Bartlett, Illinois - Danielle Rizzo's son is screaming. He is planted in the middle of the lobby of his elementary school, clinging to rainbow-coloured blocks as she gently explains that she is here - off schedule, in the middle of the day - to take him to a doctor's appointment. But the first-grader is not listening.His little brother, who is also going to the appointment, is nearby, not moving.
Rizzo hopes her children will cope better as they grow older, but for now, she knows they are suffering. Rizzo says they were eager to start their family and decided that Rizzo, younger by two years, would carry the baby. For months, the couple scoured online profiles to find just the right sperm donor.He was blond and blue-eyed, 6-foot-1, 240 pounds, and appeared to be smart and accomplished. His profile said he had a master's degree and was working as a medical photographer. His hobbies included long-distance running, reading and art.
She and her partner took turns running the boys to therapies. But the more months that passed, the more help the boys seemed to need. Instead of one day off, she started taking two, then three. And because of their unusual role in modern reproduction, the effect of those mutations can be amplified. Popular donors can father 10, 20, 100 or even more progeny - each potentially carrying the same genetic risk factors.
Rizzo filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in July 2017. In her complaint, she alleged that his online profile was a lie and that he was not an "appropriate candidate for sperm donation." She sued Idant and Daxor, Idant's former parent company, under the state's consumer fraud and deceptive practices act.
Officials from Daxor, Idant's former parent company, said in a statement that Rizzo's lawsuit was "meritless." In court filings, Idant attorneys called the accusations by Rizzo "inflammatory, specious and dangerous," and said her claims did not establish that the company "knew any of the alleged representations to be false."
"We would deny participation to a donor in our program if he or any first-degree relative had a history of autism," the company said. For more than 20 years, Scherer's lab, based at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, has been collecting, cataloguing and trying to find patterns in the DNA of families affected by autism. It has more than 20,000 samples. A similar project, called SPARK and funded by the Simons Foundation in New York, has amassed 85,000.
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