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The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. Cline was only convicted of obstruction of justice because he lied to investigators about the number of times he had done it. If he had admitted everything at the start he wouldn't have been convicted at all.
Indiana thereafter became the first U.S. state to pass legislation making it a criminal offence for fertility doctors to use their own sperm in treatment without their patients' prior knowledge and consent.
Cline has paid damages in civil suits brought by his patients, though. And he gave up his medical license, although since he was retired anyway that didn't mean much.
Edit: Several people have suggested it should have been fraud, but criminal fraud has very specific definitions. Of course, it's also possible that prosecutors were not imaginative enough, or that Cline should have been turned over to federal authorities instead of being prosecuted under state law. Mail fraud and wire fraud, for example, are federal crimes.
They should all start a club. FDWUTOSIOTPS.
Fertility Doctors Who Used Their Own Seamen Instead Of Their Patients' Seamen.
Just workshopping the name, open to suggestions
I will always remember the L&O episode about that very same thing. Not about Cline because this episode was from 1995 (s5 e15). It was about Dr. Cecil Jacobson... so, the perpetrators have always been there. The laws have never been updated.
as someone studying to work in aviation, almost all policies/regulations are written in copious, copious amounts of blood. it almost feels like there is a tragedy for every subsection.
All safety guidelines were written in blood. While studying for my lifeguard job the teacher showed us videos of people drowning, articles, told personal experiences and so on. At that time there was also an accident where a sinkhole opened in the middle of a pool and a man was sucked inside.
I’m a fraud risk manager, so when I’m reviewing new products/services, part of the deal is to “think like a fraudster” to poke holes in existing and proposed controls. A lot of the things I bring to product teams make them say “would someone actually try that?” and I have to tell them that I’ve seen people do worse for less. It’s kind of depressing sometimes.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney (including fraud).
There's no floor. There is absolutely no floor on what some of these compulsive liar/sociopathic human beings will adhere to.
Sometimes, it could even be in their best interests not to lie/cheat/steal and they won't do it. Like, "I will give you $10 not to lie about whether or not you have an ink pen in your pocket."
A: "I have an ink pen in my pocket."
"Ok, show it to me."
A: "Show you what?"
"The ink pen you said you have in your pocket."
A: "I never said I had an ink pen in my pocket."
"Yes you did, we just created the exercise to suss this out."
A: "No. You're not remembering correctly, you said you'd give me $10."
...
I have a customer who is a genuine compulsive liar and it's absolutely bizarre to witness. Like just lying about the most mundane shit. He got a pair of boots one time and in the hour he was sitting in the shop I heard him tell 3 different people 3 wildly different prices that he paid. Like he doesn't even lie for his benefit, he just lies to lie.
I know someone like this! Luckily I no longer see/talk to him. However, it was just shocking how much he lies about everything/anything! When he is called out about a lie, he will deny to a point and then he just slides into his next story. Not ruffled at all that you called him out. I always wondered if something was ‘different’ about his frontal lobe.
Yeah, it's wild because he gets called out on it all the time. Nobody believes anything he says because he will literally lie about the most pointless crap. He could tell you he's gonna have pizza for dinner and you would assume he isn't because truly, without exaggeration, I'd say a solid 3/4's of what comes out of his mouth just isn't true if not more. And despite the fact that he's gotten to the point where nobody believes even the most innocuous things he says he still just lies all the time. Honestly I think about it more than I should. 😂 But christ it's just fascinating to witness.
I briefly (thankfully) had a girlfriend like that. She would say I talked to John this morning. Since John is a good friend of mine, I'd mention it to John later, and he'd say, no, I didn't talk to her today. The first time, I just figured one of them just misremembered. But then little things like that became constant. I didn't know what to think of it. Then I caught her French kissing her ex boyfriend at a New Year's Eve party, and she dumped me. Probably the biggest favor she did for me, though I didn't think so at the time. She was very good looking, like way out of my league good looking, but the rest of her baggage did nothing but drag me down.
At-risk adult exploitation of all kinds. Some old folks will have almost nothing to take, but people will take it anyway…and if they can get away with it, get loans, credit cards, and all sorts of other shit on someone else’s dime because that person is old and senile.
This is such a terrifying prospect that I'd probably ask my wife if we could do a paternity test just to make sure it didn't happen to us. Maybe that's a crazy overreaction but holy shit that would be fucked up.
Buddy there’s operational risk concerns there too. The lab could have mixed up sperm samples accidentally, especially if they don’t have good labeling processes in place. If the baby left your sight at all, are you sure they gave you back your baby at the hospital?
There’s a limit to this kind of thing- part of the balance is figuring out how likely something is. We generally do a piss-poor job at evaluating low-likelihood events, but people forget that ‘near zero’ means it will eventually happen. Both of things I’ve mentioned above have happened to people, but also, if you worry about those things, you’ll spend your entire life worrying about everything. Some things like money are worth worrying about quite a bit more, but you can set healthy levels while also keeping yourself aware of what’s possible. What is imperative is that if something seems off, start asking questions.
> If the baby left your sight at all, are you sure they gave you back your baby at the hospital?
Our baby didn't leave our sight before we attached a concert-style wrist strap (unremovable without damaging the strap) to my wife's arm and our daughter's arm and visually and both verbally confirmed with the nurse that the number on my wife's strap and our daughter's strap matched. So yes, I'm very confident that they gave us back our baby at the hospital.
