A US couple has instituted a lawsuit against a fertility clinic after discovering their daughter is not biologically related to the man who raised her.
Mike and Jeanine Harvey said they realised the error after purchasing a DNA kit for their daughter, Jessica, before she travelled to Italy.
Jessica believed she had Harvey’s Italian heritage and planned to celebrate her 30th birthday in Italy. To help trace relatives there, she took the ancestry DNA test in December 2020.
But the result wasn’t what they were expecting.
“The test comes back, I’m sitting at my desk at work, actually, I opened up and see some English. There’s Irish, Welsh, German. Like, where’s the Italian, maybe Sicilian, What? What? nothing,” she told CBS News.
According to the report, further testing suggested a zero percent chance that she was biologically related to Harvey.
The couple said they underwent the fertility procedure, known as intrauterine insemination (IUI), at a hospital in Ohio in 1991 and their daughter was born the following year. The procedure involves injecting sperm directly into the uterus in an attempt to increase the chance of getting pregnant.
Discovering the mix-up was “like waking up in someone else’s life,” Harvey said.
“Learning that your entire reality isn’t what you believed it to be is hard to explain.”
In their lawsuit against Summa Health System and Nicholas Spirtos, a doctor, the couple claimed that a stranger’s genetic material was used to inseminate Jeanine.
They also claimed to have tracked down Jessica’s biological father, who was also undergoing fertility treatment at the same facility as them.
Jessica said she had spoken with him and that he had shown delight at the discovery that he did have a child.
In a statement, Summa Health System said: “We take this allegation seriously and understand the impact this has on the family. At this point, we have not met with the family or conducted testing of our own.”
