The mother of the girl, Pamela Branum, says she and her husband discovered a genetic mismatch in their daughter, and were able to trace her lineage with help from relatives of the now-deceased fertility clinic worker, Thomas Ray Lippert.This may sound callous, but, I'm not sure what the fuss it about. Can you guys set me straight? I don't want to walk around in a crooked fashion ;)
"I don't think we're the only ones," Branum told CBS affiliate KUTV in Salt Lake City. "We think we're one of many" victims who used a clinic that was operated by faculty members.
The University of Utah says there is "credible" evidence of semen tampering or mislabeling. On Friday, the university announced it was opening a hotline and offering paternity testing to anyone who used the clinic between 1988 and 1993.
Friday, January 17, 2014
"It was hard at first, to think, 'Who am I?'"
"The University of Utah is investigating a complaint that a convicted felon working at a fertility clinic replaced a customer's sperm with his own, fathering a girl 21 years ago."
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28 comments:
This isn't the first time we've heard of this.
Some of these guys think they're Ramses, who had the fun of doing it the old-fashioned way.
First off, there are the possibility of unknown genetic diseases or risk factors. If you know who your parents are, you can look at their family histories to see what you might be at risk for. (Examples: alcoholism, cystic fibrosis, cancer risks, butt-ugliness, stupidity, etc.)
Second, I am presuming that this clinic worked with couples that were having trouble conceiving on their own, as opposed to simply using donor sperm. It's going to be upsetting to parents and children alike to find out that a cuckolding has occurred. Not to mention that now the parents will start to view the children's strange character and physical traits differently.
Related to that, the fathers are likely to look at their "children" with scare quotes now. It'll be natural for even the most decent of men to look at a child with someone else's features and feel sickened by it.
Finally (for the list off the top of my head) incest now becomes a more worrisome trend. Imagine after a couple has married, because they just seem so similar, only to find out they're half-siblings. That increase the chances for more bad genetic loading even if the offspring of that union don't have any obvious problems.
I remember a similar case from, I believe, Virginia, in which the fertility doctor himself was replacing donor sperm with his own. I believe he had dozens of children by dozens of mothers. I'll now use Bing to look for that case.
Cecil B. Jacobson is the doctor I referenced above. Genetic testing has confirmed that he was the father of 15 different children and he is suspected of being the father of perhaps as many as 75. Many of those children live in the same area of Virginia.
I would imagine that this (sperm swapping at fertility clinics) is a bit more common than people would like to think, though I would like to think it is still the exception rather than the rule.
Also, should this have a "spooge stooge" tag? (I prefer spooge to splooge, as do Matt and Trey of South Park infamy.)
What a topic for a country song!
My Daddy Was a Turkey Baster!
I'm still trying to write a country Christmas song about a story forwarded to me in Facebook.
Christmas Shootout at the Titty Bar!
I don't know quite how to fit the prison baby daddy thing into the turkey baster tune.
I don't know quite how to fit the prison baby daddy thing into the turkey baster tune.
You need to add pickup truck, horse, drunk, trains and mama and your song will be a winner.
This is all a ruse to keep the girl from figuring out she's really a replicant.
@Michael
That tune was written by an old friend of mine from Chicago, Steve Goodman.
Steve has been gone for a long time. Too long.
Icepick suggests ...
you can look at their family histories to see what you might be at risk for. (...butt-ugliness , etc.)
Why yes you can :)
This is all a ruse to keep the girl from figuring out she's really a replicant.
IS she as pretty as Sean Young? (Is that possible?)
We shouldn't be too hard on the sperm swapper. Maybe it was late at night at the clinic. And he was holding a vial of the father's semen when there was a lightening flash. And he was startled by his own reflection in a mirror which caused him to drop the vial and it broke on the floor and ruined the specimen.
What else was there to do?
I mean, after all, it's not like he substituted sperm from Abby Normal or someone like that.
Ari, I was actually thinking of the case of the guy in China who sued his wife after they started having ugly children. Turns out she had had a LOT of plastic surgery done before meeting him. He had no idea until the children were born.
There's this chick in China, and they give her some kind of hormone treatment or something, and she puts out like a gazillion eggs, and they're sold to fertility clinics all around the world to be implanted into the birth mother.
I don't know much more than that about her but I assume she's very healthy and very good-looking.
Since she's Chinese I'm guessing she doesn't get a whole lot of money for it, by our standards.
I once met a woman who was in her early thirties, unmarried with no prospects. She visited the office with a catalog of potential sperm donors. There was a photo of each one (head shot) and a bio-profile. I kid you not.
She had almost finally decided on one of them and she wanted to get confirmation from someone who worked here.
She was completely infatuated with this one sperm donor and positively giddy that she would bear his child.
I thought she was stark, raving bonkers.
I think the biggest fear, initially, would be STDs but after 20+ years that seems remote at best. The second thing is getting your genetic stock not from some college kid trying to make $25 for jerking off (good work if you can get it), but from some sociopath.
If I were paying good scratch for some college kid's spooge, I'd insist on some kind of assurance that the magazines they gave him were good, clean, wholesome porn and not like all perverted and stuff.
Wouldn't it be kind of weird to find out that your old man cracked his nut while whacking off to a photo of some naked dude or a goat or something?
Well, maybe a naked goat, but wool is not sexy. Too scratchy.
Maybe the wife just screwed thew clinic worker, and this is her cover story.
If I were paying good scratch for some college kid's spooge, I'd insist on some kind of assurance that the magazines they gave him were good, clean, wholesome porn and not like all perverted and stuff.
You mean anything from Germany or Japan?
If I were paying good scratch for some college kid's spooge, I'd insist on some kind of assurance that the magazines they gave him were good, clean, wholesome porn and not like all perverted and stuff.
You mean anything from Germany or Japan?
Does that make him a splooge stooge?
I think that this is a big deal, a really big deal. Maybe rape? The criminal is dead so nothing to do about it. The Father has his biological fatherhood taken away from him, even if he undoubtedly loves his daughter very much.
We're biological creatures and biology matters. Genetic procreation matters at the primal level of our very genes. This is why people bother to do the fertility treatments at all. This is why they use donor eggs and donor sperm so that even if one person can't have biological children, the other person can have a child related to them.
We don't dare say these things because we don't want adopted children to feel bad or infertile couples to feel bad. So we refuse to say it. Some people have no desire at all to procreate and we don't want them to feel bad either.
Wanting to be nice doesn't change the truth that, over all, life is about our genes making copies of themselves. *All* life is about our genes making copies of themselves. Starting at cyanobacteria and ending at Blue Whales.
After all, why doesn't anyone think that the felon did it?
Synova, read Icepick's 10:49 link. A doctor that used his own sperm in multiple clients got only five years in jail.
I think if the biological father was really, really good at football and that was his dominant gene, then the legal father would be willing to forgive and forget.
In another stunning development, DNA tests reveal that some of the semen is not human.
John and Ken speculation on the news of the Blue Dress, back when.
You leave a copy of yourself by training your replacements.
It works like writing.
A message to the future.
If you go by DNA, you're not leaving a copy of youself but of your parent, or their parents...
It's like a woman retaining her father's name to prove she's a feminist.
The logic doesn't work.
There's a evolutionary advantage is males not wanting to raise other males' offspring, but modern compensation is the presence of the female.
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