This is interesting. The poskim talk at length about the halachic issues involved in using a sperm donor to conceive a child. Stories like this - a severe breach of medical ethics - support those who are concerned with the terrible ramifications of permitting it.
Not knowing who the real father is can cause tremendous halachic problems. This guy was giving out his sperm like a faucet gives water. It is not too remote to think about a reality where brother and sister unknowingly get married רח"ל.
Of course I am not paskening anything - that is for the Gedolei Ha-Poskim. But such stories have to be taken into account when paskening. Not a simple matter.
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A REVERED family doctor may have fathered hundreds of children using his own sperm - sometimes without the parents' knowledge - over four decades, The Sun can reveal.
Dr Philip Peven is credited with delivering around 9,000 babies during his 40-year career in Detroit, Michigan.
Now a group of siblings who found they were genetically matched after doing an online DNA test have discovered they are related to Dr Peven, who was their parents' doctor, and believe he is their father.
One of the siblings - Jaime Hall - approached Dr Peven in December 2019 and says that he admitted to being her father and to using his own sperm to father a multitude of babies, both as a sperm donor in the late 40s and in his medical practice as an OB-GYN in Detroit, MI.
While both her parents are now dead, Jaime said they believed her biological father was a family friend who had given them a sperm sample - and had no idea Dr Peven used his own sperm.
Jaime says she has been matched up to five half siblings on the website 23andMe, since she submitted her DNA test, but believes there could be hundreds more Peven siblings out there.
“All of us were born in the same hospital, all of our birth certificates show Dr Peven as our OBGYN, not our father," Jaime, 61, of Traverse City, MI, told The Sun.
“I then discovered one of Dr Peven’s grandsons on there, he came up as a half nephew sharing 12.3% DNA with me.
“That served as the final, undeniable proof. I share more DNA with Dr Peven's grandson than my sister Lynn's daughter."
Jaime explained how, in the early 50s, her parents visited Dr Peven at Grace Hospital in Detroit, Michigan for help conceiving.
In 1956, Joyce gave birth to Jaime’s elder sister Lynn, and in 1959 she gave birth to Jaime - both babies were delivered by Dr Peven.
Jaime had no reason to doubt her parentage until 2008, when one of their stepsisters told her and Lynn that the man who had brought them up was not their biological father.
So, in 2017, she conducted a paternity test that confirmed this.
In 2019, she traced her family tree using two genetic testing and analysis services – ancestry.com and 23andMe.
She said: “I discovered that I was 50 percent Ashkenazi Jew, but no one in my family is Ashkenazi Jew. It didn’t make sense.
“My sister Lynn came up as a close match, but she had no Ashkenazi Jew in her DNA analysis…there were also lots of other matches for me as close family, which was exceedingly strange.
“As far as I knew I only had one sister, Lynn.”
Over the next year Jaime undertook a rigorous analysis of her genetic history, meticulously piecing together a series of half siblings that she never knew she had.
“I started messaging everyone who appeared as a close match to me,” Jaime, who runs a company called Laser Pain Relief Center of America with her husband Todd, 51, said.
Over the next year, Jaime claims she has received numerous calls and emails from people who all share high proportions of DNA with her, and who were all delivered by Dr Peven, who is currently the oldest living graduate of the University of Michigan's medical school.
In January of 2020, Jaime teamed up with one of the half-sisters she had discovered through DNA analysis, who has asked not to be named, and decided to finally meet Dr Peven in the flesh.
They found Dr Peven, now 104, who is still living independently in Southfield, Michigan.
He explained to them he would inseminate his patients with a fresh sperm sample - either his own or one of his doctors - in a simple procedure using a pipette while the woman lay down in surgical stirrups.
“We just turned up at his door and walked right in there," she said.
“He was all hunched and had a walker, he said he has neuropathy, but his brain was very sharp.
“Initially we just said ‘You knew our parents, you delivered us’ and he invited us in and we got talking.
“I showed him a picture of my parents and he zoomed in on the baby, me.
Jaime went to visit Dr Peven with another of her newly discovered siblings.
“He sat on a chair and we both sat on the floor at his feet, like his two little daughters.
“He said: ‘I was a pioneer you know, I was the first to ever be doing anything like this.’
“We said ‘you not only delivered us… we want to thank you for fathering us. Without you we wouldn’t be here.’
“He asked how we knew, and we told him about the DNA tests.
“He told us that he was not the only doctor at the hospital who was donating sperm - there was a group of doctors and between them they fathered many children.
“He said he had been donating sperm since 1947, since he was doing research in Chicago.
“I said ‘Did you ever think that DNA would be around to bring all these children back to you?
“He said: ‘I never thought this would be possible. It’s like a fairy-tale isn’t it?’ My daughter think I could have fathered thousands of children.'"
Jaime's sister, Lynn Neher, 63, told The Sun she did similar DNA tests online and discovered her father was one of Dr Peven's resident doctors. She has also been matched to half siblings who she has contacted.
Despite the shocking revelations, Jaime and Lynn feels positive about the whole experience.
“I don’t look at it in a negative way. These women, my mother included, came to him desperate, and he gave them something that they all wanted," Jaime said.
