A lawsuit filed in Ohio by Mike and Jeanine Harvey claims that a doctor at Akron, Ohio, impregnated Mrs. Harvey with another man’s sperm, meaning their daughter Jessica is not biologically related to her father.
Mr. and Mrs. Harvey went to Akron City Hospital in 1991 looking for help getting pregnant. The couple hired Dr. Nicholas Spirtos to inject Mr. Harvey’s sperm into Mrs. Harvey to increase their chances of conceiving a child.
The treatment was a success, as they quickly got pregnant and Jessica was born.
Jessica Harvey told CBS News that she was proud of her Italian heritage — particularly on her dad’s side.
“My entire life, I have always been so passionate, so proud of my heritage on both sides where I came from, how my ancestors got here, what makes me today,” she said.
Ms. Harvey used ancestry.com in 2020 to help track down some of her relatives, as she scheduled to celebrate her forthcoming 30th birthday in Italy. The results of the test were shocking.
“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 said. “My stomach just dropped … I knew something was wrong from the get-go.”
The test showed she had no connection to her father, and a second test from LabCorp confirmed it.
“I’m like, wait a minute, I carried a total stranger’s child, you know, for nine months, and who in the world is this other half of this child belong to?” Mrs. Harvey said.
The couple is suing Dr. Spirtos and Summa Health System, the successor to Akron City Hospital.
“It shouldn’t be that the fertility clinic transferred some stranger’s sperm into Mrs. Harvey’s body,” said family attorney Adam Wolf. “That is not OK. It’s not OK under the law. It’s not OK under any sense of medical ethics. And it shouldn’t happen ever.”
Summa Health said in a statement that “we take this allegation seriously and understand the impact this has on the family.”
The statement also said the clinic has “very limited information” but that it will meet with the family and do its own round of testing.
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