Our Father

The probing new documentary from Netflix looks at the true story of an Indianapolis doctor who used his own sperm to inseminate patients -- and the heroic women who spoke out.

“The world does not need to know,” Dr. Donald Cline said icily over the phone. But the woman he was speaking to, Jacoba Ballard — who also happened to be his biological daughter — knew that it did.

Let’s be thankful she had the guts to stand up and tell her story.

“Our Father,” the new documentary directed by Lucie Jourdan, looks at the true story of Cline, an Indianapolis fertility doctor who inseminated untold numbers of female patients with his own sperm. Ballard and other half-siblings eventually found each other starting in 2014 due to the advent of easy genetic testing and ancestry websites, and instantly knew that something had been stolen from them.

The film interviews dozens of these “children” of Cline, as well as the mothers he violated without their consent. He was eventually charged and convicted: of obstruction for lying to investigators. His acts, while morally craven, had the twisted benefit of not fitting any crimes on the books, as testified by then-county prosecutor Tim Delaney.

(Indiana lawmakers have since made it a crime, though there is still no federal law against fraudulently inseminating a woman.)

As of the airing of “Our Father” today on Netflix, there are 94 known Cline siblings — and potentially many more are out there. Cline, who received only a $500 fine and no jail time for his offense, still lives locally — in some cases, just a few blocks away from some of his “children.”

I use quotes around that word because Cline himself, as revealed in audio recordings and testimony, does not consider them his offspring. And the victims certainly do not regard him as their father in any sense of that word.

I was glad that Jourdan also interviews many of the mothers and their husbands to talk about how they felt upon learning about Cline’s misdeeds. They were the first victims, having genetic material placed inside them without their consent. One woman who underwent fertility treatment on multiple occasions says it was “like being raped 15 times.”

Cline told his patients that donated sperm came from medical students, and that none were used more than three or four times. Instead, he used his own material, which he must have obtained moments earlier. (Think about that.) He claimed he did this to help women have the babies they’d always desired and couldn’t due to infertility issues.

But as we learn, he sometimes even swapped in his own sperm in place of viable samples from fathers.

Perhaps the most chilling testimony comes from Alison Kramer, who was one of the last to learn about Cline’s parentage — and had used him as her own physician for two years. She talks about the pain of having intimate physical examinations by a man who knew he was her biological father, the most outrageous violation of trust one can imagine.

We hear from a number of the other children who had the courage to step forward: Julie Harmon, Matt White, Heather Woock, Jason Hyatt, Carrie Foster, Lisa Shepherd-Stidham. They have in many cases met each other, thankful for these sibling relationships despite the pain they have been caused.

They comment up on the physical similarities between them: most with blonde hair and blue eyes, even when their parents have darker features and skin. This leads to uncomfortable questions about Cline’s potential motivation to spread his seed with a warped white supremacist worldview wrapped in a church-based philosophy known as “quiverfull.”

An ardently church-going man, Cline repeated his favorite scripture to Ballard and his other offspring, Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.” He supposedly intended it as consolation, that no child is born as a mistake. But from his lips the meaning takes a decidedly sinister turn.

Many of Cline’s offspring suffer from autoimmune disorders that run in his family — another piece of his poisonous legacy. They wryly note that he himself would have been rejected as a potential sperm donor.

Cline is represented at times with an actor for recreations of actual events. He paints an unsettling figure, a great bear of a man who leans upon a cane and tries to dominate every social encounter. He was known to often carry a gun, including in his initial meetings with his offspring after they tracked him down. Some experienced threatening phone calls and actions afteward, like all the lugnuts on their car being removed.

It’s likely that this story would never have been told without Ballard’s insistence and resolve not to back down. She filed complaints with the state against Cline and heard nothing back, reported her story to every news outlet she can think of and was ignored.

She finally got a response when she reached out on Facebook to Angela Ganote at FOX59, who responded and first broke the story. Ganote appears for interviews herself, talking about her frustration at getting no traction for more than a year, until finally the dam burst when she tracked down Cline’s false statements to prosecutors.

Yay, journalism!

(Disclosure: I appear weekly on FOX59.)

Cline was defended by many in his church and community (even by a local prosecutor) as a kindly man known for helping others — something they continue to do to this day.

“Our Father” is so powerful because it shows us one man’s acts — which he always saw as benevolent — and how they damaged hundreds of people: the mothers, their children, their entire families and communities. Imagine going through life and finding out that your father is not really your father, or that your mother’s doctor actually impregnated her himself without her knowledge?

For Ballard and some of the others, it’s brought newfound strength and determination to stand up and always tell the truth, even when it’s bound to bring pain to many. In facing their own fears and anger, they step toward a redemption Donald Cline can never know.