A California couple is suing a fertility doctor for impregnating the wife with a stranger’s sperm rather than her husband’s, a new lawsuit states.
The duo, known in the complaint as Jane and John Roe, sued Dr. Hal C. Danzer for “medically raping” Jane when he artificially inseminated her using the sperm of a donor rather than that of her husband in the 1980s, according to the suit obtained by The Independent. It wasn’t until earlier this year that the pair discovered that John was not biologically related to his daughters.
The Independent has emailed Danzer and a lawyer who previously represented him in an unrelated lawsuit for comment.
According to the suit, in 1983, after failing to conceive naturally, the couple sought help from Dr. Danzer at the Los Angeles Fertility Institute, who suggested they try intrauterine insemination.
Following multiple unsuccessful attempts, the couple successfully conceived twins in April 1984 — but tragedy struck months later when Jane went into premature labor in November; the twins didn’t survive more than a day.
“The loss of their twins solidified Plaintiffs’ deep desire for their own children and imbued their subsequent attempts to conceive with even greater gravity,” the filing says. After even more unsuccessful attempts and investing in a “notoriously expensive” process, the couple found success in October 1985, and Jane gave birth to healthy twin girls in June 1986.
The couple was “overjoyed.” Decades later, the family made a life-altering discovery.
In January, one of the twins became interested in her family’s ancestry after having a child of her own. She was “shocked and dismayed” when the results showed that she had a biological relationship with her mother — but not with her father, the suit says.
Her twin sister took a DNA test a month later to confirm there wasn’t a fluke. Both tests showed the same results: the twins had 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish DNA from their biological father. This genetic makeup didn’t align with John, who is of Greek descent.
The couple felt “devastated that they were deceived so terribly,” the suit says. The suit accused Danzer of having “ violated his oath as a physician” as well as Jane’s “bodily autonomy” by using a stranger’s sperm.
After digging through ancestry websites, the family realized this was not an isolated incident; they uncovered 16 paternal half-siblings related to the twins. The family reached out to these relatives and found that of those who responded, all were born in Los Angeles from 1971 to 1992 and were all connected to Danzer’s former partner at LAFI, the filing says.
John and Jane have both suffered from emotional distress as a result of the mixup.
For Jane, “having a trusted doctor medically rape her by impregnating her with a stranger’s sperm without consent is a horror she feels she may never overcome… She also feels deeply ashamed, as if she let down her husband and her children by choosing to work with someone as careless as Danzer,” the filing says.
“The loss for John is also severe—to learn that he has no biological ties to his only children is a blow he cannot ever have anticipated,” the suit says. John has sunk into a “deep depression” after learning the news, as “he feels as though a key portion of his identity—that of being a father—has been stripped away overnight. Despite the fact that he knows his girls still love him, he feels left alone with no family,” the suit states.
He also has to “live with the uncertainty” of what happened to his sperm. “If Danzer could use the wrong sperm to inseminate Jane, might not he have used John’s sperm to inseminate—perhaps even impregnate—someone else?” the suit says.
On top of this, the medical history of the twins’ biological father has led to “starving revelations” that have “rocked” the family and created new fears about the future, the suit says.
The biological father has a family history that includes high blood pressure, high cholesterol, breast cancer, diverticulitis, osteoporosis and dementia/Alzheimer’s disease, high cholesterol, gout and heart attack. The sperm donor himself even passed away at 63 from thigh liposarcoma, the suit says.
The couple is suing Danzer for medical battery, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, unjust enrichment, negligence and/or malpractice and breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. They are demanding a jury trial.
The couple is seeking damages in an amount to be determined at the trial, the suit says.