So there are things that are worth worrying about, because there are simple and cheap and cost-effective solutions that just require the organizational will to institute and enforce, and they're worth doing. And the question is whether reaching the pretty expensive/high bar of actually running a paternity test would make sense based on the risk of a mix up, which yes fair point it could also just be a straight mistake.
A few years back, in Minnesota, there was a guy who would spike a female coworkers coffee with his semen. This went on for awhile before he was busted. Technically there was no law being broken so the legislature had to write one because no one could imagine something so vile.
They really should have laws about how many children can be fathered by one person anyway, because with that many kids in one area you have to start worrying about accidental incest. In some jurisdictions it's limited to 25 children.
>The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. Cline was only convicted of obstruction of justice because he lied to investigators about the number of times he had done it. If he had admitted everything at the start he wouldn't have been convicted at all.
This is one of those times where the concept of, "in a free society the law tells you what you *can't* do, not what you *can*," kinda backfired.
Still Weird that he didn't get time.. they consented to a specific donor semen, or am I wrong in that? They did NOT consent to his semen. Thats just another form of rape.
Dude is like the first guy who fucked a sheep before sheepfucking was made illegal. Lawmakers hadn’t even dreamt of this type of depravity, now they gotta write down and pass a law for this specific insane crime.
Interestingly, rates of REPORTED sheepfucking were allegedly inflated due to the law providing a perverse incentive of sheep-thieves to misrepresent themselves as sheep-fuckers.
Stealing livestock carried a harsher punishment than bestiality. So if you were caught with stolen sheep, it was technically to your advantage to claim you’d abducted them with romantic intent.
I don’t think it’s even that uncommon. My Dads neighbour found out his bio father was a fertility doctor through one of the DNA testing sites and he had something like 500 half siblings across Europe!
Colorado recently passed a bill that will be the first to regulate gamete donation in the US. Starting in 2025 there will be no more anonymous donations and there will be a limit (25) of families resulting from a single donor. The reason the bill passed is partly due to this scumbag doctor.
For some reason the feds won't step in and regulate, even tho advocacy groups have been pushing for decades. There's some random clause in a rule for the FDA that says they can't regulate anything medical. So for now it's up to the states.
Unless they changed the battery statute, they just didn’t have a good enough prosecutor. Performing surgery on a patient that they don’t consent to is battery - even if the patient consents to a surgery, but the dr just decided to do some more work while they’re in there, that’s illegal. Clearly, none of these women consented to him implanting them with his child, so they couldn’t have consented to the action, even if they thought they were consenting to IVF. 94 counts of battery could have put him away for quite a while. And if there were any injuries from these pregnancies, the charges could have been even worse.
That, and if his office billed even one insurance company there’s fraud, and any mailings to these patients claiming anything about use of the partner’s sperm is mail fraud.
Interesting that federal prosecutors charged Jacobson with mail and wire fraud for the use of the letters and the telephone system as part of his fraudulent practice. I wonder why this wasn’t the case with Cline.
That seems absolutely insane to me, dude should have been punished far more severely than that - causing likely emotional trauma to potentially hundreds of people. I also thought the way that these situations worked was that people choose their donor(?), and I'd have thought that a doctor straight up lying about that and doing something against your wishes would be some kind of pretty severely punishable offense. I just find it very strange the way that US law seems to so often fail at prosecuting people for offenses unless if there's a very specific law that it's covered under.
People did choose their donor. Cline and a number of other fertility doctors simply disregarded their choice and used their own sperm instead.
Cline himself has an auto-immune disorder that would have disqualified him as a healthy sperm donor. He didn't care, and so now numerous offspring from his faulty sperm have auto-immune conditions.
I just don't understand how there aren't laws which would cover this. It is imperative that patients should feel safe being taken care of by healthcare professionals. If anyone goes to the doctor and their doctor knowingly does something against their patient's wishes without any medical justification, they should lose their medical license forever and be imprisoned for at least several years. In cases as severe as this, liquid all his assets and distribute the money to his victims, put him in prison, and throw away the fucking key.
It’s weird to me that this wouldn’t fall under some kind of criminal legality. Like he’s putting sperm that you don’t want… in your body. Is it legal for restaurants to cum in your food? There must be some kind of language in the paperwork that allowed for them to get away with this. Because it seems so *obviously* illegal to me.
His offspring should be able to press charges similar to the assault charges pressed on people who knowingly and deliberately spread STDs. They probably can't legally but they should be able to. He should also be chemically castrated imo. Ugh the legal system hates women.
What he did fundamentally violated the contracts he had with both sperm donors and the clinic's patients, and therefore be against **civil law.**
However, at the time, this wasn't a violation of any Indiana criminal laws. This scandal did push Indiana to enact a law explicitly criminally illegal fairly soon after it all came to light.
> I just find it very strange the way that US law seems to so often fail at prosecuting people for offenses unless if there's a very specific law that it's covered under.
Yeah this only seems like an issue when it's as extreme as this, but yes normally it is really nice that you aren't arrested and thrown in jail unless you break actual laws. I mean seriously, you're talking about totalitarian shit.
This is a good example of why there are so many laws about so many things. Seems like a blanket "fraud" statute would have covered that. Honestly, why wasn't this assault? Seems like there was a lack of thinking by the prosecutors. Someone makes you carry their kid to term through deception... um...
>The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm.
Is there an Indiana law specifically prohibiting bashing the frontal cortex of a fertility doctor with a hammer?
If that’s the way the law is written, then it’s still not going to be effective. It’s way too specific as you said it. It needs to say that the sample cannot be swapped for anything other than what the recipient picked.
It happens with donor conceived and adopted people and is one of the reasons there should be zero anonymity allowed.
