When a search for ancestors reveals fraud in fertility treatments

Like millions of Americans, David Berry is curious about his genealogy. He wanted to find out more about his paternal grandfather, whose ancestors were British. But when studying his father’s side of the family, he discovered something completely unexpected: the man he believed to be his father was not related to him at all.

The results of his DNA tests on Ancestry.com presented two additional surprises: Berry, 37, is more than 50% Jewish, and had a cousin or half-brother he didn’t know about.

So Berry, who grew up in Rochester, New York, and now lives in Miami, started looking for her biological father. His parents revealed that the family doctor had arranged an anonymous sperm donor for them. Was there any way to find him?

Over the next three years, Berry discovered that he had at least ten other half-brothers and half-sisters, through the same donor. He got in touch with some of them, like Morgan Hellquist, who lives in the Rochester area.

In May, he finally discovered the identity of his biological father. The man was not an anonymous sperm donor, after all, but Dr Morris Wortman, a fertility specialist who treated his mother in Rochester. Wortman, who continues to practice medicine in that city, had impregnated her with his sperm without informing the patient.

(Wortman declined several requests for comment. Berry’s mother also declined to comment.)

Berry revealed the information to Hellquist. The news came as an especially strong shock to her. For a decade, Wortman had been Hellquist’s gynecologist. In September, she sued him for assault and for the emotional problems he may have caused by treating her as a patient when she knew the true situation.

“Everything I thought I knew about myself has been ripped apart and destroyed,” she said. “Imagine knowing you’re descended from someone capable of doing something like that.” She added that “the idea that this man’s DNA is part of my children makes me want to die.”

The information about Wortman’s alleged actions also shocked his immediate family. Arielle Wortman, 37, the daughter of the doctor’s first marriage, said the revelation had shaken her. “I am very hurt that my father betrayed the trust of the patients and the families he treated,” she said.

Revelations After DNA Tests

Over the past few years, more than 50 fertility doctors in the United States have been accused of fraud in connection with sperm donation, according to legal experts and observers.

Traci Portugal, who is in her 40s, lives in Washington state and operates the website DonorDeceived.org, which catalogs and tracks court cases related to fraud in conceptions obtained with the help of donors. She has documented lawsuits against more than two dozen doctors in the United States, and at least half a dozen international cases, involving fraud in former patients’ fertility treatment cases. Portugal founded the organization in 2019 after discovering that her mother’s doctor was her biological father.

In Canada, a notorious case involving Norman Barwin, a fertility doctor, led to a class-action lawsuit brought by 226 former patients of his, and their children. In July, in what is believed to be the first out-of-court settlement of its kind, the families accepted the equivalent of $10 million in compensation.

Almost all the doctors accused of this type of practice were discovered as a result of DNA tests carried out by their descendants.

Hellquist’s mother, like Berry’s, had turned to Wortman for help getting pregnant. He told Hellquist’s parents that he had used a medical student as a sperm donor.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, said this type of cheating, practiced by a doctor, “can lead to traumatic disruption” for the women involved.

It didn’t take long for word to emerge that Wortman was one of three Rochester doctors — all friends and colleagues — who had used their own sperm to impregnate women in that city, beginning in the 1960s.

Doctors Frederick Dischinger, who died last year, and Robert Tichell, who is retired, secretly used their sperm to impregnate patients, according to genetic evidence revealed in June by DNAngels.org, an organization that helps people seeking information. about its biological roots. The evidence came from two people whose mothers had sought help to get pregnant, and who suspected they were the biological children of the doctors who treated them.

Tichell lost his license to practice medicine in 1997 for reasons unrelated to these cases.

Contacted by phone from his home in Buffalo, Tichell, 89, said it was possible he was the biological father of at least one child of a patient.

“I was a doctor for a while,” he said. “And sometimes, back then, before fertility clinics came along, when you couldn’t find a donor and you were working with a patient who wanted to get pregnant…. it wasn’t exactly an ethical practice, but it was something that happened occasionally.” . He added that “I assume other doctors did the same, but nobody talked about it.”

He added, in a later text message: “I’ll admit I did it when a donor didn’t respond. The women were eager to get the insemination done, and the timing was crucial. It may have been less than perfect, but hopefully they were able to. to conceive”.

Portugal and other activists have been pushing for legislation, both at the state and federal levels, to make fraud in fertility treatments a crime. For now, there are laws on this in Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Utah. Arkansas passed a bill in April 2021, and there are bills in the pipeline in seven other states, including New York.

the face in the mirror

When Berry discovered he had half-siblings with whom he had little in common — other than the fact that their mothers had gone to the same doctor for fertility treatments — he began to suspect their father might be Wortman. After years of searching, he decided to contact Arielle Wortman, one of the doctor’s daughters in his first marriage, and ask her to undergo a genetic test to help him uncover the truth. To his surprise, she agreed.

The tests were analyzed by Laura Olmsted, executive director of DNAngels.org. About a week later, she had the results. It was true: the two were, in fact, half-brothers.

Berry was both shocked and relieved. The discovery cleared up a mystery, Berry said: Even though his mother had asked for a donor who looked like actor Tom Selleck, she had always thought her son actually looked like Morris Wortman.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci.