In an incident that sounds more like an episode of Law & Order SVU than real life, a former UCSF fertility doctor is being accused of covertly artificially inseminating a patient with his own sperm.

The doctor, Christopher Herndon, was a fellow at UCSF from 2008 to 2011, per the Chronicle. (He’s now based in Washington State.) One of the patients he assisted with artificial insemination around 2009 apparently realized last year that something was wrong: She thought she had two children with the same sperm donor father, but genetic testing showed that they didn’t have the same paternity.

A subsequent ancestry test reportedly revealed a familial connection to the Herndon name, and a private investigator confirmed that one of Herndon's siblings was the biological uncle or aunt of her second child, as the Seattle Times reported.

The woman, whose identity has not been released, reported the alleged violation to the Washington Medical Commission last summer, and Herndon surrendered his state medical license. But his actions have apparently raised some serious questions within UCSF, and hospital staff has had to contact the other patients he treated over a decade ago. Staff has reportedly been working through the list since the beginnning of December and offering genetic testing for families.

In a statement, UCSF expressed their condemnation of Herndon's actions, deeming them "inexcusable" and stating their intention to explore all legal options, including potential civil and criminal actions.

It’s unclear how many times Herndon has allegedly committed “fertility fraud,” which is a rare but increasingly occurring trend when medical practicioners use their own genetic material without patient consent. As the Chronicle reported, Donor Deceived, a website tracking such cases, has identified similar instances involving nine doctors in California, resulting in 18 pregnancies dating back to the 1970s. The widespread accessibility of genetic testing has brought these cases to light.

Image of UCSF Fertility Clinic at Mission Bay via Google Street View.

A gut-wrenching video is making the rounds on social media of a woman in crisis giving birth on a sidewalk near the Tenderloin, though thankfully the SF Fire Department says the woman and child are now both doing okay.

We definitely need to preface this post with an obligatory content warning/trigger warning, as we are embedding a graphic and heartbreaking video. But as KTVU reports, a woman gave birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, and according to the video that’s being widely shared on Instagram, this took place near the intersection of Geary and Larkin streets.

Again, this video is extremely difficult to watch, and you may not wish to scroll further because it’s so graphic.

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Whomever first posted this video has an Instagram account that seems to specialize in shock videos, and does not use a particularly sensitive tone. “Woman gives birth on the street after smoking crack all afternoon according to the witness who filmed the video,” the Instagram poster says. “Happened at a two minute walk from Union Square, in San Francisco on Geary Street 900 block.”

The video is rather brief, but the baby can be heard crying. A good Samaritan stopped to help, telling the woman, "It's going to be ok, just relax," and "Don't move, it's going to be fine. They are coming to pick you up."

But the SF Fire Department confirmed to KTVU that the incident did take place in San Francisco this past Thursday, and HIPPA privacy rules prevent them from releasing the woman’s name.

Thankfully, though, the department said in a statement to KTVU regarding the infant and mother that “both patients were taken to the hospital in stable condition."

Related: Five-Year-Old Girl Killed In Freeway Shooting In Fremont [SFist]

Image: Nobuyuki Kondo via Wikimedia Commons

When anesthesiologist Mimi Lee was diagnosed with breast cancer just ten days before her wedding to financial analyst Stephen Findley, the couple was shocked. As the Chronicle and NBC Bay Area explain, at 41-years-old Lee was eager to have her own biological children with Findley but concerned that her age and the coming cancer treatments would leave her infertile. Through in-vitro fertilization the couple created five embryos, which were then frozen. The two signed an agreement at UCSF, where the procedure was performed, agreeing that the embryos would be given to one of them only in the event of the other’s death and could be thawed and discarded in the event of both of their deaths or, as Findley is firm on, their separation.

Indeed, Findley did file for divorce in 2013. And today the first hearing takes place in San Francisco to decide the embryos' fate, with Lee and Findley expected to take the stand later in the week.

“It is the first time the California courts will address the issue,” said Lee Wolosky, a partner with the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner, which has represented Lee throughout the case. “The cases in other states have really come out all over the place ... but no court has ever held against a woman for whom the embryos in dispute represent her only chance to have biological children."

As more couples choose the procedure, there are now more than 600,000 "cryopreserved embryos" in the US.

Wolosky contends that the agreement served to provide disclosure of the procedure’s risks. The contract, he argues, was between the couple and UCSF, not Lee and Findley. Lee's lawyers, the San Jose Mercury News reports, are urging Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo to find that discarding the embryos would foreclose an infertile woman's ability to "realize the fundamental and constitutionally protected bond of a parent and a child."

