Clinic admits sperm mix-up

Fertility agency can’t rule out strange fathers

Unable to make babies on their own, more than two dozen couples went to a top-flight fertility clinic in the Netherlands for help.

But the clinic has announced it may have been leaving old sperm on its tools for more than a year — and now those couples face the prospect of raising a stranger’s biological child.

“The chance is small, but cannot be ruled out” that women were “fertilized by sperm cells from a man other than the intended father,” officials at the University Medical Center in Utrecht said in a statement last week.

It’s not the first mass case of artificial insemination potentially gone awry, though most high-profile bungles have mixed up anonymous donors.

In this case, the medical center said that it was trying to contact 26 men and women — half of whom already have or are expecting a baby — for 26 very difficult conversations.

“The supervisory board regrets having to burden the couples involved with the news,” the statement said.

The New York Times reported that the women were contacted after the statement’s release and were offered DNA tests.

The patients didn’t use the most common method of in vitro fertilization, in which egg and sperm are combined in a petri dish.

Rather, they used a newer procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, which can help men with scant or sluggish sperm by shooting it directly into an egg cell.

A technician had just finished an injection in November, a hospital spokesman told The New York Times, when she discovered sperm from a previous patient on the end of the syringe.

The syringe tips are disposable, the Times reported, so the hospital suspects that the rogue cell hitched a ride on a rubber bulb that wasn’t supposed to be attached to the device.

The clinic had been improperly using those bulbs since April of the previous year. Some of those couples now have a child — the oldest might be 1 year old, if the first patient conceived right away.

Other women treated during that period are pregnant, according to the hospital. And 13 couples have frozen embryos at the clinic, which they must now decide whether they want to replace.

Meanwhile, the hospital is trying to figure out if any stray sperm actually managed to make a baby.

It’s also unknown how many contaminant sperm cells from how many men may have been used on patients.

David Keefe, who chairs New York University’s department of obstetrics and gynecology, said his own clinic is hesitant to perform the injections, unless absolutely necessary. The procedure was considered risky by many doctors until a few years ago — mostly because it was new.

Now that it’s been tested, Keefe said, it tends to be overused by patients in a hurry to have a child.