Many doctors used their own sperm in artificial insemination procedures
| Updated: Aug 22, 2019, 15:08 IST
A recent investigation by a news portal discovered many doctors have used their own sperm to inseminate patients. The DNA of multiple children born through artificial insemination does not match that of the selected donor. However, it was discovered their DNA matched the doctor who helped their parents with the procedure.
Eve Wiley learned she was conceived through artificial insemination when she was just 16. Her mother Margo Williams told her the reason they decided to take this was that her father was infertile. A few years after the revelation Wiley decided to take a DNA test and discovered her biological father was Dr Kim McMorries, the man who her parents asked to help find a donor. However, McMorris reportedly told Wiley's mother the sperm selected for her came from a sperm bank in California. “You build your whole life on your genetic identity, and that’s the foundation,” Wiley told a news portal. Adding, “But when those bottom bricks have been removed or altered, it can be devastating.”
In another incident, Dr Donald Cline has been accused of artificially inseminating at least three dozen women with his own sperm in the 1970s and 1980s. After getting caught, his medical license was taken away and he pleaded guilty to two felony obstruction of justice charges.
In the past, women who were trying to have a baby with the help of this procedure did not expect their doctors to be the father of their children, according to Dov Fox, a bioethicist at the University of San Diego. “In a word, gross,” Fox told a news portal about the alarming number of these cases. Adding, “In a couple more: shocking, shameful. The number of doctors sounds less like a few bad apples and more like a generalized practice of deception, largely hidden until recently by a mix of low-tech and high stigma.”
Picture Courtesy: Google Images
Eve Wiley learned she was conceived through artificial insemination when she was just 16. Her mother Margo Williams told her the reason they decided to take this was that her father was infertile. A few years after the revelation Wiley decided to take a DNA test and discovered her biological father was Dr Kim McMorries, the man who her parents asked to help find a donor. However, McMorris reportedly told Wiley's mother the sperm selected for her came from a sperm bank in California. “You build your whole life on your genetic identity, and that’s the foundation,” Wiley told a news portal. Adding, “But when those bottom bricks have been removed or altered, it can be devastating.”
In another incident, Dr Donald Cline has been accused of artificially inseminating at least three dozen women with his own sperm in the 1970s and 1980s. After getting caught, his medical license was taken away and he pleaded guilty to two felony obstruction of justice charges.
In the past, women who were trying to have a baby with the help of this procedure did not expect their doctors to be the father of their children, according to Dov Fox, a bioethicist at the University of San Diego. “In a word, gross,” Fox told a news portal about the alarming number of these cases. Adding, “In a couple more: shocking, shameful. The number of doctors sounds less like a few bad apples and more like a generalized practice of deception, largely hidden until recently by a mix of low-tech and high stigma.”
Picture Courtesy: Google Images