16 | DECEMBER 24 • 2020 

IN 
THE
JEWS D
ON THE COVER

delivered many Detroit Jews. 
Sy Ziegelman, also a retired 
OB-GYN in the Detroit area, 
remembers Dr. Peven as a 
respected doctor in the com-
munity, who liked to fish in 
his spare time. Ziegelman first 
met Dr. Peven as an intern at 
Sinai Hospital in 1963. He was 
“rather well-thought of, kind 
of a gentleman,” Ziegelman 
said. “He was considered to 
be a very competent obstetri-
cian-gynecologist.”
It wasn’t unusual for medical 
students to sell sperm as a way 
of making extra money back 
in the day, Ziegelman said. In 
fact, Dr. Peven has mentioned 
to some of his donor children 
that he did just that, they told 
JN. 
But Ziegelman said he’d 
never heard of Dr. Peven using 
his own samples to inseminate 
his infertility patients without 
their knowledge. “I would 
be rather surprised — that 
doesn’t really sound like him,” 
Ziegelman said. 
Roger Peven, the doctor’s 
son, said in a statement that 
his dad “has lived a remark-
able life,” as a first-generation 
American and Army MASH 
surgeon. Roger also said he 
knew nothing of artificial 
insemination or his dad’s role 
in the practice. 
“Learning about it now 
does not in any way affect 
how I feel personally about 
my dad,” he said. “Regardless 
of the appeal of this story, the 
bottom line to me is that if 
women unable to conceive in 
their marriage came to my dad 
for his professional expertise 
and conceived a healthy child 
through artificial insemina-
tion, that’s good, regardless of 
the donor’s identity.” 
“I don’t know the number 
of biologically related folks 
my dad has through artificial 
insemination. I respect their 
privacy and wish them, and 
their families, all well,” he said. 

FERTILITY FRAUD
In the 1950s, artificial insem-
ination was viewed by the 
public as a form of adultery, 
said Indiana University law 
professor Jody Madeira. But 
as the practice became more 
widely accepted, an actual form 
of deception in the field began 
to take hold: swapping out 
one sperm sample for another, 
a practice known as fertility 
fraud.
According to Madeira, a 
fertility fraud expert, there 
are between 20 and 30 known 
U.S. cases of doctors using 
their own sperm to artificially 
inseminate a patient. 
But prior to now, Madeira 
had only heard of two such 
cases dating back to the 1940s 
and 50s. That would make Dr. 
Peven — whose earliest known 
use of his own sperm was in 
1959 with Jaime’s birth — one 
of the first to engage in such 
practices.
It’s “interesting when one 
of these earlier cases breaks 
through, because then I think 
you get a complicated genera-
tional comparison of what was 
viewed as a harm and when,” 
Madeira said. Though she per-
sonally believes these practices 
were just as unethical in the 
1940s as they are today, doc-
tors in the mid-20th century 
operated under different social 
norms, she said. 
Many people who later find 
out their fertility doctor was 
their donor had been told the 
donor would be a resident 
or intern from the hospital, 
Madeira said. This was the case 
in at least one of the families 
treated by Dr. Peven who the 
JN spoke to for the article. 
Madeira said there’s no 
known connection between 
doctors who’ve used their own 
samples. “This is an idea that 
can occur, I think, to many 
smart people at one time,” she 
said. Some do it for conve-
nience, or because they’d begun 

to donate sperm as young doc-
tors, as Dr. Peven supposedly 
had.
The world of fertility fraud 
came under additional pub-
lic scrutiny this month with 
the release of the new HBO 
documentary Baby God, which 
details the story of a Las Vegas 
fertility doctor who also used 
his own sperm to inseminate 
his patients. Jaime decided to 
go public with her story to the 
JN after reading about the doc-
umentary. 
Even though Jaime and her 
half-siblings don’t think Dr. 
Peven meant to cause harm by 
using his own sperm to insem-
inate their mothers, they still 
question the morality of his 
actions — after all, they assume 
their mothers didn’t know. 
But Dr. Peven believed him-
self to be on the cutting edge of 
fertility and obstetric advances, 
he reportedly told his donor 
children. Jaime said he told her 
he never thought it would be 
possible for donor-conceived 
children to figure out who their 
donors were via at-home DNA 
tests.
“I think sometimes he may 
have just looked at it as, he’s 
more of a scientist, doing what 
he did, than the fact that what 
he was doing was just absolute-
ly Wild West,” Jaime said. 
At the height of Dr. Peven’s 
practice, the ethics surround-
ing fertility treatments were 
indeed different. But according 
to Madeira, a doctor using 
his own sperm for artificial 
insemination without inform-
ing the patient is “a violation 
of informed consent,” she said. 
“You can’t tell patients that 
you’re doing one thing … and 
then do another.” 

GRATEFUL TO BE HERE
Jean Landes, 55, of Beaverton, 
Ore., learned that Dr. Peven 
was her biological father in 
September 2019 (though she 
prefers the term “donor dad”). 

continued from page 15

“I FEEL LIKE A 
PART OF ME 
... THAT WAS 
MISSING IS NOW 
FOUND.”

— JEAN LANDES

FROM TOP: Jean Landes and her dad, 

Oleh Kostetsky. Landes with “donor 

dad” Peven earlier this year. Landes’ 

hands side-by-side with Dr. Peven’s. 

COURTESY OF JEAN LANDES

