A 77-year-old fertility doctor who is accused of impregnating patients with his own sperm is now facing felony charges after nine children of former patients found out they were siblings.
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Today Dr. Donald Cline entered a plea of “not guilty” in response to two charges alleging he obstructed justice.
Cline’s attorney says he’s not accused of not cooperating with authorities. Cline, who is now retired, initially denied to investigators that he fathered any of the children.
In August the prosecutor’s office conducted a paternity test on Cline for two of the siblings. According to court documents, Cline responded in January 2015 by saying, “I can emphatically say that at no time did I ever use my own sample for insemination”, and “in fact, if this woman is saying this or writing this I believe she is guilt of slander and/or libel”. Obviously I am my mom’s.
Cline’s son and daughter met with two former patient’s children after one sent a Facebook message to Cline’s son. Cline treated hundreds of women for years at his office on West 86th Street.
Cline surrendered to the court during an initial hearing on Monday. But those families have a lot of concerns. “I don’t think that is ever going to be a possibility”, said one woman only identified as ‘Carrie’.
Her mother had visited Cline in the early 1980s because she was struggling to conceive.
“She said he was kind”. He had told his patients they were receiving sperm from medical or dental residents or medical students and that no single donor’s sperm was used more than three times.
The woman, surprised to find that she was related to eight other users on the website, reached out to a local news station, which connected the relatives, ordered subsequent DNA tests and confirmed the eight were siblings, the affidavit said.
Last May, she spoke with a group of siblings who suspected Cline was their father.
Cline “said he used his own sperm whenever he didn’t have a donor sample available”, the affidavit said he told them.
Cline said he did wrong by inseminating the women with his own sperm, but felt he was helping them because they wanted a baby, according to court documents. Also, he felt pressured to use his own sperm because he didn’t always have access to fresh sperm.
New technologies that assist with male reproductive problems have also made the use of donor sperm less and less common for heterosexual couples. The now retired doctor allegedly admitted to some of the siblings his sperm could have been used up to 50 times.
He went on to explain how he had kept medical records of those who received his sperm, but these were destroyed after seven years in accordance with in state law.
The youngest sibling was born in 1986.
The most notorious fertility doctor to secretly use his own sperm was Cecil Jacobson, who may have fathered as many as 70 children from 1976 to 1998 in Vienna, Virginia. He apologized for his actions and said since he found God, he knows what he did was wrong. There seems to be some confusion in the media as to the “crime” that Dr. Cline was actually charged. The charges arise exclusively from his written response to inquiries from the Indiana Attorney General’s office and nothing more.
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His attorney is expected to release a statement on Monday afternoon.