The question of what happens to frozen embryos when a couple separates was raised recently and highly publicly when Nick Loeb, Sofia Vergara's ex-fiancé, penned this New York Times Op-Ed about the couple's frozen embryos, which Vergara wanted destroyed but which he considered to be a form of life due to his "religious beliefs." "A woman is entitled to bring a pregnancy to term even if the man objects," Loeb wrote. "Shouldn’t a man who is willing to take on all parental responsibilities be similarly entitled to bring his embryos to term even if the woman objects?" Last month Vergara was dogged by "pro-lifers" demanding that she let her embryos, described by the protestors as "children" or "daughters" live. The protest took place at the Magic Mike XXL premier.

Today the Bold Italic brings us a new piece by local literary wunderkind Michelle Tea (Valencia, Rose of No Man's Land), who is actually not a wunderkind anymore. She's 40. She's an established S.F. writer and, like many a bohemian around her age, she suddenly heard the loud ticking of her biological clock and decided she needed to have a baby. The trouble is, like many women her age, she realized she might be too old already, and she wasn't even in a committed a relationship. "Burst into tears before your computer. Flash on the 'I can’t believe I forgot to have children!' T-shirt with the picture of the ’50s-era woman sobbing into her hands.

Being the avid memoirist that she is, Tea wrote a couple of pieces just two months ago for XO Jane about trying to get pregnant as a single, 40-year-old lesbian, and about how her friends tried to dissuade her from child-rearing in a most San Franciscan fashion. "You can’t just go and put the baby in the other room when you want to have sex," and "You like to take off and go to Paris," they said.

But Tea was determined to spawn, and she tried for a year using a children’s oral medicine syringe from Walgreens and sperm from a drag queen/activist friend named Quentin, to no avail. It turns out she had fibroids all over her ovaries and a fairly low egg count.

But, as luck would have it, she's not single anymore. She now has a terrific new girlfriend ten years her junior, and that's the chapter she now tells in the Bold Italic. Girlfriend Dashiell, who's "more like a boy than a girl," is therefore "not keen on the idea of getting pregs." So, they're going to have one of her eggs inseminated and Tea plans to carry it, and you can be sure we will hear more tales about the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and childbirth in the years to come.

[Bold Italic]

CBS5 reports that at least five Bay Area pregnant women in their early third trimesters have been admitted to intensive care units due to complications with the H1N1 swine flu. Two of the women are no longer in ICU, and all of the fetuses appear to be fine. Some of the women were apparently in perfect health before contracting the virus, and others had unnamed underlying conditions.

According to CBS5, the Center for Disease Control said many pregnant women who are infected with H1N1 will not have a problem, but pregnant women are more likely to get sick in general and have more serious problems with seasonal flu, due to lowered immune systems. The Center for Disease Control has info on how to avoid contracting the virus, swine flu symptoms, and what to do if you get sick.

The World Health Organization declared the swine flu a pandemic on June 11, and many fear that the virus will mutate and come back even stronger in the fall and winter months, which is what happened with the flu pandemic in 1918.

After women were again chastised warned about drinking coffee during early pregnancy last month in a Kaiser study, it looks like the media is ready to strike again, but now taking it to the next level with deadly birth defects that women have absolutely no responsibility for or control over.

Why such a small study is making headlines in print and on television, we have no idea. The lives of pregnant women are already so limited, what with no drinking allowed, no drugging allowed, no hot-tubbing allowed, etc, etc. Despite the fact that 80% of miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities and have absolutely nothing to do with behavioral or lifestyle choices, a recent, small-scale Kaiser study says that women in the first 16 weeks of pregnancy who drink 200 mg or more of caffeine are twice as likely to have a miscarriage than those who consume less or none at all. The Oakland-based study included a paltry 1,063 women, with 16% (or 170 women, according to our math) suffering miscarriages.

There are, of course, some reasonable arguments for lowering caffeine intake during pregnancy. It is commonsensical to to suggest moderation in all areas of life during pregnancy. But is there really a need to freak out pregnant women any more than they're already freaked out? If scientists are calling the study important but statistically insignificant, aren't they jumping the gun just a little bit with all the warnings?

On the upside, Safeway now may see a decline in Taster's Choice Coffee theft.

Read more about the study here or here.