“Our Father” is difficult to watch, especially if you’ve suddenly discovered as an adult that you have a never-known family of half-siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews thanks to a long-ago sperm donation. One review dubs the series “Netflix’s most gruesome real-life documentary yet.”
It tells the tale of Indianapolis fertility physician Donald Cline, who used his sperm to inseminate at least 96 women (and counting) between 1979-1986. After years of being in the dark, the offspring have found each other thanks to diligent sleuthing by some of the half-siblings and DNA testing.
“The majority of us live in a 25-mile radius, some within minutes of Cline. I walk around and I could be related to anyone. I’ve probably met half sibs and we don’t even know it,” said a son named Guy.
Dr. Cline told many of his patients that he would be using sperm from a medical student or resident, and that no donor would be used for more than three women. The nefarious donations went on for so long in the small town that he used his sperm to inseminate his own daughter!
Deducing the deception
The ”Our Father” series is in part a detective story—the sleuthing work of Jacoba Ballard, a young woman who was the first to uncover the physician’s deception. When a DNA test revealed she had seven relatives in nearby parts of Indiana, she knew something was wrong.
“It was a sick feeling,” Jacoba said. What she unraveled was shocking: besides finding sisters and brothers with whom she shared a quarter of their DNA, each victim had a mother who’d sought fertility treatment from Dr. Cline.
How did these suddenly-bonded young adults unravel the rest of the mystery? Figuring out familial relationships begins with more sleuthing than science. Newbie sibs zero in on the donor by identifying relatives who’ve tested and with whom everyone matches. Then, they trace backwards and start asking older relatives questions.
Things got complicated at times. Jacoba identified a second cousin they all matched with on 23andMe who’s related to someone with the same surname as Dr. Cline’s mother’s maiden name. Dr. Cline was indeed the cousin’s cousin, and yes, he’s a doctor.
“Right then my stomach dropped because she confirmed what we already knew but were hoping wasn’t true, that Dr. Donald Cline could be our biological father,” she says in the documentary. “I was in shock. So many emotions, so many questions. He lied about a donor being used. Why did he do it? How long did he do it? How many siblings do we have?” Jacoba recalls.
“Our Father” is also the story of local FOX 59 TV journalist Angela Ganote. She began unearthing the story in February 2015. At first she had great difficulty getting information from local authorities. But once the station began airing her interviews with Jacoba, at least one half-sib stared at her screen and thought she was looking at a twin. Many of them share blond hair and blue eyes.
The unfolding story
The documentary opens with a hallway lined with photos of babies. Objects and imagery from Christianity are everywhere; the doctor was a marriage counselor and Sunday school teacher. A placard quotes Jeremiah 1:5,
God Knew Me Before I Was Born: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Then the camera pans to a sterile exam room with illustrations of uteri festooning the walls. Photos of kids are tacked to bulletin boards; lots of little blonds a la The Boys from Brazil.
The story unfolds in interviews with parents, kids, and co-workers. Numbers interrupt the narrative as test results reveal more offspring, up to #96.
A nurse who worked for Dr. Cline from 1981 to 1994 tells how it all happened. She gave patients questionnaires about traits they desired in a donor. Then she’d go across the way to a hospital to collect samples from medical residents. Some couples would bring in a sperm sample, perhaps told that that it would be used or mixed with donor sperm.
A former physician colleague backs up the stories from the nurse, patients, and offspring. He adds how the layout of the office suite enabled Dr. Cline to collect and deliver his donations.
But the hospital samples were never used. In fact, Cline would have had to masturbate somewhere nearby while the women were waiting insemination. He would likely still be experiencing the after-effects of arousal as he was inserting the semen, one daughter said.
She recalled that she’d be the only patient in the office, and the doc would duck out while she arranged herself in the stirrups.
“He’d place his semen into a syringe and then place it at the base of my cervix. The fact that he was still on an endocrine high from ejaculation has no place in a medical setting. When my son’s DNA test came back, my first words were ‘I was raped and didn’t even know it’.”
Added Jacoba,
What made him wake up every day and go into work and masturbate and place it into women without their consent?
But if the goal was to make his patients pregnant, the doctor did. “The fact that he used his specimen to impregnate me made me sick to my stomach. On the other hand, because of his skills, I have twin daughters who are absolutely delightful. You can’t be angry when you have what you always dreamed of,” said one former patient.
Jacoba’s half-siblings share their emotional ups and downs, their words eerily echoing my own as I have struggled to accept, beginning in September 2018, that I, too, have a mystery family, the result of mysterious sperm donations. Since then, I’ve been on several Facebook groups for NPEs – “not parent expected” – and read many stories, but none on the scale of “Our Father.”
It helps to connect with others. Especially useful was a recent study in the American Journal of Human Genetics from Christi Guerrini JD, MPH, from the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, “Family secrets: Experiences and outcomes of participating in direct-to-consumer genetic relative-finder services.” I wrote about it here.
