The Fertility Doctor Who Played God
Keith Boyle as Donald Cline in Our Father. [Netflix]
The popularization of at-home genetic testing has, in many ways, been a boon. Millions of people have learned about their ancestries to a degree previously thought unimaginable. Long-lost relatives have been found. Decades’-old cold cases have been solved. New relationships have been forged.
And then there are the discoveries nobody ever wants to make.
In 2014, Jacoba Ballard signed up for an account on the genetic testing site 23andMe, and was surprised to receive a notification saying that she had seven half siblings near her in the Indianapolis area. After doing further research, she realized that this wasn’t a mistake — her biological father was not the man who had raised her, but Dr. Donald Cline, a fertility specialist who secretly inseminated dozens of clients over more than four decades, including her mother.
Over the next several years, as ancestry sites grew in popularity, the number of Ballard’s siblings continued to grow — from seven, to two dozen, to four dozen, to an eventual 94. And that’s just for now. So far, the youngest sibling who has been discovered was born in 1988 — 11 years before Cline stopped practicing medicine. “Every time we get a new match I give them this news,” Ballard told The Guardian, “and it’s like I’m ruining their life.”
This horrifying story of one deranged doctor’s private medical experiment is the subject of Our Father, a new Netflix documentary directed by Lucie Jourdan and produced by Blumhouse, the production company behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Picking up on that film’s attention to the horrors lurking beneath white suburbia, Our Father details a world in which every (blonde) person could potentially be related, and coming-of-age means being mindful of who you date. After all, as Ballard discovered, almost all of the siblings live within a 25-mile radius of each other.
Do Cline’s actions count as rape? Lots of his victims think so. After all, none of the women who visited his clinic between 1972 and 2009 knew he might use his own “sample.” Many went with their husbands, and had no idea that the good doctor was in the next room, swapping their specimens with his.
When Ballard figured out what had happened, she wrote to state and national attorneys general, who informed her that Cline had not broken any laws since he didn’t use force, and anyway, Indiana juries wouldn’t be likely to prosecute him. She then blanketed the press, receiving no responses. It wasn’t until a local Fox News reporter picked up the case and began pressuring Cline to take responsibility for his actions that things started to change.
When Cline finally did see the inside of a courtroom, it was because he had lied to his attorney about using his own sperm. Cline was ultimately stripped of his medical license and given a $500 fine. And that was that. He has stoutly refused to speak to journalists, or to almost all of his 94 children, or to anybody else lacking the force of law. (In Our Father, he is portrayed by a series of actors.) Cline is an elder in his church and is surrounded by a protective community.
It’s important to note that for the siblings, these consequences aren’t only psychological, they’re also physical — a number of his kids have autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illness they’ve been unable to diagnose. As one of the siblings noted, in light of Cline’s own medical history, he never would have been accepted as a donor.
Given Cline’s refusal to speak, there’s no way of knowing exactly why he did what he did, but in her research, Ballard came across a telling clue — his association with a member of the Quiverfull movement, a conservative Christian theology that holds that members should have as many children as possible in order to fill the world with their babies. As The Daily Beast succinctly put it, “The underlying motivation here is often racist: White Christians must repopulate the planet with their own chosen kind, lest it be taken over by darker-skinned heathens.”
While Cline has not identified himself as a member of the movement, he was known to be assertive about his conservative religious beliefs, decorating his office with Christian memorabilia and frequently citing Jeremiah 1:5, a line of scripture that is popular in the Quiverfull movement. It reads, “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.”
Jourdan began working on Our Father in 2017. Netflix’s release of the documentary in the wake of the Supreme Court draft leak was surely a matter of luck, but still, it seems apt. Until 2019, when Indiana became the first state in the country to make it a crime for doctors to unknowingly inseminate women with their own sperm (just stop and consider that sentence for a moment), it was perfectly legal. Meanwhile, of course, women are about to be deprived of the ability to make choices about their own lives and bodies.
It’s no secret that the GOP is in bed with Christian white nationalists, and that the war on women is now in the open. For years, argues Laura Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, “it used to be that if you wanted to rally the right-wing troops, your misogyny had to be racially coded to mostly exclude white women,” focusing on “single Black mothers as ‘welfare queens’ and immigrant women with children as unfairly taking public benefits.” Now, all women are now under threat, and men like Cline remain free.
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