In 2018, NPR published a story about a case where a doctor was supposed to have inseminated a woman with a “sperm cocktail,” 85 percent of which consisted of the patient’s husband’s sperm and 15 percent of which consisted of the sperm from an over six-foot-tall college student who resembled her husband. Years later, DNA test results showed that the doctor had lied and swapped in his own sperm instead. In 2019, there were reports of a Dutch doctor who had been accused of using his own material to father up to 200 children.
These cases raise broader questions about ethics and consent in the practice of reproductive medicine as well as questions about what donor anonymity means — or if it can exist at all — in the era of 23andMe and AncestryDNA.
There is no specific law against fertility fraud at the federal level in the United States, and at the state level, it often remains unlegislated.
…
But among all these cases, fertility fraud involving doctor-donor daddies stands out: crucially, they involve a breach of trust in the doctor-patient relationship. Some litigants have even likened these incidents to “medical rape” in court filings since they involve the doctor literally inserting material into their patient without their informed consent.
