Suit Claimed Wrong Sperm Used at Saddleback Center

A Rancho Santa Margarita woman who turned to the Saddleback Center for Reproductive Health in 1992 for help in becoming pregnant was inseminated with the sperm of the wrong man, according to a 1993 lawsuit.

“She felt like she was violated, just one step short of rape,” the woman’s brother-in-law, Craig Wilson of Diamond Bar, said Thursday.

Vickie Ann Wheeler and Dale J. Wheeler, both 43, went to the Saddleback clinic on Oct. 5, 1992, to seek in-vitro fertilization therapy with Dr. Jane L. Frederick after three years of trying to conceive a child, according to the suit filed in Orange County Superior Court.

Three weeks later, the couple returned to the clinic where Frederick--an associate of doctors Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio Stone, UC Irvine fertility experts--performed an artificial insemination procedure on Vickie Ann Wheeler, the suit said.

Minutes after the procedure, Frederick alerted Wheeler that she had “inseminated [Vickie Ann Wheeler] with the sperm of an unknown male, rather than with the previously donated sperm of her husband,” the suit said.

Frederick’s colleagues are at the center of a nationally publicized scandal in which the doctors have been accused by the University of California of egg stealing, research misconduct, financial improprieties and insurance fraud. Frederick, 37, an employee of the Center for Reproductive Health, has not been accused by the university of any wrongdoing.

Because the Wheelers’ lawsuit, which also names UCI Medical Center, ended in a sealed settlement that prevents the parties from discussing the case, the Wheelers declined to comment. Frederick could not be reached.

But according to Wilson, Vickie Ann Wheeler went into shock. In a panic, Frederick told Wheeler that she didn’t keep track of patients’ faces and names and that the wrong chart had been on the door, said Wilson, whom Wheeler called immediately “in a panic” after the mix-up.

“It’s like a factory down there,” Wilson said. “They have more business than they can handle. They put the wrong chart and the wrong [sperm vial] on the door.”

Frederick told Vickie Ann Wheeler that she would have to wait two weeks to find out if she was pregnant and gave her large quantities of birth control pills, Wilson said.

“They told her they couldn’t do anything about it,” Wilson remembered. “They wouldn’t even reveal who the donor was.”

Vickie Ann Wheeler had to undergo AIDS testing, and Asch personally took over her case, Wilson said. After two nerve-racking weeks, the Wheelers found out they were not going to have a baby, Wilson said. They never found out what happened to Dale Wheeler’s frozen sperm.

The couple, who were never able to conceive, adopted a baby girl in December, Wilson said. They settled their suit with Saddleback, Frederick and UCI in June, 1993, he said.

“I think it was a pittance, and they wanted to get it behind them,” Wilson said.

Frederick was hired by the fertility doctors in 1990. The USC graduate worked at both the now-defunct UCI Center for Reproductive Health and the Saddleback clinic.