A woman is suing a Massachusetts fertility doctor, claiming he secretly impregnated her in 1980 after promising the sperm would come from an anonymous donor — a lineage allegedly revealed to her daughter through a pair of at-home DNA testing kits.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Sarah Depoian, 73, said she and her husband went to Dr. Merle Berger, a founder of the Boston IVF fertility clinic, in 1979 to discuss intrauterine insemination. Depoian said Berger told her the sperm would come from "a medical resident who had similar physical traits as my husband" and who would be unknown to the couple, while the couple would be unknown to the donor, she related at a news conference Wednesday.
The artificial insemination that Berger performed resulted in a successful pregnancy, and Depoian gave birth to a daughter in early 1981. Berger told Depoian not to reveal the treatment to anyone and her daughter didn't know for decades that the man who raised her wasn't her biological father.
Berger, a former professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and founder of one of the nation’s largest fertility clinics, has since retired. 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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Depoian's daughter, 42-year-old Carolyn Bester, said she learned first that she had a different biological father through DNA tests from Ancestry.com and 23andMe, then pieced together who her father was weeks later when a relative of Berger "reached out to me and said, 'Are we related?' And I said, 'Interesting question, I don't know.'" By that point she knew Berger had been Depoian's fertility doctor.
The discovery left Bester devastated — she said she didn't get out of bed for a day: "It was really, really shocking and horrible to find that out, that that's your life's story and that's the story of how you were created is not great, to say the least."
Depoian, a retiree who moved from Massachusetts to Maine with her husband three years ago, said that her daughter's support and love helped her share what happened to the family.
"It's hard to imagine not trusting your own doctor. We never dreamt he would abuse his position of trust and perpetrate this extreme violation," Depoian said.
Berger's lawyer said in a statement that the claims "will be disproven in court," while noting that artificial insemination's early days were a "dramatically different" environment for fertility treatment.
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. 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. The allegations, which have changed repeatedly in the six months since the plaintiff's attorney first contacted Dr. Berger, have no legal or factual merit, and will be disproven in court.
Asked about the statement from Berger's lawyer, the fertility attorney representing Depoian and Bester said that Berger hadn't denied it when they first reached out to him about the pending suit, and that their claims haven't changed.
Boston IVF also issued a statement:
We recently learned that Dr. Merle Berger was named in a lawsuit. This matter occurred more than 40 years ago which was prior to Dr. Berger’s employment at Boston IVF and, in fact, before our company existed. We wish to highlight that the field of reproductive endocrinology and infertility is much different than it was decades ago, and the safety measures and safeguards currently in place would make such allegations virtually impossible nowadays. Patients should be assured that our field continues to uphold the most rigorous ethical and medical standards.
There have been several instances in recent years of patients learning their fertility doctors used their own sperm to impregnate them. In 2017, a retired Indianapolis fertility doctor plead guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice for lying about using his own sperm to impregnate dozens of women after telling them the donors were anonymous. The case was detailed in the Netflix docuseries "Our Father."
Last year, a Vermont jury awarded a woman $5.25 million from a doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate her during an artificial insemination procedure in 1977.
Earlier this year, a Northern California woman learned her mother's fertility doctor was her and her sister's biological father, as well as the father of at least one other patient's child, whom she found through Ancestry DNA, NBC Bay Area reported.
