True Crime — A Netflix Documentary
Our Father Who Art in His Fertility Clinic, Hallowed Be Thy Name He’s Dr. Don Cline
In the new chilling Netflix documentary, one woman found out she has 94 siblings, and their father is their mom’s fertility doctor
I have five siblings all women, we were supposed to be seven, my mom had a miscarriage before me, a boy. My parents kept trying to have a boy. It was a different time.
The new Netflix documentary ‘Our Father’ now streaming has the horror genre feels, it’s not surprising as Blumhouse Productions produce it.
It is the sickening story of Dr. Donald Cline who was a well-respected doctor in Indiana. He is a reproductive endocrinologist, a fertility treatment specialist from the 1970s, the kind of doctor women ask for help when they want to conceive a child when they are having difficulty conceiving on their own.
The process was simple, women came to Dr. Don Cline, and he gets a sperm donor, he always told the women that he got it from medical interns, do the procedure and wait until the women got pregnant.
And he had a high success rate, except that after you watched the documentary, one woman found out that she has 94 siblings, and all of them share the same DNA from their father.
The father turned out to be none other than Dr. Don Cline himself. He lied to their moms and implanted his own semen into their bodies for reasons that the documentary tried to unravel.
Jacoba Ballard, her story
Jacoba Ballard was a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who never felt totally at home in her family, according to Our Father.
She began to figure out why after buying a 23andMe DNA testing kit in 2014. Her DNA tests revealed that she had a few half-siblings from an unknown father.
The awful truth began to emerge as she began her investigation. Donald Cline, her parents’ reproductive specialist, was her biological father and the biological father of her new siblings. Cline had been inseminating women with his own sperm without their consent or knowledge, it came out.
Her story started with her mom, Debbie Pierce, who in 1979 went to see Dr. Cline for her to get pregnant through artificial insemination.
Dr. Cline used the same script he had with the other women, he promised to find a donor who looks exactly or similar to their husband, and that the donor would be a medical intern or student.
Jacoba found out that she was conceived with the help of donor sperm. As she was growing up, she always wanted to have siblings, someone who is related to her, a brother or a sister.
And from the information, she gathered there could be one or two possible siblings. Dr. Cline promised her mom that the donor would only father up to three children.
Her wishes of having siblings came much later when DNA home kits became available, and as for the one or two siblings she was longing for, Jacoba would soon find out she has 94 siblings.
Dr. Don Cline — Was it a sick experiment for him?
In the documentary, former colleagues have good words for Dr. Cline. Jan Shore, a nurse worked with Dr. Cline for 13 years, and she remembered meeting some of the sperm donors as many of them are medical interns in the hospital next to their office.
Before 1985, samples had to be fresh unlike today, so Jan would get the specimen and place them inside her bra to keep them warm, as they need to be at body temperature before they are used for the procedure.
In the Netflix documentary, the same modus operandi was used by Dr. Cline, he would have the women wait in a separate room, and he would come back after 20 minutes. The women thought the doctor was preparing stuff for the procedure only later would they find out that Dr. Cline was masturbating to ejaculate his fresh semen in the adjacent room.
There is more to Dr. Cline than the doctor who helped thousands of women to get pregnant, a well-known churchgoer, and a man well-loved by his community.
Jacoba Ballard and some of her newly-found siblings investigated and the truth was stranger than they would ever have imagined.
Aside from the one thing that was common among the siblings, blonde hair, and blue eyes, it was almost like this perfect Aryan clan.
Was Dr. Cline part of a Quiverfull cult, a Christian theological position that sees large families as a blessing from God?
Final words and where is Dr. Don Cline today?
Dr. Cline is in his 80s today. He was never put in jail for his crimes. He was fined $500, that’s all he got after he pleaded guilty for the only the Indiana state could prosecute him for, which was obstruction of justice when he lied when asked if he used his own sperm to father countless children.
In his office, the mothers remember this sign a Bible verse from Jeremiah 1: 5
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
And Dr. Cline knew all the children well.
It is devastating for Jacoba, her siblings, and their mothers. One mother had to see Dr. Cline 15 times before she got pregnant, she feels now that she was sexually assaulted fifteen times by the doctor.
I was raped 15 times — Liz White, one of the mothers
Donald Cline had to believe that no one would ever find out. Then there was DNA testing.
In 2016, a law was passed in Indiana, the New Fertility-Fraud Law, which makes it a crime for doctors to use their own sperm as the donor sperm for their patients.
Thank you for reading.
Sources:
A Decades-Old Doctor’s Secret Leads to New Fertility-Fraud Law
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