Steckler Wayne & Love has filed suit again a St. Louis sperm bank after a baby was diagnosed with Thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder that in severe cases requires a lifetime of blood transfusions.
From the Riverfront Times
It was never supposed to show up in the baby that a St. Louis couple conceived in 2015 using donor sperm.
That’s because the donor had been screened for just that genetic disease — or at least, that’s what the paperwork from the Manhattan Cryobank had stated. But according to a lawsuit first filed in St. Louis city circuit court last November, the sperm donor did indeed carry the trait for thalassemia alpha, an incurable disease that impairs the body’s ability to manufacture blood cells and the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin.
The lawsuit, which was transferred this week to the federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri, accuses the New York-based sperm bank of defrauding the local couple by misrepresenting its screening process for sperm donors.
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The lawsuit quotes from the agreement signed between the sperm bank and couple in 2015. The paperwork, which the couple signed before buying the sperm from Donor 184, stated that medical tests showed “no evidence of such inheritable diseases… in the donor(s) who semen will be used in the Recipients.”
But in November 2015, when Elliott’s partner gave birth, their child was soon diagnosed with thalassemia alpha. The lawsuit cites a cost analysis for a lifetime medical care: $3.6 million, which is how much the the lawsuit is now seeking in a jury trial.
Published by Danny Wicentowski
Fri, Feb 8, 2019