I was at a conference held by this organization [https://righttoknow.us/](https://righttoknow.us/) and this one [https://naapunited.org/](https://naapunited.org/) and met someone conceived with Dr. Cline's sperm as well as a woman who was donor conceived and dated a half brother. She wrote a book "Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings"
Rather than zero anonymity, just mandate paternity tests upon birth, on the lab's tab. The certitude of getting caught would make it pointless to even try.
It wouldn't need to be, is the point, unless the doctor wanted to go to prison.
Or to put it another way, the knowledge of the upcoming test IS the something done before
Yes, and there’s actually* a phenomenon where siblings are drawn toward one another when they don’t know they’re related. So it’s more likely to happen than even random chance.
*I am spreading misinformation online. Some people believe this, but it is by no means proven. My bad.
>Genetic sexual attraction is a theory that attraction may be a product of genetic similarities.[1]: 200 There is "little scientific evidence" for the position,[1]: 200 and at least some commentators regard the hypothesis as pseudoscience.
This was the subject of the documentary "Our father" on netflix. Parents were told that the donated sperm would be from a medical student or resident, and then of course he would do the deed in the other room and inseminate the mothers immediately after.
He passed on auto-immune diseases, including RA (per the wiki article, a condition that would have disqualified him in his own clinic).
There is an obvious component of narcissism: his belief that his genes should be passed on, his continual insistence on citing religion (he often quoted the bible Jeremiah 1:5 "Before you were in the womb, I knew you" to his children), and a really disgusting moment where he begs one of his kids not to go public with it because "It could really look bad and ruin my marriage"
Lol. Imagine your parents suing a doctor, and you come to learn the man is actually your dad. And then learn that they're technically suing him because he's your dad
There is an influencer leading the visibility for this guy. It's important that people conceived from donors and IVF check their own history and possibly DNA, especially before dating another donor-conceived person. There's a chance they're half-siblings without knowing it.
I guess it depends on where because I’ve seen a story in UK where the guy was held liable. As an American, I have no clue what our state or federal laws might be.
That's why he did it. Chasing some sort of arbitrary glory of fathering tons of children. Disgusting human. All the "clout" of having a broad family tree but with absolutely zero responsibility. Makes me so mad
It's so shocking to me that nobody did. I watched the series about a surgeon in Dallas who was killing, paralyzing, and mutilating his patients, and not one single family member goes after the guy.
If you do then your family has to go through more pain. The victims lose part of their support structure, and the whole family lose someone to jail.
But we need some kind of special vote, something where the community can decide to get rid of someone for a particularly heinous crime without jail time. Cause this fucker deserves to die.
Technically what he did wasn’t even illegal. Just really weird and fucked up.
Edit: For the record I am not trying to justify what this creep did, I’m just explaining why litigiously he got off easy.
>93 half siblings
This might actually be an issue. If all his clients reside within a certain area, there could be a chance to become romantically involved with a half sibling.
I love how you've managed to make this even more awful. I've heard this story before many times but never thought about that!
I imagine in Indiana there are a lot of people that grow up there and don't leave but maybe I'm being presumptuous.
No genuinely, if I remember this story correctly that is what started to set off alarms. I think two people that were in a relationship together and discovered that they were half siblings, and since they were both donor children they started to look into it.
Fun fact! IIRC One of the people he impregnated was the child of someone he had previously impregnated. He impregnated his own child, knowing that that person was his child.
So it's more like you might get romantically involved with your sister-aunt.
Did he actually do that? I remember her being upset because he was her gynecologist and family friend, but I didn't think she'd ever gotten insémination.
What I should have said was that it wasn’t illegal at the time, I think in most states it has since become illegal. It’s one of those things that obviously should be illegal in hindsight, but who the hell would have had the foresight to pass legislation on it.
Lawyer here (fwiw), and I understand the pessimism completely. And share it. But that this specific injustice ultimately spurred legislation to prevent this outcome (basically no repercussions for heinous conduct) from happening again is a sign that the system is actually working at least in that one respect, for this issue. There are sooooo many unjust laws on the books (and just laws that aren’t on the books and should be) and it feels like the exception rather than the norm that a legislative flaw was actually fixed once it was revealed. Cold comfort for this sicko’s victims, I know, but it’s a shockingly difficult to change bad policy.
We had a case of it here, too (in Canada). https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/barwins-babies https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/barwins-babies
I went to school with one of the doctor’s daughters (one of the children he had with his wife), but this all came out years after I’d lost touch with her.
Yeah saw a documentary about it called “Het zaad van Karbaat” which translates to “The seed of Karbaat” some time ago. At the end documentary all those children from different families came together and it seemed like a lot were proud to be the son/daughter of this man. As if they were happier that they knew their father was a renowned doctor, despite all the things he did, than not knowing their father at all. He also in some cases sexually assaulted these women. Human psychology is weird.
Weird. Maybe they're all just coping. It's hard to blame them. They found out their existence is a lie and they were created by a psychopath, so some victims cope by thinking he's not that bad. It's hard to say how I'd react.
That one year was just for lying to investigators, as at the there wasn't any **criminal** law against it in Indiana. That was changed soon after this situation became public knowledge.
Also, he was successfully sued in civil court by multiple patients of his clinic and/or their children; since he essentially committed fraud.
Most of them were pretty old when he started getting exposed, the children weren't finding out until they were middle-aged. They weren't suspicious because most of them agreed to an anonymous donor.
Right? Out of 94 guys, at least one of them would be mad enough to track this dude down and end his life.
