‘Our Father’, Netflix’s latest true crime documentary, has been making a noise all around the world for its nauseating facts and scenes people can’t take. It provides a different kind of horror that makes it troublesome for many, making it so unbearable to watch or even read (because articles about this doctor is out).
‘Our Father’ tells the jaw-dropping true story of Don Cline, a fertility doctor in Indiana who inseminated over 90 patients with his own sperm, without their consent. Parents who desperately wanted children but couldn’t conceive trusted this Doctor Cline, who told his patients he used sperm donated by medical students. Cline assured mothers individual donors were used no more than three times, to avoid a network of half-siblings in the Indianapolis area.
All of Cline’s patients were lied to, almost manipulated. Shortly before the insemination procedure, Cline was somewhere in the building, masturbating into a sample cup. Then he injected his sperm into his patients, and they unknowingly birthed his child.
He did this for about a decade after opening his clinic in 1979 until sperm banks became more commonplace in the late 80s. He probably assumed no one would ever find out. But then his many offspring grew up and started taking DNA tests.
DNA testing wasn’t invented until 1984. Back in 1970s, Cline must have presumed that there was no way that he would ever be caught out for his crimes. He certainly wouldn’t have accounted for the rise of DNA testing as part of online genealogy accounts that are so prevalent now, and what finally caught him out.
It was Jacoba Ballard’s discovery that she was secretly fathered by her mother’s fertility doctor. For years of research and finding proof to all these crimes, she figured that she has 94 half-siblings and counting.
What makes it gruesome is that all of these things and revelations was not technically illegal at that time that it took place.
At the end in 2018, he was only convicted of two felonies: of hindering the investigation and of lying about using his own semen. He was fined just $500 and lost his medical license – however, he’d been retired since 2009. Cline is still alive now, in his 80s, and has served no time for his malpractice. He also seemingly has no remorse for his actions, and has never explained why he did it.
