A woman has filed a lawsuit in which she alleges that a fertility doctor contaminated and inseminated her with his own sperm without her consent about a decade ago.
Carolyn Bester bought a home ancestry kit in a bid to learn something about her family history.
“I knew plenty of people who tried DNA tests and I actually thought I was going to have a lot of fun doing the research,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
But she found out that her father was a fertility doctor who performed the procedure that led to her birth, according to a lawsuit filed by her mother on Wednesday in Massachusetts District Court.
In the lawsuit, Bester’s mother, Sarah Depoian alleged that Dr. Merle Berger inseminated her with his own sperm after she sought fertility treatment at his Boston area clinic for more than 40 years ago.
“We never dreamt he would have used his position of trust and perpetrated this extreme violation,” Depoian told reporters at a press conference.
Bester, a New Jersey-based lawyer with one 5-year-old child of her own, already knew that her mother received fertility treatment from Berger.
“To say I was shocked when I figured this out would be an extreme understatement,” she said. “It feels like reality has shifted.”
Bester said she had already learned the father who raised her was not biologically related to her.
