An Oregon woman says her life began with a mistake — and she is now asking a court to hold powerful institutions accountable. In a lawsuit seeking $17 million, a 44-year-old woman claims fertility workers mistakenly inseminated her mother with the wrong man’s sperm, a mix-up that went undiscovered for more than four decades.
The case, filed last week, targets Oregon Health & Science University and Providence Health & Services of Oregon, accusing them of negligence in a fertility procedure dating back to 1981.
A Family Shaken by a Genetic Revelation
The woman, identified in court documents only as A.P., filed the suit alongside her biological mother, C.W., and the man who raised her, K.W., her legal father. The couple is married and raised A.P. together, believing for decades that K.W. was her biological parent.
That belief collapsed within the past two years, the lawsuit says, when genetic testing revealed no biological connection between A.P. and the man she knew as her father. The filing does not specify why the DNA testing occurred, but notes the widespread rise of consumer genetic tests in recent years.
Further testing, according to the lawsuit, identified another man as A.P.’s biological father — a patient who had provided sperm to the same fertility clinic while attempting to conceive with his own wife. Both couples, the suit alleges, were treated by the same OHSU fertility doctor.
