A woman has filed a lawsuit alleging that the fertility doctor who treated her secretly used his own sperm to conceive her child, after telling her the donor was a healthy young medical student. The case adds to a growing string of "fertility fraud" lawsuits in the US, in which doctors are accused of deceiving patients about the true source of donor sperm used in their treatment, often only discovered decades later through consumer DNA testing.

The lawsuit claims the woman only learned the truth about her child's paternity after a DNA test connected the child to the doctor rather than the anonymous donor she had been promised. She is seeking damages over what her legal team describes as a profound breach of trust and medical ethics, arguing she would never have consented to treatment had she known the doctor intended to use his own genetic material.