Fertility Doctor Used Own Sperm to Secretly Impregnate Patients and His Kids May Never Know How Many Siblings They Have

An Indiana fertility doctor demonstrated a boundless lack of perspective when he said that he was just trying to help his patients when he made the decision to use his own sperm to impregnate them.

According to CBS News, Dr. Donald Cline is 77 years old and only just retired from his practice at Reproductive Endocrinology Associates in Indianapolis in 2009. When he was initially accused of having used his own sperm to impregnate some of his patients, he denied it, writing to the Indiana Attorney General to say: ”I can emphatically say that at no time did I ever use my own sample for insemination.”

But it was apparently hard to keep that up when faced with six grown adults, whose mothers had been patients of Dr. Cline’s and who had DNA tests that showed they were his biological children. He’d allegedly “donated” his sperm to around 50 women starting in the 1970s, and it sounds like that process resulted in the live births of at least eight babies, who are now adults in their 30s and 40s.

Court records indicate that Cline said he just used his own sperm when he didn’t have a sample available, and that he ”felt that he was helping women because they really wanted a baby.”

Yeah, that’s bullshit. If Cline thought he was helping, he would have told the patients where the sperm had come from. If he did not think he was doing something wrong, he would not have told his patients that the samples came from medical residents and medical students, and he would not have promised his patients that no donor’s sperm was used more than three times.

Cline used his own sperm around 50 times or more, and he reportedly has at least eight very angry biological children as a result of this. There could be a lot more, too. Two of the children found out about this when they took DNA tests for ancestry research and discovered that they were related to 70 of Cline’s relatives. Another woman did a DNA test and the company she used wrote back that she was related to eight other people in its database.

That is a pretty big pill to swallow. And really there’s no way of knowing how many others are out there. Cline practiced until 2009, when he was in his 70s.

Ugh. This is so disgusting, and now it’s even worse. I was going to stop writing there, but then I accidentally read the comments and there are actually people defending the doctor and saying he did nothing wrong, and that he actually did the women a favor by giving them an “upgrade” in the sperm, on the grounds that they had wanted sperm from medical students or residents, and he gave them sperm from a “real” doctor.

That’s not how any of this works! The patients were looking to get pregnant, and they were told they were getting samples from anonymous donors who would not be donating more than three times. Now they’ve been used as pawns in the doctor’s creepy, narcissistic attempt to spread his seed and litter the world with his DNA, and their children will probably never be able to go on a date or kiss another person without worrying that they might be with a biological sibling. This is completely disgusting, and the doctor must have known it. If he didn’t know it was wrong, he wouldn’t have hidden it and denied it for 30 years.