It’s just the latest horror story in an ongoing crisis that has exposed more than 30 fertility doctors who have used their own sperm to impregnate women, with the truth being discovered thanks to the accessibility of DNA testing.
DNA testing. It’s for more than just criminal investigations. It’s also become a fun way for people to learn more about their family and medical history, and maybe discover a long-lost or unknown relative — which can then lead to criminal investigations.
With the growing popularity of Ancestry.com and 23andMe, more and more people have been learning about their family history. In some cases, though, this has led to big surprises, with one of the ugliest surprises coming in connection to the fertility industry.
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Victoria Hill is one of the more recent people to have discovered that her identity wasn’t at all what she thought it was, according to a report by CNN, nor was it what her family expected. And it all stems back to when her parents sought a fertility doctor to get pregnant.
For Hill, the journey began after she started experiencing medical issues and symptoms that neither of her parents had ever dealt with. She then utilized the services of 23andMe for a DNA test where she discovered that her father wasn’t her father.
The company’s online connections portal further connected her with multiple half-siblings she knew nothing about. At the time of CNN’s story, the count was up to 22 known, with more likely out there.
As it turns out, the doctor who helped her parents, Dr. Burton Caldwell, had substituted his sperm into Hill’s mother, according to one of Hill’s newly discovered siblings, and done so allegedly without her consent or knowledge.
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Telling the outlet she was “traumatized” by this discovery, it only got more extreme when she became the first known victim of this particular situation to have actually shared an intimate encounter with one of those half-siblings.
She revealed that she’d dated one of her newly-revealed half-brothers and could easily have married him. “Now I’m looking at pictures of people thinking, well, if he could be my sibling, anybody could be my sibling,” she told CNN.
Janine Pierson, another of HIll’s half-siblings has filed a lawsuit against Caldwell, despite their being no fertility fraud laws in Connecticut. “It shouldn’t just be, you know, the Wild West where these doctors can just do whatever it is that they want,” she argued.
Thanks to DNA testing, this fertility fraud has been able to be exposed in ways that would have been impossible decades ago, and yet CNN reports that there are few states that have laws against it on the books, though they are slowly catching up to the reality.
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According to CNN, about a dozen new laws have been passed in the past four years. In 2019, Indiana became just the second state to make fertility fraud a felony, 20 years behind California.
For the most part, those who have been caught have rarely faced consequences, with some of them continuing to practice medicine. CNN confirmed more than 30 doctors have been caught, while advocates say they know of 80 or more.
Hill has joined a group of donor-conceived people who are seeking to expose this type of fertility fraud and get something on the books to prevent it from happening to others.
The most prominent known case of fertility fraud came at the hands of Dr. Donald Cline, who became the subject of a 2022 Netflix documentary. He fathered at least 90 children in Indiana, per CNN.
The exposure brought by the Netflix documentary led to a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives penned by Rep. Stephanie Brice (OK-R) and Mikie Sherrell (NJ-D) that is seeking to outlaw fertility fraud at the federal level.
If it passes, the Protecting Families from Fertility Fraud Act would make it a federal sexual assault crime to knowingly misrepresent the source of DNA used to assist with reproductive procedures and other fertility treatment. Hill and other advocates went to Capitol Hill in support of the bill.
