DES MOINES, Iowa (KCRG-TV) – A lawsuit claims the former head of the University of Iowa OB-GYN department secretly used his own sperm to get at least ten patients pregnant. The children only learned of the fertility fraud decades later. One brother and sister took an ancestry.com DNA test and discovered the father they grew up with wasn’t their biological father. Instead, their father was University of Iowa Health Care’s Dr. John Randall, who was the head of the OB-GYN department in the 1950s.

Iowa’s Fraud in Assisted Reproduction Act became law in 2022 as a way to hold medical employees accountable when reproductive measures are changed without the parents’ consent. But now the Iowa Supreme Court has to decide if the law can be used to penalize past actions. Doctor John Randall died in 1959.

The advocacy group ‘Right to Know’ had a hand in helping the Act get passed, and its founder said the law was intended to help all victims of fraud going forward, but especially providing closure to ones from the past. However, state attorneys didn’t interpret the Act this way because those children were born before the law existed. The Supreme Court has heard the arguments in the case, but it will take a few weeks for them to issue their final ruling.