'Fertility fraud' daughter has two serious genetic conditions

A woman seeking to understand why she has two genetic conditions, despite having no family history, discovered that her mother's fertility doctor is her biological father.

Summer McKesson from North Carolina had a history of breathing problems and had multiple surgeries to remove unexplained blood clots from her heart and lungs. She was subsequently diagnosed with two genetic conditions: a blood-clotting disorder and Marfan syndrome, which affects the body's connective tissue. With no family history of either condition, she sought answers from a commercial genetic test, which revealed she has at least seven half-siblings. Further investigation revealed they were all fathered by her mother's fertility specialist, Dr Charles Peete.

'I didn't even know I was a sperm donor baby, much less finding out at the exact same time that, you know, the doctor ... had used his sperm and that I was a product of a crime,' McKesson told WRAL News, 'The mothers deserve to know that this happened to them. And the children, all of the half-siblings, deserve to know their medical history.'

In 1980, McKesson's mother, Laurie Kruppa, had undergone fertility treatment at Duke University Hospital, where she was told that a sperm donor would be selected from one of the residents at the medical school. However, one of the half-siblings McKesson contacted through 23andMe, suggested that McKesson ask her parents if they were treated by Dr Peete, who, it appears, had used his own sperm in multiple procedures without consent.

'We have been made aware of unacceptable actions by an individual that occurred in our program in the early days of fertility care during the late 1970s and early 1980s,' a Duke Health spokesperson told People. 'The unacceptable actions could not happen today at Duke Health and should never have happened.'

Dr Peete is not the only clinician to have used his own sperm in treatment, with cases having come to light across the USA (see BioNews 944, 1222 and 1033) and Europe (see BioNews 996). In many instances, there was no law specifically banning such actions at the time, although several US states have subsequently passed 'fertility fraud' laws making it a specific offence (see BioNews 998, 999, 1151 and 1172). North Carolina currently does not have such a law.

Around one in four cases of Marfan syndrome are the result of spontaneous de novo mutations; therefore, it is possible that McKesson did not inherit this condition from her biological father. However, recent research indicates increased genetic risk for children fathered by older men (see BioNews 1310), and Dr Peete would have been in his late 50s when McKesson was conceived.

Dr Peete died in 2013, so it is not clear what, if any, legal action McKesson, or her half-siblings, can take. But, McKesson is keen to encourage North Carolina's state legislature to hold doctors accountable to protect others like her.