Couple Wants Criminal Charges Filed : Scandal: They say former UCI fertility clinic director Asch stole four of their eggs. ‘It’s just such a violation of trust.’

Diane and Budge Porter stepped into the media whirlwind over the UC Irvine fertility scandal Tuesday, looked straight into the cameras and demanded that the world-famous fertility doctor whom they say stole Diane Porter’s eggs be brought to justice.

“It was a theft,” said Budge Porter. “We gave no consent for our eggs to be taken or given to someone else.”

The Porters were flown in this week from their rural Nebraska home near Omaha by their Newport Beach lawyer, Theodore Wentworth, to tell the world they believe Ricardo H. Asch, former director of the fertility clinic, took four of Diane Porter’s eggs and inseminated them with another man’s sperm. They said they think Asch then tried unsuccessfully to help a Newport Beach woman get pregnant.

“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “What do you own in your life but yourself and your genetic character and [it was] taken and given to someone else. It’s just such a violation of trust, ethics and morals.”

Asch has denied knowingly engaging in any misconduct. If mistakes occurred, his lawyers say, nurses and other clinic staffers are to blame for mishandling patient records.

The Porters approached Asch in 1991. Budge Porter, a 39-year-old former University of Nebraska football player left paralyzed by a football injury, had been seeing a male fertility specialist in Omaha because his injury had affected his sperm production.

The Porters said they took out a second mortgage on their home, borrowed from family and friends and scraped together $35,000 to pay for visits to Asch. Diane Porter, a former San Juan Capistrano resident, said she clearly remembered the day her eggs were removed as part of the effort to become pregnant.

Like others, she had received fertility drugs that caused her to swell up quickly, adding nearly 20 pounds in days. When she entered the clinic, a nurse looked at her and joked, “ ‘Oh, we over-baked you,’ ” Diane Porter said, adding, “I felt just awful.”

The Porters said they later learned that Asch had harvested 26 of her eggs. From those, they allege, Asch took four without consent. And from the remainder, six embryos were frozen and remain in storage.

Although the treatments from Asch did not produce a baby, Diane Porter later became pregnant with the help of a fertility specialist in Omaha and gave birth to a daughter nearly two years ago.

The couple said they learned of egg switching in May when they were called by members of a clinical panel hired by UCI to investigate allegations made by three whistle-blowers involving Asch and two other fertility doctors.

“They called me and just said that our name has come up and that they see some irregularities with our case,” Diane Porter said. “They asked me a few questions about my procedures and asked me if I could obtain my medical records.”

The Porters have not been able to get their records.

“We blame UCI, we blame Dr. Asch, and our main focus is that criminal charges are brought against Dr. Asch,” Diane Porter said. “He definitely stole something from us that is precious and irreplaceable and we’d like to see the district attorney go after him.

“We put our trust into a doctor we believed to be the best in the world,” she continued. “Going into it we were excited, we had the dream . . . of having our own child and we’re absolutely appalled over what happened.”