A Japanese woman has placed her baby up for adoption and is suing the sperm donor she used to conceive the child for allegedly lying about his ethnicity. The unnamed woman is suing the baby’s biological father, who she had sex with 10 times before getting pregnant, for 330 million yen ($2.86 million) after she discovered that he’d been dishonest about pretty much everything he’d told her about himself.
- The woman believed the man was the donor of her dreams. The woman, who’s in her 30s and lives in Tokyo, is married and already has a child but wanted another one. Since her husband has a hereditary disorder that carries an increased risk of being passed on, the couple decided to use a donor. That’s where the lying man came in.
- Everything seemed to have gone smoothly enough. The man claimed to be a Japanese man who was educated at Kyoto University and was very successful. However, it wasn’t until after she became pregnant that the truth came out.
- The man wasn’t who he said he was. In fact, he wasn’t Japanese at all but Chinese. Not only that, but he was already married, not single as he’d claimed to be, and hadn’t gone to Kyoto University or any fancy college at all. The woman had been duped.
- The woman would have gotten an abortion. However, given that she didn’t discover the truth until it was too late, she instead decided to place the baby up for adoption and start a lawsuit against the man, citing “emotional distress.”
- Sadly, there aren’t many laws around sperm donation in Japan. A Vice News article reports that it’s largely unregulated and that commercial artificial insemination is rare and pretty scarce. This leads many people to search for alternatives online, which is where this woman met her donor.
- Not everyone supported the woman’s decision to give the baby up. While her lawyer claimed during a press conference that the woman was dealing with physical and emotional distress due to the backlash she’s received for giving the baby up, Japanese child welfare worker Mizuho Sasaki dubbed her “shallow” and accused her of “treat[ing] the child like an object.”