As I watched the progam and saw the numbers tick up for Dr. Cline’s offspring, my empathy for their angst began to ebb. Their reactions were overwhelmingly of anger and negativity, or at least that is what dominated “Our Father.” Perhaps it was like a Facebook page for people with the same disease dominated by those with the most dire experiences. I couldn’t help but wonder – without the horrifically egocentric fertility doctor, those half-siblings wouldn’t exist.
Consider some of their comments:
- “I want to call it a nightmare. It was absolutely wrong from the beginning.”
- “I think it was an experiment for him, some sick game. I think about this every single day.”
- I took the test. Jacoba showed up. It’s the hardest thing I ever had to go through,” said a woman named Julie, crying. “What did he do with my dad’s sperm, throw it away like it was nothing?”
- “You live it over and over and over. Every time a new sib pops up I know I’m going to call them and I know I’m going to ruin their life,” said Jacoba.
- “It took me to an incredibly dark place. Why did he do it? To further your career? Be the best of the best? Create life? A sexual thing?” said Jason, aka #48.
Some of them recognize past clues and present commonalities:
- “Growing up I felt different. I’m this blond, blue-eyed person in a family with olive skin and dark hair and eyes. I asked my mom if I was adopted and kept reassuring my parents it’s fine, if I am it’ll be ok. Finally, my mom told me the truth. I’ve known since age of 10 that I was from donor sperm.”
- “You go back to everything you’ve known about yourself, and it completely washes away your identity. You have no idea who you are anymore.”
Some of the siblings saw something more sinister. “Every time we get a DNA match, we say ‘it looks like one of the Cline boys’ or ‘it looks like a Cline girl.’ Most of us have blond hair and blue eyes. I hate to say this, but it is almost like we are this perfect Aryan clan and it’s disgusting. The goal appeared to be to produce more whites because whites would eventually disappear.”
“All of the photos in the office were of Caucasian babies,” said a sister named Julie. Added Jacoba, “You wonder if the person who created you was a racist bigot who used my mom as a pawn, and he did it over and over and over again.”
The Nazi hypothesis is as opposite as possible from the motivation behind some of the thousands of surprise-donor-conceived offspring like me from the New York City area, from the 1950s and 1960s. Our existence, in some cases, grew out of a desire to replace some of the six million Jews the Nazis killed during the second world war.
A slap on the wrist
The number of Dr. Cline’s offspring may not even be known or knowable. But he did the deed. When forced to provide a DNA sample, the results showed that the probability that Jacoba is his biological child was beyond doubt: 99.9997 percent.
But in the end, he wasn’t punished much. In 2016, Cline was only charged with two counts of obstruction of justice, to which he plead guilty. Technically, the court found, he wasn’t sexually violating the women because they were his patients and had given permission. Although some of his offspring feel that their mothers had been raped, legally that claim couldn’t hold up.
Dr. Cline was sentenced as a level 6 felon and fined $500, “which is a slap in the f—ing face,” said Jacoba.
But progress has been made. In 2018 illicit donor insemination became illegal in Indiana, although there’s still no federal law. And dozens of more doctors have been caught using their own sperm.
My donor story revisited
My reactions to discovering one-half of my genetic parentage was different than the siblings in my father. I’ve shared my story in Libby Copeland’s book The Lost Family, in several blog posts and articles for Genetic Literacy Project and with the New York Times’ Modern Love Podcast.
The feelings among my half-siblings vary.
- One half-brother doesn’t know we exist. It was his daughters who tested and discovered our paternity link, but they implored us not to tell him after we popped up on their relative’s roster. It would destroy his relationship with his father, they said. Of course, we didn’t.
- Another half-brother lost an adult child, and couldn’t handle a sudden, new exponentially-large family.
- One half-sib backed off, perhaps because with many grandchildren another family dropping out of the sky was a bit much.
- Several of us understand the science; we know that the tests are accurate. But it is all just so bizarre that sometimes we ignore the emails from the companies informing us that a new relative has been found.
- One half-sister who is an only child was thrilled. When we each saw the other materialize on Facebook on a January morning in 2019, after getting our 23andMe matches, we cried; we had a family connection!
- A few of us have become good friends. I visited the half-sister with no sibs just days before the US shut down due to COVID.
Who was our biological father? We’ve narrowed down our sperm donor to two of three brothers from a wonderful family that we’re excited to be part of, even in such a strange way. We look a lot alike. And we’ll have an answer pretty soon, pending a recent match that filled in a few blanks, and also led to the discovery of a wonderful new cousin, half-niece, and possible brother or cousin.
It’s weird, and adjusting took time, but I’m thankful. Now that we’re at an age when we are starting to lose people, finding new siblings is a great gift. That’s no solace to many of the aggrieved victims of the deeply deceptive Dr. Cline. But it does illustrate that the proliferation of DNA tests can, in some circumstances, bring some joy and help expand a sense of family.
Ricki Lewis, PH.D is a writer for PLOS and author of the book “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It.” You can check out Ricki’s website and follow Ricki on Twitter @rickilewis
