Woman sues her OBGYN and accuses him of using his own sperm to artificially inseminate women
Rochester woman says it has caused ‘significant trauma, emotional harm and distress’
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Your support makes all the difference.A woman has accused her own OBGYN doctor of artificially inseminating a number of women, including her own mother, according to a New York lawsuit.
Morgan Hellquist filed a lawsuit against Dr Morris Wortman, the Genesee Valley Group Health Association and the Center for Menstrual Disorders in Monroe County Supreme Court. In the filing, she alleges fraud and malpractice.
In the court documents, it is stated that the Ms Hellquist was born in 1985 after treatment given to her parents from Dr Wortman. For a fee, Dr Wortman would attempt to insert live sperm into her mother Ms Levey. The filing stated that this was under the impression that the donor was an anonymous medical student.
The plaintiff was informed how she was conceived when she was 9 years old in 1993. Throughout her life, Dr Wortman was viewed as “trusted” “by Ms Hellquist’s family, said the filing.
According to the filing, Ms Hellquist was treated by Dr Wortman as her usual gynecologist was not able to help her during and after her pregnancies in 2009 and 2011.
The lawsuit said that in 2016, after he father died, she was interested in finding out more about her biological father, promoting her to do “direct-to-consumer” genetic testing. The results showed that she was 50 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish. Between 2017 and 2020, she found out that she had two six half siblings. All were conceived around the time she was born, between the early to mid 1980s. According to document, all the siblings were also 50 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish, which Dr Wortman is.
WHAM first reported on the details of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit stated that finding new relatives was viewed as a positive, however it also had emotional and psychological impacts.
“Plaintiff experienced increased anxiety, migraine headaches, shock and confusion, feelings of despair, stress and other physical manifestations of continuing to learn that her donor father had been a serial sperm donor,” the lawsuit read. “Plaintiff also feared there were other half-siblings who would continue to show up in her life.”
According to the filing, every time a new half-sibling was uncovered, the plaintiff would report it to Dr Wortman’s practice. During a consultation with Dr Wortman in April of this year, he asked her a number of personal questions. They concerned her children, her husband and other personal matters.
The filing read, “At the very end of the appointment as Plaintiff was getting ready to leave and as he was writing something down he started to chuckle to himself and said out loud, ‘You’re a really good kid, such a good kid.’”
Ms Hellquist eventually started to suspect “there was a possibility Defendant Wortman could be the donor himself,” read the document.
The filing said that the plaintiff experienced “shock and disbelief” about Dr Wortman being her gynecologist if he was also her biological father, and called it “inconceivable”.
According to the lawsuit, Ms Hellquist and one of her half-brothers asked one of Dr Wortman’s children to take a DNA test, which showed that the half-brother and Dr Wortman’s daughter were 99.99 per cent likely to be siblings.
In the lawsuit, she claims that Dr Wortman has “genetically significant risk factors.” It goes on to state that he and members of his family have been diagnosed and treated for mental illness.
The filing alleges that Ms Hellquist “realising that she had been lied to while Defendants continued to their gynecological treatment of Plaintiff caused her significant trauma, emotional harm and distress”.
Ms Hellquist is seeking a yet-to-be-determined sum of financial damages in the suit.
The Independent contacted The Center for Menstrual Disorders and Rochester Regional, the parent company of the Genesee Valley Group Health Association, for comment.
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