The daughter of a couple who enlisted the services of a Boston, Massachusetts, fertility specialist, has discovered through a purchased DNA kit that the doctor is her biological father, after over 40 years.
According to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court District of Massachusetts, Dr. Merle Berger was accused of secretly using his own sperm to inseminate the mother, Sarah Depoian, in 1980.
“This is an extreme violation,” Depoian said in a statement released by her attorney, Adam Wolf. “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.”
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Dr. Berger had at the time told Depoian that the sperm used in the insemination would be from a medical resident “who resembled her husband” and “whom she did not know,” according to the complaint.
But it was later revealed Dr. Berger used his own sperm to inseminate Depoian, the complaint alleges.
“Dr. Berger secretly inserted his own sperm into his patient, Sarah Depoian. He did so without her consent and against her wishes,” Depoian’s attorney Wolf said in a news release.
Court documents showed Depoian’s daughter, Carolyn l discovered Dr. Berger was her father after she purchased DNA kits last year from Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
The lawsuit says results showed that she was related to Dr. Berger’s granddaughter and Dr. Berger’s second cousin.
She later spoke to “one of her newfound relatives,” the complaint alleged.
“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.”
Depoian was said to have reached out through her attorney to Dr. Berger, who didn’t deny that she consented only to insemination with a donor’s sperm who didn’t know her, and whom she didn’t know.
Dr Berger through his legal team denied the allegations.
“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.”
The statement said, “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.”
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