DNA Test reveals that a woman’s father is not genetically related to her, Sperm Mixup

• A home DNA kit revealed that a 29-year-old woman was not genetically related her father.
• A new lawsuit claims that the hospital used another man’s sperm for her parents’ fertility treatment.
• The law firm states that the US doesn’t regulate the fertility industry tightly, which can lead to confusion.

Jessica Harvey Galloway and her husband requested Ancestry.com kits in time for Christmas 2020. They hoped the gift would help them connect with Galloway’s Italian relatives prior to their trip.

Instead, the kits showed that Galloway, 29 years old, is not of Italian descent and is not genetically related with her father, who has an Italian heritage. New lawsuit claims. Galloway claims that her biological father is a stranger, whose father was wrongly substituted for her father’s sperm during a 1991 fertility treatment.

Galloway, She married her husband with the last name of her husband. Her family is calling for stricter regulation of fertility and holding the doctor and hospital responsible.

“As a husband and a father, it’s extremely difficult to watch your family in pain, and the source of the pain is something that I’ll never be able to change,” Galloway’s father Mike Harvey said in a press conference hosted by their law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise.

“Learning that your entire reality isn’t what you believed it to be is hard to explain. It’s like waking up in someone else’s life.”

To conceive Jessica, her parents underwent intrauterine injections in 1991

Jeanine Harvey and Mike Harvey claimed that they underwent intrauterine fertilization, or the clinical injection of sperm in the uterus, in order to conceive their daughter, in 1991.

Their lawyers stated that Mike Harvey had provided a sample of sperm for the procedure.

Galloway’s family has maintained that Galloway is biologically theirs for almost three decades. They trusted Summa Health System in Ohio and Dr. Nicholas Spirtos, their doctor. Galloway grew up proud of her Italian heritage and confident in her health risks — Mike Harvey’s family lived well into their 90s and had no history of cancer,

Diabetes

Or

Heart disease

.

Galloway was then unable to identify himself after he received the Ancestry.com results.

“We can no longer share our little private Italian jokes or enjoy our little Italian get-togethers — it’s just too painful for her,”Jeanine Harvey spoke at the press conference. “Her heritage has literally been stripped away from her.”

Galloway spent several months searching Ancestry.com, Facebook and getting help from a geneticist to find her biological father. She stated that the Harveys had performed fertility treatment on both the man and his wife at the same clinic.

It is not clear what happened to Mike Harvey’s sperm. “Did the clinic use his sperm in another patient’s procedure? And who’s the other patient? Don’t they have a right to kow the truth?”Jeanine Harvey spoke.

Peiffer Wolf claims that the law firm has not provided answers from the hospital or Spirtos, nor offered to conduct tests on their own, or asked to meet with the family. They are accused of medical malpractice and battery, as well negligence, failure to safeguard genetic material and other charges.

Insider received a statement from Mike Bernstein, Summa Health’s system director for corporate communication. He said that Summa Health takes the allegations seriously and recognizes the negative impact they have on the family.

“At this point, we have not met with the family or conducted testing of our own,”He wrote. “Given the very limited information that we have and the amount of time that has passed, it remains our hope that the attorneys representing the family will work with us to make that next step a priority.”

This is not the first time this has happened to fertility.

Peiffer Wolf claims it has dealt with hundreds of cases of misconduct in fertility centers, including misplaced embryos and doctors using their own eggs for IVF without consent.

In 2019, a New York City couple sued LA-based CHA Fertility Center after they learned they had carried two other couples’ boys to term. A couple in Los Angeles sued their fertility clinic last year after they were able to become pregnant with another couple’s child through an embryo mixup. The couple then began caring for their own child.

Peiffer Wolf has been pushing for Legislation nationalfor better oversight of IVF and fertility clinics, which it said are less regulated than barbershops and hair salons.

“I know that we are not alone in our pain, so many other families have gone through the same kind of unimaginable circumstances and have been forced to put the pieces of their lives back together,”Galloway stated this in a press conference. “It’s not fair to them, just like it’s not fair to my family and I. … This has to stop.”