, which the school does not own or operate.
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Plaintiff: Berger Committed 'Medical Rape'
Depoian's lawyer, Adam Wolf, told reporters that Berger clearly knew that what he was doing was wrong, which could be tantamount to "medical rape."
On the other hand, Ian Pinta, who represents Berger, described him as a pioneer in the medical fertility field with around 50 years of practice and helped thousands of families fulfill their dreams of having a child.
A spokesperson for Boston IVF Fertility Clinic, which Berger helped found, said the situation cited in the lawsuit occurred before Berger's employment at the clinic and before the company even existed. In a written statement, it said that fertility procedures in the late 1970s and early 1980s were "much different" than current ones today.
If convicted, Berger would be an addition to a list of medical professionals who were charged and sentenced for impregnating their patients with their own sperm.
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