In a new lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court District of Massachusetts, a family has sued their fertility specialist more than 40 years after they got pregnant, alleging it was his sperm that resulted in their pregnancy.
The issue was first discovered after the daughter of the Boston couple, Carolyn Depoian, purchased a DNA kit that told her the specialist, Dr. Merle Berger, was her biological father, the suit alleges.
Berger was accused of secretly using his own sperm to inseminate the woman’s mother, Sara Depoian, in 1980.
“This is an extreme violation,” Depoian said in a statement. “I am still struggling to process it. I trusted Dr. Berger fully. We thought he would act responsibly and ethically. I will never fully recover from his violation of me.”
In 1980, when they visited Berger’s clinic, Depoian was told by the former Harvard Medical School professor that the sperm used in the insemination would be from a medical resident who “resembled her husband” and that the person was someone “whom she did not know,” the complaint said.
However, the family is alleging that Berger lied to them, saying he “secretly inserted his own sperm into his patient.”
“He did so without her consent and against her wishes,” Depoian’s attorney, Adam Wolf, said in a news release.
Court documents explain that Carolyn used a DNA kit from Ancestry.com and 23andMe last year, leading to the discovery, as results showed she was related to Berger’s granddaughter and second cousin.
The complaint says she pieced it together after talking to “one of her newfound relatives.”
“To say I experienced shock when I figured this out would be an extreme understatement,” Carolyn said in the statement. “It feels like reality has shifted. I just want to say how proud I am of my mom for speaking out, and I’m honored to stand by her side.”
Berger has denied the allegations brought against him, according to a statement from his legal team shared with WCVB.
“Dr. Merle Berger was a pioneer in the medical fertility field who, in 50 years of practice, helped thousands of families fulfill their dreams of having a child,” according to the statement. “He is widely known for his sensitivity to the emotional anguish of the women who came to him for help conceiving. The allegations concern events from over 40 years ago, in the early days of artificial insemination. At a time before sperm banks and IVF, it was dramatically different from modern-day fertility treatment.”
He went on to say that the story has changed “repeatedly” since he was first contacted by the family’s attorney and that the claims have “no legal or factual merit and will be disproven in court.”