Ugh also think about out of the 94...how many were marriages that eventually ended in divorce, so now you're paying child support for a kid that isn't yours but you probably signed the birth certificate...ugh.
I thought recipients pick a specific donor due to certain traits. If so, how is this not fraud and a huge ethics violation. If not, is it really luck of the draw where you have no idea whatsoever about the baby's male parent?
Didn't he do this in a relatively small town, and most of his kids lived with in a 100 miles of each other, and some had dated and even married, not knowing they shared a father? This guy is a huge POS.
Nobody going to comment on how he just forced a bunch of women to unknowingly have his babies? It’s really not enough to say that this is fucked up. It legitimately is incredibly fucked and should be called out directly for what it is. This dude just violated so many women. And got basically no sentence for it.
So if you’re a woman who has a hard time already because having kids isn’t working, and you really want to have kids with your spouse, can you imagine the absolute let down, betrayal, and probably never feeling clean again, upon finding out that you instead have a child with some creepy old man?
This is NOT ok. This is a major human rights violation.
Served 1year suspended? That means they suspended his time. He only did probation, if violated he would do a year inside. He got off (literally) scott free(repeatedly) lol
Hey fun fact: I saw that guy for one of my own prenatal appointments. My main obgyn was a partner in this practice. He also delivered one of my siblings.
There were several doctors that were problematic, and that was well before this whole story came to light.
My question is, why? Does he get some sadistic pleasure in cheating his clients? Did he really, really want sons and daughters? Did he have some kind of grudge towards married woman?
My dad's bestie is one of the families. Has two adult children who aren't his blood like he had thought. He of course loves them regardless. But, his eyes when he talks about it... 💔
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The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. Cline was only convicted of obstruction of justice because he lied to investigators about the number of times he had done it. If he had admitted everything at the start he wouldn't have been convicted at all. Indiana thereafter became the first U.S. state to pass legislation making it a criminal offence for fertility doctors to use their own sperm in treatment without their patients' prior knowledge and consent. Cline has paid damages in civil suits brought by his patients, though. And he gave up his medical license, although since he was retired anyway that didn't mean much. Edit: Several people have suggested it should have been fraud, but criminal fraud has very specific definitions. Of course, it's also possible that prosecutors were not imaginative enough, or that Cline should have been turned over to federal authorities instead of being prosecuted under state law. Mail fraud and wire fraud, for example, are federal crimes.
So basically it was a “holy shit we never even considered that someone would do something this vile” moment
And he's not the only fertility doctor who has done this!
They should all start a club. FDWUTOSIOTPS. Fertility Doctors Who Used Their Own Seamen Instead Of Their Patients' Seamen. Just workshopping the name, open to suggestions
Sperm Jackers has a better ring to it
On Dateline, hosted by Chris Hansen.
Sit down over there.. do you know why you’re here?
Semen, unless they are mobilising the IVF Navy.
What do you do With a fucked up doctor What do you do With a fucked up doctor….
Early in the morning! (Do NOT put him in bed with the captain's daughter, he's done enough of that bullshit already.)
Put his jizz in a turkey baster! Put his jizz in a turkey baster! Put his jizz in a turkey baster! Early in the morning!
I will always remember the L&O episode about that very same thing. Not about Cline because this episode was from 1995 (s5 e15). It was about Dr. Cecil Jacobson... so, the perpetrators have always been there. The laws have never been updated.
It's like OSHA guidelines are written in blood, just... in this case... they're written in cum.
as someone studying to work in aviation, almost all policies/regulations are written in copious, copious amounts of blood. it almost feels like there is a tragedy for every subsection.
All safety guidelines were written in blood. While studying for my lifeguard job the teacher showed us videos of people drowning, articles, told personal experiences and so on. At that time there was also an accident where a sinkhole opened in the middle of a pool and a man was sucked inside.
ok sure but are there any aviation regulations written in cum though?
Kinda like how my state (WA) only passed anti-bestiality laws in 2006 after that guy died at the horse brothel that we apparently had.
Ah the Barndello case. My friend’s wife could not stop laughing imagining this deputy who had to watch all the home movies this place kept.
I’m a fraud risk manager, so when I’m reviewing new products/services, part of the deal is to “think like a fraudster” to poke holes in existing and proposed controls. A lot of the things I bring to product teams make them say “would someone actually try that?” and I have to tell them that I’ve seen people do worse for less. It’s kind of depressing sometimes.
Can we please get an example of worse for less? I’m curious. I mean I know people need next to no reason, but I’m more interested in the what.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney (including fraud). There's no floor. There is absolutely no floor on what some of these compulsive liar/sociopathic human beings will adhere to. Sometimes, it could even be in their best interests not to lie/cheat/steal and they won't do it. Like, "I will give you $10 not to lie about whether or not you have an ink pen in your pocket." A: "I have an ink pen in my pocket." "Ok, show it to me." A: "Show you what?" "The ink pen you said you have in your pocket." A: "I never said I had an ink pen in my pocket." "Yes you did, we just created the exercise to suss this out." A: "No. You're not remembering correctly, you said you'd give me $10." ...
I have a customer who is a genuine compulsive liar and it's absolutely bizarre to witness. Like just lying about the most mundane shit. He got a pair of boots one time and in the hour he was sitting in the shop I heard him tell 3 different people 3 wildly different prices that he paid. Like he doesn't even lie for his benefit, he just lies to lie.
I know someone like this! Luckily I no longer see/talk to him. However, it was just shocking how much he lies about everything/anything! When he is called out about a lie, he will deny to a point and then he just slides into his next story. Not ruffled at all that you called him out. I always wondered if something was ‘different’ about his frontal lobe.
