JEWSINTHED ON THE COVER
An Unknown
Mishpachah Longtime Jewish Detroit fertility doctor used his own sperm to inseminate patients, new DNA tests show.
MAYA GOLDMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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hen sisters Lynn Neher and Jaime Hall, then Lynn and Jaime Brown, were growing up in a non-Jewish household in Bloomfield Hills in the 1960s, they thought of themselves as polar opposites. Jaime had dark hair, pale skin and blue eyes. Lynn had blond hair, olive skin and green eyes. They had a running joke in the family that Jaime was the mailman’s daughter, Lynn told the Jewish News. Jaime, of course, wasn’t the mailman’s daughter. But decades later, she and Lynn found out that they were, indeed, half-sisters. They’d both been conceived via artificial insemination at the Detroit practice of Dr. Philip Peven. Lynn’s sperm donor was then an intern at Grace Hospital. And Jaime’s biological father, as now suggested by DNA tests, was Dr. Peven himself. “A BIT OF A SHOCK” Jaime, 61, and Lynn, 63, began to question their true parentage in 2008, when their stepfather passed away and their stepsister decided to spill the family secret she’d promised to tell upon his death: Their dad wasn’t their biological father. “I just said, ‘Yeah, right. Like, I believe that.’ I mean, just talk about utter shock after utter shock,” Lynn said. A few weeks later, Jaime got in touch with Dr. Peven, who she said confirmed he’d helped their parents with fertility treatments. (Dr. Peven did not respond to multiple interview requests from the JN
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for this story, and his son Roger Peven declined to comment on his behalf.) Dr. Peven told her that he didn’t have records of their births, but that he thought Lynn’s biological father had been a resident at the hospital. They often used interns or residents who looked like the dads as donors, Jaime says he told her on that first call. Jaime eventually got her mother to admit that Jaime’s donor had been a close family friend. In 2015, Jaime and Lynn’s mother passed away. Lynn ordered an AncestryDNA testing kit, but it didn’t lead her to any information about her biological father. In 2018, she decided to provide a sample to 23andMe as well — soon, she learned of a half-sister. She connected with the sister, who’d been raised by their shared father. The sister told Lynn that her dad had, in fact, worked as an intern at Grace Hospital around the time Lynn was born. At this point, Jaime decided to do a DNA test as well. She’d already connected with the family of her supposed donor. She’d assumed her results would tell her she was nearly 100% Scottish. But that wasn’t what she found. “To see that I was 50% Ashkenazi Jew was a bit of a shock!” Jaime said. Through the other relatives who came up as close DNA matches on AncestryDNA and 23andMe, Jaime deduced that she was related to Dr. Peven in some way. When Dr. Peven’s grandson showed up on her platform as her nephew, she became more certain the doctor was her biological father. (Jaime shared her 23andMe results with the JN.) Eventually, Jaime connected with Dr. Peven again. She said he told her that her mom had brought in her own donor sample, but that he threw it away and used his own because he knew it was “pure and viable.” In her conversations with Dr. Peven, Jaime has come to think of him as a scientific man who was just trying to help families become whole. But she still wonders about the ethics of his actions.
