A family has filed a lawsuit against a Las Vegas fertility clinic after a teen girl learned from an online DNA test that she is not biologically related to her parents.
For the last 18 years, the young woman's parents were under the impression that the father's sperm and a donor egg created the embryo implanted into her mother through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
However, according to KLAS's interview with the family's attorney, Robert Murdock, a DNA test the daughter submitted to Ancestry.com revealed that was not the case.
"My client had more tears than I've ever seen someone shed, because what he thought was his daughter -- isn't," Murdock said.
DNA results indicated that the daughter is not biologically related to her father or to the egg donor selected by the couple. The lawsuit claims the embryo came from another Las Vegas couple.
Questions remain as to what happened to the embryo fertilized by the father. "Where did that embryo go?" Murdock asked in an interview with David Charns of 8 News. "Was that implanted in someone else?
The teen's mother passed away a year before the DNA test. "This was a way to have his heritage move on," Murdock said, referencing the IVF procedure. Now, "It turns out it's not, and it's a little too late for that."
KLAS reported that the doctor named in the lawsuit, who is still practicing, settled a $30,000 lawsuit for "negligence in freezing and storing embryos," roughly 18 years ago.
"The real point of this is finding out what happened, why and hopefully making sure that this is the only mistake out there," said Murdock.
The lawsuit accuses the doctor and embryologist of negligence and malpractice, seeking potential damages to be determined by a jury.
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