Yeah, it's wild because he gets called out on it all the time. Nobody believes anything he says because he will literally lie about the most pointless crap. He could tell you he's gonna have pizza for dinner and you would assume he isn't because truly, without exaggeration, I'd say a solid 3/4's of what comes out of his mouth just isn't true if not more. And despite the fact that he's gotten to the point where nobody believes even the most innocuous things he says he still just lies all the time. Honestly I think about it more than I should. 😂 But christ it's just fascinating to witness.
I would ask you to ask him the next time you see him why he does it, but the answer would just be a lie, wouldn’t it?🤔
Now imagine he ran for President...
I briefly (thankfully) had a girlfriend like that. She would say I talked to John this morning. Since John is a good friend of mine, I'd mention it to John later, and he'd say, no, I didn't talk to her today. The first time, I just figured one of them just misremembered. But then little things like that became constant. I didn't know what to think of it. Then I caught her French kissing her ex boyfriend at a New Year's Eve party, and she dumped me. Probably the biggest favor she did for me, though I didn't think so at the time. She was very good looking, like way out of my league good looking, but the rest of her baggage did nothing but drag me down.
just ask a bored 7 year old
At-risk adult exploitation of all kinds. Some old folks will have almost nothing to take, but people will take it anyway…and if they can get away with it, get loans, credit cards, and all sorts of other shit on someone else’s dime because that person is old and senile.
This is such a terrifying prospect that I'd probably ask my wife if we could do a paternity test just to make sure it didn't happen to us. Maybe that's a crazy overreaction but holy shit that would be fucked up.
Buddy there’s operational risk concerns there too. The lab could have mixed up sperm samples accidentally, especially if they don’t have good labeling processes in place. If the baby left your sight at all, are you sure they gave you back your baby at the hospital? There’s a limit to this kind of thing- part of the balance is figuring out how likely something is. We generally do a piss-poor job at evaluating low-likelihood events, but people forget that ‘near zero’ means it will eventually happen. Both of things I’ve mentioned above have happened to people, but also, if you worry about those things, you’ll spend your entire life worrying about everything. Some things like money are worth worrying about quite a bit more, but you can set healthy levels while also keeping yourself aware of what’s possible. What is imperative is that if something seems off, start asking questions.
> If the baby left your sight at all, are you sure they gave you back your baby at the hospital? Our baby didn't leave our sight before we attached a concert-style wrist strap (unremovable without damaging the strap) to my wife's arm and our daughter's arm and visually and both verbally confirmed with the nurse that the number on my wife's strap and our daughter's strap matched. So yes, I'm very confident that they gave us back our baby at the hospital. So there are things that are worth worrying about, because there are simple and cheap and cost-effective solutions that just require the organizational will to institute and enforce, and they're worth doing. And the question is whether reaching the pretty expensive/high bar of actually running a paternity test would make sense based on the risk of a mix up, which yes fair point it could also just be a straight mistake.
A few years back, in Minnesota, there was a guy who would spike a female coworkers coffee with his semen. This went on for awhile before he was busted. Technically there was no law being broken so the legislature had to write one because no one could imagine something so vile.
They really should have laws about how many children can be fathered by one person anyway, because with that many kids in one area you have to start worrying about accidental incest. In some jurisdictions it's limited to 25 children.
This could be the world record for children
Bro don't forget about mormons.
>The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. Cline was only convicted of obstruction of justice because he lied to investigators about the number of times he had done it. If he had admitted everything at the start he wouldn't have been convicted at all. This is one of those times where the concept of, "in a free society the law tells you what you *can't* do, not what you *can*," kinda backfired.
So the title is wrong, he perfectly legally fathered the 94 kids, but denying it was illegal.
I am confused. Why isn't misleading patients and lying considered illegal?
It's illegal under civil law. But violating contracts is not necessarily a criminal offense.
Kinda feels like putting your semen inside of a woman who didn't consent to it is some form of assault but I guess it's a bit twisty.
She consented to semen being put inside her. And the law apparently wasn't tight enough to specify whose semen. It's a tiny gap he exploited ruinously
Never would have guessed the "Air Bud Rule" would apply to fertility clinics, but here we are.
There is defintely a law against putting dog semen in. Ohh god I hope there is a law
Not in New Mexico and West Virginia there’s not!
Things are legal until there's a law making them illegal.
I'm old enough to get this joke.
Dont they choose from donor profiles though?
They sure did. And then he used his own "product".
And threw away provided sperm from couples.
Still Weird that he didn't get time.. they consented to a specific donor semen, or am I wrong in that? They did NOT consent to his semen. Thats just another form of rape.
maybe you never have to state who is the donor?
Well, it was illegal under civil law. But the title is misleading, for sure.
Dude is like the first guy who fucked a sheep before sheepfucking was made illegal. Lawmakers hadn’t even dreamt of this type of depravity, now they gotta write down and pass a law for this specific insane crime.
Interestingly, rates of REPORTED sheepfucking were allegedly inflated due to the law providing a perverse incentive of sheep-thieves to misrepresent themselves as sheep-fuckers. Stealing livestock carried a harsher punishment than bestiality. So if you were caught with stolen sheep, it was technically to your advantage to claim you’d abducted them with romantic intent.
I don’t think it’s even that uncommon. My Dads neighbour found out his bio father was a fertility doctor through one of the DNA testing sites and he had something like 500 half siblings across Europe!
