It doesn’t matter who we are, we all have a secret. For many of us, it is a secret that really doesn’t affect anyone but there are people out there who hold a secret that is horrifying in its scope.
That is the case with a fertility doctor who used his own sperm in order to impregnate women in the 1970s and 1980s. Although he was supposed to use fresh sperm from medical students, he would often use his own.
As of this date, at least 48 children who were born during that time are confirmed to be his. This has been discovered, thanks to some DNA testing.
It seems as if a woman named Jacoba Ballard learned that she was conceived using a sperm donor. She used DNA testing to find her half-siblings but, after finding quite a few, she admits that she feels like their mothers were violated.
One of the women, Liz White, is now 68 years old. She is the mother of Matt, who was conceived after five months of artificial insemination procedures in the early 1980s. She says that she feels like she was raped 15 times.
One of the interesting things that she remembers is all of the baby pictures he had in his office. They were children that he had helped to conceive but now she wonders if they are actually his children.
Because of his crime, he received a one-year suspended sentence in 2017. No other charges were filed because doctors in Indiana are not banned from using their own sperm during these procedures.
An online forum was set up by Jacoba in 2014 to discover more have siblings. Adoptees and others were searched out and then she found someone who was linked to the doctor. She knew they were related as soon as she saw the picture.
As she searched more and more, there were new pieces to the puzzle that began to fall into place. Doctor Cline had said that he had used each donor only three times for successful pregnancies. They had proof otherwise.
The birth years had ranged between 1979 and 1986. Medical students, which the doctor said he used, only do residencies for three years. After finding more and more matches, it became a shocking revelation.
One of the people who was contacted was Heather. Her husband set up a genealogy account for her through ancestry.com. After being contacted, she became part of a group.
The group ended up meeting the doctor and he confessed that he used his own sperm. He had apologized for the pain that he caused but was not specific with how many times it was done.
In the meantime, many of the children have formed close bonds with each other. It seems as if the real crime was the fact that they didn’t know each other growing up.