An Ancestry.com test led to an Idaho woman’s disturbing discovery about her origins.
An Ancestry.com test led to an Idaho woman’s disturbing discovery about her origins.
Kelli Rowlette used the popular genealogy service to learn more about her family’s story — but was surprised when the website suggested a parent-child relationship between Rowlette and a man she had never heard of. She assumed it was a mistake, and told her parents she was disappointed by the inaccurate result.
At the time, Rowlette didn’t know that more than 36 years ago, her parents had tapped a fertility doctor to artificially inseminate her mother.
Rowlette and her parents, Sally Ashby and Howard Fowler, claim in a lawsuit filed in U. S. District Court in Idaho last week that her mother’s fertility doctor used his own sperm to get her pregnant with Rowlette.
The lawsuit accuses Gerald. E. Mortimer, a now-retired obstetrician gynecologist, of fraud and medical negligence.
In the early ’80s, Mortimer diagnosed Fowler with a low sperm count and sperm motility, and Ashby with a tipped uterus, according to the lawsuit.
They struggled to conceive and Mortimer suggested that Ashby be inseminated with a combination of sperm from her husband and an anonymous donor with physical traits selected by the couple, the lawsuit says.
They requested a donor who was in college, resembled Fowler, was taller than 6 feet and had brown hair and blue eyes.
Mortimer said that he had found a match, and the couple agreed to move forward with the procedure.
But the lawsuit claims that Mortimer – who did not match the couple’s specifications – used his own sperm.
Ashby became pregnant and Mortimer delivered Rowlette in May, 1981, without revealing that he was her biological father.
The doctor cried when the family said they were moving to Washington state, the lawsuit states.
Neither Rowlette nor her parents knew of the secret until the genealogy test was ordered.
Rowlette called her mother to express her “disappointment in the unreliability of the service,” and named the man to whom she was inexplicably linked.
Ashby, of course, recognized the doctor’s name.
“Ms. Ashby contacted Mr. Fowler, now her ex-husband, and relayed the information she obtained from Ancestry.com. Mr. Fowler was also devastated by the news,” the lawsuit states.
The couple “painfully labored” over whether they should tell their daughter the truth.
Several months later, Rowlette made the shocking discovery on her own.
She was helping her father sort through old papers when she came across her birth certificate, which was signed by Dr. Mortimer.
A “horrified” Rowlette contacted her parents to relay what she had found.
“Since discovering Dr. Mortimer’s actions, Ms. Ashby, Mr. Fowler, and Mrs. Rowlette have been suffering immeasurably,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit alleges that Mortimer “breached the standard of care as to Ms. Ashby, Mr. Fowler, and Mrs. Rowlette by inseminating Ms. Ashby with a mixture of genetic material from multiple different sources.”