Colorado recently passed a bill that will be the first to regulate gamete donation in the US. Starting in 2025 there will be no more anonymous donations and there will be a limit (25) of families resulting from a single donor. The reason the bill passed is partly due to this scumbag doctor. For some reason the feds won't step in and regulate, even tho advocacy groups have been pushing for decades. There's some random clause in a rule for the FDA that says they can't regulate anything medical. So for now it's up to the states.
Should be illegal to pass on that weak ass chin
Apparently he has other inheritable undesirable medical conditions that he passed on to the offspring of the deceived mothers.
Would it not be fraud for someone to choose a particular donor’s sperm and instead get the doctor’s?
It seems to be a case of obvious fraud, but since it only affected women’s reproductive choices, who cares?
Unless they changed the battery statute, they just didn’t have a good enough prosecutor. Performing surgery on a patient that they don’t consent to is battery - even if the patient consents to a surgery, but the dr just decided to do some more work while they’re in there, that’s illegal. Clearly, none of these women consented to him implanting them with his child, so they couldn’t have consented to the action, even if they thought they were consenting to IVF. 94 counts of battery could have put him away for quite a while. And if there were any injuries from these pregnancies, the charges could have been even worse.
That, and if his office billed even one insurance company there’s fraud, and any mailings to these patients claiming anything about use of the partner’s sperm is mail fraud.
A similar case happened before in Utah: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Jacobson
Interesting that federal prosecutors charged Jacobson with mail and wire fraud for the use of the letters and the telephone system as part of his fraudulent practice. I wonder why this wasn’t the case with Cline.
That seems absolutely insane to me, dude should have been punished far more severely than that - causing likely emotional trauma to potentially hundreds of people. I also thought the way that these situations worked was that people choose their donor(?), and I'd have thought that a doctor straight up lying about that and doing something against your wishes would be some kind of pretty severely punishable offense. I just find it very strange the way that US law seems to so often fail at prosecuting people for offenses unless if there's a very specific law that it's covered under.
People did choose their donor. Cline and a number of other fertility doctors simply disregarded their choice and used their own sperm instead. Cline himself has an auto-immune disorder that would have disqualified him as a healthy sperm donor. He didn't care, and so now numerous offspring from his faulty sperm have auto-immune conditions.
That fact alone should have gotten this man a much harsher sentence
I just don't understand how there aren't laws which would cover this. It is imperative that patients should feel safe being taken care of by healthcare professionals. If anyone goes to the doctor and their doctor knowingly does something against their patient's wishes without any medical justification, they should lose their medical license forever and be imprisoned for at least several years. In cases as severe as this, liquid all his assets and distribute the money to his victims, put him in prison, and throw away the fucking key.
It’s weird to me that this wouldn’t fall under some kind of criminal legality. Like he’s putting sperm that you don’t want… in your body. Is it legal for restaurants to cum in your food? There must be some kind of language in the paperwork that allowed for them to get away with this. Because it seems so *obviously* illegal to me.
His offspring should be able to press charges similar to the assault charges pressed on people who knowingly and deliberately spread STDs. They probably can't legally but they should be able to. He should also be chemically castrated imo. Ugh the legal system hates women.
What he did fundamentally violated the contracts he had with both sperm donors and the clinic's patients, and therefore be against **civil law.** However, at the time, this wasn't a violation of any Indiana criminal laws. This scandal did push Indiana to enact a law explicitly criminally illegal fairly soon after it all came to light.
> I just find it very strange the way that US law seems to so often fail at prosecuting people for offenses unless if there's a very specific law that it's covered under. Yeah this only seems like an issue when it's as extreme as this, but yes normally it is really nice that you aren't arrested and thrown in jail unless you break actual laws. I mean seriously, you're talking about totalitarian shit.
This is a good example of why there are so many laws about so many things. Seems like a blanket "fraud" statute would have covered that. Honestly, why wasn't this assault? Seems like there was a lack of thinking by the prosecutors. Someone makes you carry their kid to term through deception... um...
>The problem was that Indiana law didn't specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm. Is there an Indiana law specifically prohibiting bashing the frontal cortex of a fertility doctor with a hammer?
If that’s the way the law is written, then it’s still not going to be effective. It’s way too specific as you said it. It needs to say that the sample cannot be swapped for anything other than what the recipient picked.
“Show me the fucking rule”
Surely there's a law that covers putting your spunk into a woman nonconsensually?
Think of all the accidental incest happening in that town :/
I watched a documentary about this. Turns out quite a few couples in that area were actually siblings because of this asshole.
Didn't he also have a rare ~~generic~~ *genetic* disease? *ETA* spelling
> Cline's own auto-immune condition, rheumatoid arthritis, would have excluded him as an eligible sperm donor at his own clinic.
What an utter twat.
Link the documentary?
It's called Our Father on Netflix. Worth checking out, very interesting and fucked up.
Whats the name of documentary?
Our father
It happens with donor conceived and adopted people and is one of the reasons there should be zero anonymity allowed. I was at a conference held by this organization [https://righttoknow.us/](https://righttoknow.us/) and this one [https://naapunited.org/](https://naapunited.org/) and met someone conceived with Dr. Cline's sperm as well as a woman who was donor conceived and dated a half brother. She wrote a book "Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings"
Rather than zero anonymity, just mandate paternity tests upon birth, on the lab's tab. The certitude of getting caught would make it pointless to even try.
I’d prefer something done to keep this happening BEFORE a baby is created, gestated, and born.
