Could it happen today? Women seeking infertility care may be wondering if they are safe from the kind of misconduct alleged in a lawsuit filed this week, which accused a doctor of using his own sperm in artificial insemination without the woman’s consent in 1980.

But times have changed, and more safeguards are in place today. Several states have passed laws that specifically prohibit such behavior. And a host of deterrents are in effect everywhere, including the inescapable fact that such misconduct has a good chance of being discovered now that so many people take home DNA tests.

That’s how Sarah Depoian came to sue Dr. Merle Berger, a prominent Boston fertility doctor who has retired. Depoian’s daughter took a DNA test and soon heard from a relative of Berger’s who had also done the test and wanted to know how they were related.

Adam Wolf, Depoian’s lawyer, said he has represented 36 women in similar situations, each involving a different doctor.

Almost all such cases, Wolf said, occurred between 1978, when intrauterine insemination — the practice of inserting sperm directly into the uterus — became prevalent, and 1989, when doctors realized that DNA testing was starting to become more common.

“Could that happen now? Technically it could,’’ Wolf said. “I have not seen an instance of it occurring in the past 10 years.’’

Today, donor sperm comes from sperm banks, where the samples have been cleaned and frozen, or from an individual the mother has asked to donate.

Depoian’s insemination happened at a time when there were no banks of frozen sperm, and doctors had to find a donor to give a fresh specimen when the woman was ovulating. In his 2020 memoir, Berger recounts how “couples who needed donor sperm were treated, in retrospect, remarkably haphazardly.’’ Doctors would “search out healthy-appearing young men’’ and offer them “$50 per donated specimen,’’ he wrote.

“This particular case illustrates how norms have changed in the field,’’ said Katherine Kraschel, assistant professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University. “You could see how, if the norm is collecting a fresh sample from a medical resident on site that day, the opportunity for physicians to do this would be readily available,’’ she said.

But today’s protocols make misconduct like what Berger is accused of “much less likely,’’ she said.

Today, fertility clinics and their laboratories must undergo certification and accreditation in order to be part of their professional organizations, she said.

Such measures, while an improvement, are “not fail-safe,’’ said Jody Madeira, an Indiana University law professor and expert on fertility fraud.

Fertility clinics tend to focus their verification efforts on patients, and not on supervising the doctors who work in them, she said. There are multiple steps in the process, such as when a patient’s sperm is transferred from the laboratory to the insemination room, where doctors can come into contact with sperm samples.

“Everyone thinks that the threat is coming from a patient masquerading as someone they’re not, and no one suspects the doctor of being the one to defraud the patient,’’ Madeira said.

But David Stern, chief executive of IVF Boston, the chain of fertility clinics that Berger helped found six years after Depoian was treated, said his company’s clinics have “a very rigorous chain-of-custody protocol’’ for sperm.

The process, he said, goes like this: Every patient must present identification. The sperm goes into a sealed cup and is passed into the laboratory. There, two people oversee the documentation and processing of the sperm as it goes through the cleaning and preparation steps.

At the time of insemination, the sperm is put into a catheter and someone checks the identification on the sperm and the patient, to make sure the correct sperm is being used. Doctors are not involved in this process at all, Stern said.

“The doctor actually never touches the sperm,’’ he said.

Over the past several years, more than 50 fertility doctors across the country have been accused of fraud in connection with donating sperm, according to a New York Times analysis last year. Just last month, a University of Washington fertility doctor voluntarily surrendered his license after he was accused of replacing a patient’s selected donor sperm with his own, and fathering a child as a result.

The incident happened in 2009 when the doctor, Christopher Herndon, was practicing reproductive medicine as a clinical fellow at a California hospital.

In response, at least a dozen states since 2019 have enacted fertility fraud laws making it a criminal or civil offense for doctors to inseminate a patient using their own sperm without consent. In Iowa, a doctor who uses his own semen on a woman can be found guilty of a felony, punishable with up to five years in prison, and forced to register as a sex offender, under a law passed last year. And Texas passed a measure four years ago that makes it a sexual assault — punishable by up to two years in jail — for a health care provider to implant human sperm, eggs, or embryos from an unauthorized donor.

“More and more people are seeing this for what it is — a form of medical rape,’’ said Kara Rubinstein-Deyerin, chief executive officer of Right to Know, a Seattle-based nonprofit that advocates for people seeking to know their genetic identity. “These doctors knew what they were doing was wrong, which is precisely why they didn’t tell their patients.’’

Dr. Paula Amato, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said the society “supports fertility fraud legislation.’’

“Recent cases have highlighted that there is still a need for this type of legislation to protect patients and hold physicians accountable,’’ said Amato, a fertility specialist at Oregon Health & Science University.

But Kraschel, the Northeastern professor, said that existing antifraud and consumer protection laws — the statutes cited in Depoian’s suit — are sufficient. She questioned whether more regulation would deter the very few doctors willing to commit fraud in today’s environment.

Fertility care is so expensive that it is out of reach for many, Karaschel noted. “Hyperregulating’’ to try to catch a few outliers could make treatment even more costly and worsen disparities in access, she said.

Almost always, doctors found to have engaged in such misconduct have multiple victims, said Madeira, the Indiana University fertility fraud specialist. She has studied about 50 cases of doctor fertility fraud since the 1940s and has not found a single case where there was just one victim. During the 1970s and 1980s, a fertility doctor from Indiana, Donald Cline, inseminated dozens of patients with his own sperm, which became the subject of a Netflix documentary film, “Our Father.’’

“Where there is one case, there is likely to be more,’’ Madeira said. “It could be they’re playing God or they want to spread their seed . . . or perhaps there are darker reasons.’’

Felice J. Freyer can be reached at felice.freyer@globe.com. Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com.