The recent embryo mixup that ended up with a Staten Island woman giving birth to test-tube twin boys – one black and one white – is not the first high-tech fertility foul-up, and it won’t be the last, experts told The Post.
“A woman has more federal oversight getting her hair colored than she does in having her eggs taken out,” said Brooks Keel, president of the American Association of Bioanalysts.
He and other experts said the case of Donna and Richard Fasano of Staten Island and Deborah and Robert Rogers of Teaneck, N.J., highlights the horrors possible in reproductive technology.
The Fasanos say they’ll give up their black son to the Rogers – clients of the same Manhattan fertility clinic – if DNA tests confirm the Rogers are the baby’s genetic parents.
And lawyers for both sets of parents say they will discuss visitation – sparking hope there will be a happy ending to the gut-wrenching tragedy for both families.
But for many couples who’ve fallen victim to mixed-up fertility procedures – or shameless doctors – there are no happy endings.
Their numbers are hard to determine because most parents want to shield their children from publicity, legal experts said.
One cited the case of Cecil Jacobson, a Virginia doctor who artificially inseminated scores of unsuspecting women with his own sperm, fathering as many as 75 children.
Jacobson was convicted of fraud and perjury in March 1992 for telling his patients he used sperm from anonymous donors.
A few other cases have surfaced in recent years:
*Interracial couple Michael and Betty Higgins, with the help of an in-vitro fertilization clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., had twins in 1995 – but both babies were white.
Because of an alleged lab mixup, her eggs wound up being fertilized by another man’s sperm. The clinic insinuated she must have had an affair.
*An interracial Dutch couple went to a fertility clinic in the Netherlands for in-vitro fertilization in 1993, and had twin boys – one white, the other black.
The hospital admitted the eggs were accidentally inseminated with sperm from another man, plus that of her husband.
*A white Manhattan woman charged that a fertility clinic and sperm bank mistakenly substituted another man’s sperm for those of her husband, who later died of cancer. The woman gave birth to a baby girl in 1987.
Her lawsuit helped lead to stronger state regulation of sperm banks – but not of labs that handle embryos.