Melissa Alberti-Araujo subjected her newborn daughter, Nadine, to a battery of tests after she called Acu-Gen to complain that her test results had been wrong. She said Wang came on the line and insisted Nadine had male DNA.
"We panicked," said Alberti-Araujo, who is studying to be a family therapist in Three Rivers, Calif., and joined the class-action suit against the company.
"We did an ultrasound to make sure she didn't have testicles stuck up in there or anything. She was fine, but it was real emotional for us."
The feelings can linger.
Plaintiff Anissa Iverson, who works as an office manager at Disney Studios in Burbank, mourned when she discovered that the baby she expected to be a girl was a boy.
She had already washed and folded more than $500 worth of clothes for the daughter, to be named Sydney. When she and her husband realized they would be having a son, they changed the baby's name to Zachary.
Iverson later became pregnant again, this time with a girl. The clothes bought for Sydney came out of storage, but the name could not be resurrected.
"I felt like Sydney had died," she said. "It was a tainted name."
Instead, she named her daughter Courtney.
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karen.kaplan@latimes.com
