Hey, it's Stephanie. In this bonus episode, I wanted to share some parts of the June tenth trial we didn't get to in episode seven. Ultimately, you know how this trial ends. Judge Mata ruled in Clayton's favor and referred the matter to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for review of Laura Owens's actions. This family court trial was jam packed because there was a two hour time limit, So in this bonus episode, I wanted to go back to
the experts testimonies. Laura Owens's team brought in doctor Michael Medchill, a retired OBGYN who said he had delivered over twenty thousand babies before the trial. Doctor Medschill reviewed medical records provided by David Jingris and reached a notable conclusion.
Doctor Medschill, based on your review of Laura's medical records that you've identified in your report, did you form any opinions at all regarding whether or not she was pregnant in twenty twenty three at any time?
Absolutely, I believe she was pregnant with over ninety nine percent probability.
But the validity of the medical records doctor Medschell reviewed were a point of contention.
You understand, Laura has admitted to faking medical records in this case.
Yes, this became a central point of dispute during cross examination, especially because Laura had already admitted under oath both at her deposition and again on June tenth, to doctoring medical records. But there was something even more stunning about doctor Medschell's testimony, a moment that became infamous in coverage of the case. Here's David Jingers.
During the trial, mister Eckert has said that he doesn't believe that a pregnancy was possible here because there was no intercourse. Do you have an opinion about that? Uh, regarding general, not regarding him or her, but in general.
Well, it's said that men are like basketball players. They dribble before they shoot. They also dribble afterwards. And if you are rubbing genitalia together, it is possible to get pregnant.
After this moment that later became etched into the lore of this trial, Jingers asked doctor Medschill to address the elephant in the room head on, and he doubled down.
How much weight would you assign to the fact that mister Ecker denied sexual intercourse. Is that significant to the question of whether she was pregnant or is it a minor point.
It has nothing to do with whether she was pregnant.
This testimony gave me pause. I always understood penetrative sex to be a near universal precursor to conception, so I called my own expert.
My name is doctor Marissa Weiss. I'm a board certified OBGIN. I currently am practicing in the space of infertility, which into so specialty fellowship in.
Doctor Weiss specializes in infertility which means she works with the science of conception every day.
Probably the most common comment I get from my patients again who are patients who are actively trying to conceive, is how surprised people are at the likelihood of conception on any given month. You know, when we are given kind of sex at in middle school, we're led to believe that if you have untregeted intercourse, there's basically a
one hundred percent chance you're getting pregnant. But in reality, even with intentional, well timed intercourse around the time of ovulation, your odds of pregnancy on any good month or twenty percent. Contrary to kind of what we're told in middle school, and high school on any given month, it's more likely that you won't get pregnant.
Importantly, what doctor Weiss is talking about here is vaginal intercourse, not oral sex, and there is a huge caveat that. Penetrative sex also has to occur at the time of ovulation, which means there's a small window on any given month that a person can conceive. Another part of trial that was stuck in my head was the detail about Laura running to the bathroom after the blowjob?
Where did you complete our mouth both times?
What happened the same second time?
She ran straight to the bathroom.
Wouldn'tick told me he always found it to be a suspicious detail in the chain of events. Would Nick said he never ruled out a kind of spit maneuver. But I wondered if it was even possible for someone to impregnate themselves this way. So I asked doctor Weiss if sperm could even survive that long.
Sperm motility decreases within minutes in the saliva, and most sperm are kind of immobilizer dead within fifteen to thirty minutes, So in some extent, it kind of depends on how long is you know, elapsing between the ejaculation and then the collection. In theory, if you did it within seconds or minutes, even I guess there's a slight chance. But again then you also run into all the other things has to be around the time, bobulation and everything else,
so it's kind of a Swiss cheese model. A lot of things have to line up in order for it to happen. But theoretically, if within a couple minutes of ejaculation into someone's mouth, they to collect the sperm and put it in the vagina, either you know, via some ki badginal insemination or elsewise, and they happened to be on a tomicvogulation, there's still a small chance of pregnancy, but again the odds are I would say, probably less than one percent.
So it seems unlikely that a spit maneuver would have resulted in a pregnancy at all.
But hang on for a second.
She came over to your house, she gave you oral sex twice. The next day you told her you weren't interested in her. That's correct, I rejected her. Yes, And then four days later what happened. Four days later she started making claims that she could possibly be pregnant.
And then eleven days after they hooked up, Laura claimed she'd taken a positive pregnancy test. She was taking one of those at home tests where you pee on the stick. Laura's was positive, and as we know, Laura later went to an urgent care and had another test which confirmed she had an elevated hCG level. I asked doctor Weiss to explain more about how hc works and why it's often used as an early pregnancy test.
HGG levels rise exponentially in early pregnancy and then generally half every forty eight hours once a pregnancy has ended, so you're in pregnancy test to text the pregnancy hormone, which is hCG. Depending on what type of test you have, there's somewhat of a range of detection. The early response tests can detect at a lower level of HDG, which lets you detect kind of earlier in pregnancy, or put
another way, sooner after ovulation. But they're detecting HGG in the urine, so the HGG level has to achieve a certain amount in the bloodstream before reaching the urine. If you're testing with your in pregnancy test. For most people, it's kind of most reliable within twelve to fourteen days after ovulation. Obviously, after a mis period, which is generally fourteen days plus after ovulation, is even more accurate.
Doctor Weiss explained that hCG is a hormone you can inject, and if someone did inject it, they could test positive for pregnancy on a urine test, even if they weren't pregnant.
There's medication specifically that we use in fertility treatment in which we give patients synthetic HDG. So if they were to take that injection as prescribed by their fertility doctor and then do your own pregnancy test, it would come back positive.
Doctor Weiss sometimes sees false positives with her patients who take at home tests. Some other medications that have been known to raise hCG levels can produce a false positive, and then there are anomalies ways in that home test can fail.
There's something called evaporation lines, which if you kind of the instructions on your pregnancy test tell you exactly how long to wait before interpreting the result. If you wait longer than that period of time, you can get something called an evaporation line, which is a faint line that can, you know, oftentimes fool people to, you know, look initially on the bathroom counter, see it to negative, and then leave it there and then come back and be falsely either positively or negatively.
Doctor Weiss stressed that conception is more difficult than we were led to believe in high school sex set, and that the most reliable way to test for pregnancy is having an ultrasound in person with the doctor.
You'd ask me the hot tum question. I was ready for that one.
Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned for new episodes and bonus content on the Love Trapped Feed