Woman claims doctor ‘medically raped’ her

Lawsuit: Semen that impregnated her was fertility physician’s

When the young newlywed couple went to an Alamo fertility doctor in 1978, he assured the woman that the anonymous donor would contain many of the same characteristics as her husband.

Through artificial insemination, the couple produced a daughter in 1980 and later a son, presumably through the same donor.

Four decades later, Livermore

resident Katherine Richards discovered a chilling truth after her daughter took an at-home DNA test, according to a federal lawsuit: The semen that impregnated her was that of the fertility physician, Dr. Michael Kiken.

According to the suit filed in U.S. District Court, Northern California, Kiken “medically raped” Richards by using his own sperm without her consent.

In an email to this news organization, Richards recalled feeling “relieved and grateful that I might actually get to experience pregnancy and have a child” after that 1978 visit. Today, she said feels shocked,

devastated and disgusted upon learning the truth, as were her children.

Asked what she would like to tell Kiken if she could face him today, Richards said: “There is a line in the Hippocratic Oath that speaks to doing no harm. You violated that. And you violated me. I want to ask Kiken why he did this to me. On what planet is this OK? Did you think you wouldn’t ever be found out? How many other victims did you medically rape? Will my kids continue to find half siblings across the country?”

According to online records for the Virginia Board of Medicine, Kiken currently works at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland, Virginia.

Calls to the Virginia Department of Corrections and to Kiken’s medical office at the correctional facility were not returned. Personnel at Kiken’s former medical office in Lynchburg, Virginia, said he had not worked there

since 2008.

The exposure of physicians who used their own sperm to impregnate patients is a growing global phenomenon. Doctors in Indiana, Virginia and the Netherlands have been exposed, and a retired Kaiser doctor in Sacramento was accused of it in a 2019 lawsuit that remains ongoing.

“Sadly, it isn’t the first time we’ve heard about these types of cases,” said University of San Diego law professor Dov Fox, director of the school’s Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics. “We don’t know how common it is. But it is becoming clear that it’s not an aberration.”

Only now, Fox said, with the use of websites such as 23andMe, My Heritage and Ancestry.com, are doctors who injected their own semen into patients in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s being exposed because of “modern advances in genetic testing and the popularization of at-home DNA kits.”

In Indiana, Dr. Donald Cline was found to be the father of more than 50 children whose mothers were his patients. Even before genetic testing kits became widely used, a Virginia

doctor, Cecil Jacobson, was found by a jury to have fathered 15 children with unsuspecting patients. Federal prosecutors believed the real number was close to 75. Jacobson was sentenced to five years in prison.

Last year, in Rotterdam, Dutch doctor Jan Karbaat was found to have fathered at least 49 children. He died in 2017.

“It’s a profound violation of informed consent,” Fox said. “It exploits positions of power and it betrays patients’ vulnerabilities, deceiving them in ways that hide key facts about medical procedures with profound implications for their families, for their identity and social relationships.”

For decades, the use of sperm donors was veiled in secrecy, said Kara Swanson, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law and author of the book “Banking on the Body: The Market for Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America.” Artificial insemination grew in popularity in the 1960s and ’70s, she said, with fresh semen widely performed for the treatments.

But few records were

kept, she said, and some of the research on the practice “is based on guesswork.” Societal norms at the time pressured for secrecy. Men who could not father children were seen as not real men, she said. Doctors didn’t keep records, and parents were told to tell no one about the treatments.

But what would drive a doctor to use his own reproductive material? “Hubris, or narcissism, or laziness,” Swanson said. It takes a lot of work, she noted, to coordinate live donors with a patient’s ovulation cycle.

“Doctors thought they never would be found out,” she added.

In the current case, use of the popular 23andMe at-home DNA kit was how Richards’ daughter eventually learned Kiken was her father.

The DNA testing also found that Richards’ daughter carries a serious genetic condition, TaySachs disease, because of the doctor’s genes. The disease causes seizures and mental and sensory disabilities and can lead to early death in children born with it.

According to the lawsuit,

Kiken told the newlyweds the donor would be a medical student or medical intern 22 to 28 years old who resembles Richards’ husband, has the same ethnic background, is in good health, shares their Christian faith and has musical talent.

Richards’ husband died in 2000. The lawsuit states he was of Norwegian, Irish and English heritage, a Christian, 5 feet 11 inches, athletically built and had hazel eyes. Kiken was shorter, slender, has an olive complexion and is of Jewish heritage.

After Richards gave birth to her daughter in January 1980, Kiken told the couple to never reveal they used a sperm donor except in a severe medical emergency, the lawsuit states.

Later, the couple returned to Kiken to conceive their second child, asking for the same anonymous donor. The doctor told them it was no problem, that he had kept the donor’s “number” to use again, according to the suit. Their son was born in 1981.

“While she loves her children, she can’t help now but to see the person who violated her and her daughter and son,” Richards’ San Francisco-based attorney, Adam Wolf, said Thursday.

“Katie, like anyone, should have control and dominion over her body. No doctor and no one else gets to decide what goes into Katie’s body besides Katie. She now has trust issues: She will never look at any doctor the same way ever again,” Wolf said.

The 23andMe test also revealed that Richards’ daughter had a half-brother and her heritage was 50% Irish and French and 50% Ashkenazi Jewish.

According to the lawsuit, the half-brother’s mother also had sought Kiken’s help. He is four months older than Richards’ daughter, and they grew up just 15 minutes away from each other, were in the same grade and had mutual friends.

The lawsuit alleges Kiken gave the half-brother’s mother the “same spiel” about using donor sperm of a young medical student.