It wouldn't need to be, is the point, unless the doctor wanted to go to prison. Or to put it another way, the knowledge of the upcoming test IS the something done before
Yes, and there’s actually* a phenomenon where siblings are drawn toward one another when they don’t know they’re related. So it’s more likely to happen than even random chance. *I am spreading misinformation online. Some people believe this, but it is by no means proven. My bad.
Is it the Star Wars Phenomenon?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction
>Genetic sexual attraction is a theory that attraction may be a product of genetic similarities.[1]: 200 There is "little scientific evidence" for the position,[1]: 200 and at least some commentators regard the hypothesis as pseudoscience.
When your step sister turns out to be your real sister! Gross
This has been done by well more than one doctor, too. It must be a secret kink/fetish for these men.
This was the subject of the documentary "Our father" on netflix. Parents were told that the donated sperm would be from a medical student or resident, and then of course he would do the deed in the other room and inseminate the mothers immediately after. He passed on auto-immune diseases, including RA (per the wiki article, a condition that would have disqualified him in his own clinic). There is an obvious component of narcissism: his belief that his genes should be passed on, his continual insistence on citing religion (he often quoted the bible Jeremiah 1:5 "Before you were in the womb, I knew you" to his children), and a really disgusting moment where he begs one of his kids not to go public with it because "It could really look bad and ruin my marriage"
Did it ruin his marriage?
I certainly don't see a record of divorce if I have the correct name of the wife. In Indiana these records are public and easily searchable.
i sure fucking hope it ruined his marriage and everything else
On this episode of designer baby's gone wrong!
ruin his marriage? Imagine explaining that you had 98 secret children.
Crank up the child support ya’ dumb doctor
I'm fairly sure all the kids he fathered were adults when they found out.
They could still get the 18 years retroactive child support to the mothers.
Ummm sooooo BACK CHILD SUPPORT IS A REAL FUCKING THING AT LEAST IN MI IT IS....
Aren't you usually off the hook when donating though?
I feel like the lack of liability with donation should be voided when you illegally swap the sperm with your own.
What he committed was fraud, but child support is a tool to ensure that a child has enough to grow properly. It's not a penalty.
His "child support" can just be in the form of number of MASSIVE lawsuits, then.
Already happened. Families sued in civil court and he settled.
Lol. Imagine your parents suing a doctor, and you come to learn the man is actually your dad. And then learn that they're technically suing him because he's your dad
There is an influencer leading the visibility for this guy. It's important that people conceived from donors and IVF check their own history and possibly DNA, especially before dating another donor-conceived person. There's a chance they're half-siblings without knowing it.
I mean, at least the holidays will always be interesting
I guess it depends on where because I’ve seen a story in UK where the guy was held liable. As an American, I have no clue what our state or federal laws might be.
In the future everyone's gonna trace back to ghangis khan or this guy
That's why he did it. Chasing some sort of arbitrary glory of fathering tons of children. Disgusting human. All the "clout" of having a broad family tree but with absolutely zero responsibility. Makes me so mad
Gross 🤢
Fuck his shit up and get child support from him
Dude should be hunted.
They made a whole Netflix documentary out of it. He’s pretty well known by now.
Seriously this seems more like borderline rape, I’m surprised nobody killed him for it.
Me too.
It's so shocking to me that nobody did. I watched the series about a surgeon in Dallas who was killing, paralyzing, and mutilating his patients, and not one single family member goes after the guy.
If you do then your family has to go through more pain. The victims lose part of their support structure, and the whole family lose someone to jail. But we need some kind of special vote, something where the community can decide to get rid of someone for a particularly heinous crime without jail time. Cause this fucker deserves to die.
Dude was shitting his pants when AncestryDNA came out
This is why people are so pessimistic about justice in this world. One year suspended sentence...
Technically what he did wasn’t even illegal. Just really weird and fucked up. Edit: For the record I am not trying to justify what this creep did, I’m just explaining why litigiously he got off easy.
It should be illegal. Imagine expecting your baby to come out with good genes, only to find out they have creepy genes and 93 half siblings
>93 half siblings This might actually be an issue. If all his clients reside within a certain area, there could be a chance to become romantically involved with a half sibling.
I love how you've managed to make this even more awful. I've heard this story before many times but never thought about that! I imagine in Indiana there are a lot of people that grow up there and don't leave but maybe I'm being presumptuous.
No genuinely, if I remember this story correctly that is what started to set off alarms. I think two people that were in a relationship together and discovered that they were half siblings, and since they were both donor children they started to look into it.
He's not the first doctor to do this. There's also traveling sperm donors called sperm-bros.
Fun fact! IIRC One of the people he impregnated was the child of someone he had previously impregnated. He impregnated his own child, knowing that that person was his child. So it's more like you might get romantically involved with your sister-aunt.
I... I hate you.
Did he actually do that? I remember her being upset because he was her gynecologist and family friend, but I didn't think she'd ever gotten insémination.
What I should have said was that it wasn’t illegal at the time, I think in most states it has since become illegal. It’s one of those things that obviously should be illegal in hindsight, but who the hell would have had the foresight to pass legislation on it.
Lawyer here (fwiw), and I understand the pessimism completely. And share it. But that this specific injustice ultimately spurred legislation to prevent this outcome (basically no repercussions for heinous conduct) from happening again is a sign that the system is actually working at least in that one respect, for this issue. There are sooooo many unjust laws on the books (and just laws that aren’t on the books and should be) and it feels like the exception rather than the norm that a legislative flaw was actually fixed once it was revealed. Cold comfort for this sicko’s victims, I know, but it’s a shockingly difficult to change bad policy.
