transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Hey, it's Stephani. In this bonus episode, I wanted to share some parts of the June 10th trial we didn't get to in episode 7. 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' 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' team brought in Dr. Michael Medchill, a retired OB-GYN, who said he had delivered over 20,000 babies. Before the trial, Dr. Medchill reviewed medical records provided by David Gingras and reached a notable conclusion.

Speaker 2:
[00:50] Dr. Medchill, 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 2023 at any time?

Speaker 3:
[01:00] Absolutely. I believe she was pregnant with over 99% probability.

Speaker 1:
[01:05] But the validity of the medical records Dr. Medchill reviewed were a point of contention.

Speaker 4:
[01:10] You understand Laura has admitted to faking medical records in this case.

Speaker 5:
[01:14] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[01:16] 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 10th to doctoring medical records. But there was something even more stunning about Dr. Medchill's testimony, a moment that became infamous in coverage of the case. Here's David Gingras during the trial.

Speaker 2:
[01:38] Mr. Echard 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? Regarding general, not regarding him or her, but in general.

Speaker 3:
[01:49] 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.

Speaker 1:
[02:02] After this moment that later became etched into the lore of this trial, Gingras asked Dr. Medchil to address the elephant in the room head on, and he doubled down.

Speaker 2:
[02:13] How much weight would you assign to the fact that Mr. Echard denied sexual intercourse? Is that significant to the question of whether she was pregnant or is it a minor point?

Speaker 3:
[02:22] It has nothing to do with whether she was pregnant.

Speaker 1:
[02:27] This testimony gave me pause. I always understood penetrative sex to be a near universal precursor to conception. So I called my own expert.

Speaker 5:
[02:37] My name is Dr. Marissa Weiss. I'm a board certified OBGYN. I currently am practicing in the space of infertility, which I did a subspecialty fellowship in.

Speaker 1:
[02:47] Dr. Weiss specializes in infertility, which means she works with the science of conception every day.

Speaker 5:
[02:53] 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. When we are given kind of sex ed in middle school, we're led to believe that if you have unproven intercourse, there's basically a 100 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 given month are 20 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.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] Importantly, what Dr. 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.

Speaker 4:
[03:56] Where did you complete?

Speaker 1:
[03:58] Her mouth both times.

Speaker 4:
[03:59] What happened the second time?

Speaker 2:
[04:00] She ran straight to the bathroom.

Speaker 1:
[04:03] Woodnick told me he always found it to be a suspicious detail in the chain of events. Woodnick 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 Dr. Weiss if sperm could even survive that long.

Speaker 5:
[04:20] Sperm motility decreases within minutes in the saliva. And most sperm are kind of immobilized or dead within 15 to 30 minutes. So in some sense, 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. It has to be around the time of ovulation 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 of minutes of ejaculation into someone's mouth, they were to collect the sperm and put it in the vagina either, you know, via some kind of vaginal insemination or elsewise, and they happen to be around the time of ovulation, there's still a small chance of pregnancy. But again, the odds are, I would say, probably less than 1%.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] So it seems unlikely that a spit maneuver would have resulted in a pregnancy at all.

Speaker 4:
[05:21] 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?

Speaker 2:
[05:28] That's correct.

Speaker 3:
[05:29] I rejected her, yes.

Speaker 4:
[05:30] And then four days later, what happened?

Speaker 2:
[05:32] Four days later, she started making claims that she could possibly be pregnant.

Speaker 1:
[05:37] And then 11 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 Dr. Weiss to explain more about how HCG works and why it's often used as an early pregnancy test.

Speaker 5:
[06:04] HCG levels rise exponentially in early pregnancy and then generally half every 48 hours once a pregnancy has ended. So a urine pregnancy test detects 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 HCG, which lets you detect kind of earlier in pregnancy or put another way sooner after ovulation. But they're detecting HCG in the urine. So the HCG level has to achieve a certain amount in the bloodstream before reaching the urine. If you're testing with a urine pregnancy test, for most people, it's kind of most reliable within 12 to 14 days after ovulation. Obviously after a missed period, which is generally 14 days plus after ovulation is even more accurate.

Speaker 1:
[06:53] Dr. 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.

Speaker 5:
[07:05] There is medication specifically that we use in fertility treatment in which we give patients synthetic HCG. So if they were to take that injection as prescribed by their fertility doctor and then do a urine pregnancy test, it would come back positive.

Speaker 1:
[07:18] Dr. 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 an at-home test can fail.

Speaker 5:
[07:37] There's something called evaporation lines, which if you kind of, the instructions on a urine 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's negative, and then leave it there, and then come back and be falsely, either positively or negatively.

Speaker 1:
[08:04] Dr. Weiss stressed that conception is more difficult than we were led to believe in high school sex ed, and that the most reliable way to test for pregnancy is having an ultrasound in person with the doctor.

Speaker 5:
[08:17] You didn't ask me the hot tub question, I was ready for that one.

Speaker 1:
[08:24] Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned for new episodes and bonus content on the Love Trapped feed.