A woman is suing a longtime Boston fertility doctor, claiming he is the father of her adult daughter despite saying claiming a medical resident would be the father — a lineage allegedly revealed to her daughter through a pair of at-home DNA testing kits.
Sarah Depoian, 73, is suing Dr. Merle Berger, a founder of the Boston IVF fertility clinic who has since retired, for fraud and other claims in Massachusetts' federal court, seeking damages. Berger denied the claims through a lawyer as the suit was filed on Wednesday.
Depoian sought treatment from Berger in 1979, she said, and was told that he would insert "the sperm of 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.
She went on to have a baby in early 1981 who didn't know the man who raised her wasn't her biological father — Berger told Depoian not to reveal the treatment, known as intrauterine insemination, to anyone, according to the family's lawyer.
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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.
A lawyer representing Depoian said Berger clearly knew that what he was doing was wrong.
“Some people call this horrific act medical rape, but regardless of what you call it, Dr. Berger’s heinous and intentional misconduct is unethical, unacceptable and unlawful," Adam Wolf told reporters Wednesday.
Depoian is in part seeking “damages in an amount sufficient to compensate her for her injuries.”
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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.
Boston IVF was founded in 1986, and Berger retired in 2020, according to its website. Depoian said she was treated by Berger at his private practice.
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.