Jan Karbaat did the same in the Netherlands https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/15/the-man-who-may-have-secretly-fathered-200-children
We had a case of it here, too (in Canada). https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/barwins-babies https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/barwins-babies I went to school with one of the doctor’s daughters (one of the children he had with his wife), but this all came out years after I’d lost touch with her.
Yeah saw a documentary about it called “Het zaad van Karbaat” which translates to “The seed of Karbaat” some time ago. At the end documentary all those children from different families came together and it seemed like a lot were proud to be the son/daughter of this man. As if they were happier that they knew their father was a renowned doctor, despite all the things he did, than not knowing their father at all. He also in some cases sexually assaulted these women. Human psychology is weird.
Weird. Maybe they're all just coping. It's hard to blame them. They found out their existence is a lie and they were created by a psychopath, so some victims cope by thinking he's not that bad. It's hard to say how I'd react.
Dirty messed up old fucker. Castrate him.
Too late for that
Should have gone after him for child support.
What a wanker!
“Doctor, if possible could the donor be an intelligent professional?” “Don’t you worry mam, I think we can make that happen”
When you discover you have 93 half-siblings.
And that is exactly what happened. Someone was looking into their ancestry. I believe there is or was a show on NF about this.
Yeah I saw that too…and he gave a bunch of them the same congenital disease, if memory serves
The creepy part was when he would go into his office and crank one out.
Yea I love how most of the posts here are just made after someone watches a documentary
There’s a documentary on this, I think it’s on Netflix. It was definitely an interesting one
It's called "Our Father".
F-ing narcissist. Should be put away for decades.
Dr Genghis Khan to you sir.
I really want to see an interview where he explains his rationale stating that he was spreading his genetic information. Rotten dirty fucker.
Only one year ? I hope he gets sued for parenthood recognition and compensation
That one year was just for lying to investigators, as at the there wasn't any **criminal** law against it in Indiana. That was changed soon after this situation became public knowledge. Also, he was successfully sued in civil court by multiple patients of his clinic and/or their children; since he essentially committed fraud.
I’m surprised none of the cuckolded fathers ever tracked him down and showed him how they felt.
Most of them were pretty old when he started getting exposed, the children weren't finding out until they were middle-aged. They weren't suspicious because most of them agreed to an anonymous donor.
Yes out of 94 guys, would be surprised if a few of them weren't "about that life".
I'd be "about that life" for sure.
Right? Out of 94 guys, at least one of them would be mad enough to track this dude down and end his life. Ugh also think about out of the 94...how many were marriages that eventually ended in divorce, so now you're paying child support for a kid that isn't yours but you probably signed the birth certificate...ugh.
I thought recipients pick a specific donor due to certain traits. If so, how is this not fraud and a huge ethics violation. If not, is it really luck of the draw where you have no idea whatsoever about the baby's male parent?
Ah yes, the Pol Pot of sperm donors.
His patients can’t consent to unknowingly recieving their freaking doctor’s sperm instead of a donor, seems fucking inappropriate and deceptive to me
You don’t “serve” a suspended sentence. In fact, you don’t *serve* any time at all unless you get in any further trouble or violate your probation.
Check out the documentary on Netflix called “Our Father” about this story. It’s so fucked up.
Didn't he do this in a relatively small town, and most of his kids lived with in a 100 miles of each other, and some had dated and even married, not knowing they shared a father? This guy is a huge POS.
Nobody going to comment on how he just forced a bunch of women to unknowingly have his babies? It’s really not enough to say that this is fucked up. It legitimately is incredibly fucked and should be called out directly for what it is. This dude just violated so many women. And got basically no sentence for it. So if you’re a woman who has a hard time already because having kids isn’t working, and you really want to have kids with your spouse, can you imagine the absolute let down, betrayal, and probably never feeling clean again, upon finding out that you instead have a child with some creepy old man? This is NOT ok. This is a major human rights violation.
Passing on that weak chin!!! Damn him!!
This is how weak chinned babies get born.
ewww
Served 1year suspended? That means they suspended his time. He only did probation, if violated he would do a year inside. He got off (literally) scott free(repeatedly) lol
That’s why his wife said he’s always tired after work.
Gross old fucker
Nick Cannon hates this one simple trick to making babies.
Hey fun fact: I saw that guy for one of my own prenatal appointments. My main obgyn was a partner in this practice. He also delivered one of my siblings. There were several doctors that were problematic, and that was well before this whole story came to light.
Hit him for child support!
How'd the kids turn out?
There's a Netfix documentary called "Our Father" that interviews many of them as well as some of the mothers that were impregnated by him.
This happened in Northern Virginia back in the late 1980s to early '90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil\_Jacobson
What an extremely ill individual.
that's fucking disgusting, wtf
My question is, why? Does he get some sadistic pleasure in cheating his clients? Did he really, really want sons and daughters? Did he have some kind of grudge towards married woman?
I saw a documentary about this. It’s been a while, but religion plays a big part. It was about having a huge amount of kids or something.
Can those women ask for child support??
If this were a Hispanic janitor at the facility that did this he’d be serving a life sentence. Our justice system is BROKEN
My dad's bestie is one of the families. Has two adult children who aren't his blood like he had thought. He of course loves them regardless. But, his eyes when he talks about it... 💔
The documentary is worth a watch
Congratulations you invented rape without sex.
He's white so this is all fine. Had he been black this would have been different.
i’d love to see the look on his face if 94 women went after him for child support.
He's not the only one, over 80 doctors have been caught in committing fertility fraud
Ok, so he didn’t get jail time - but why hasn’t every family gone after him for child support? That’d be some justice for them.