Fertility Fraud: How DNA Exposed Donald Cline's Sinister Secret

Jacoba Ballard always felt different. She had blond hair and blue eyes, while her parents had dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. As a child, Jacoba routinely asked her parents if she was adopted, trying to explain why she felt different. Then, her parents told her she was the product of artificial insemination.

Relieved by the news, Jacoba wondered if she had half-siblings. Her mother assured Jacoba that there might be a couple as sperm samples were not used over three times, which makes sense if you want to keep the gene pool in an area deeper than a duck pond. It is a concern of consanguinity, which is when your family tree does not branch.

Jacoba’s Mom, Debbie Pierce

Debbie Pierce went to Dr. Cline to help her get pregnant. Cline told her he would use a sperm sample from someone who looked like her husband and that he used donations from medical students. Debbie became pregnant immediately after Cline artificially inseminated her. She remembers Cline being professional.

When Jacoba reached out to Cline to ask for any information on her mother’s treatment back in 1979, Cline told her he routinely destroyed patient records and there was no way he could give her any information.

Jacoba went on with her life. She got married and raised her kids. Then, in 2014, home DNA testing kits like 23 and Me and Ancestry hit the consumer market. Jacoba jumped at the chance to take one. She anxiously awaited her results, and the day she received them, Jacoba was shocked to learn that she has seven half-siblings who had also taken home DNA tests.

Jacoba Diggs Deeper

Confused and wanting answers, Jacoba reached out to these new family members. She began asking, did your parents use a fertility doctor? The answer was a resounding yes. Something strange was afoot. Either the clinic used the same donor many more times than they claimed, or the donor was a serial ejaculator, donating his sperm willy-nilly to fertility clinics across Indianapolis. A few of the siblings joked what if our dad was the fertility doctor? This joke would end up becoming a chilling piece of foreshadowing.

Jacoba was determined to discover the identity of this mystery donor and did a thorough analysis of the DNA database. Focusing on their paternal line, Jacoba located a second cousin the new siblings had in common. The woman was forthcoming and supplied Jacoba with a list of surnames in her family. One of those names was Donald Cline’s mother’s maiden name. Jacoba asked if the woman might be related to anyone with Cline’s last name. Oh, yes, she said. I’d forgotten my cousin Don. The same Donald Cline Jacoba had phoned about her mother’s care.

The new siblings grappled with the fact that Donald Cline had practiced as a doctor for over thirty years. He lied about using donor sperm and, sometimes, spousal sperm. How many more siblings could there be?

Who is Don Cline?

Donald Cline was born in 1937 in Indiana. He received an undergraduate degree from Indiana University and from there attended Indiana University School of Medicine to receive his M.D. After interning at Methodist Hospital, Cline served in the United States Air Force for two years and was in inactive reserve for 12 years until he received an honorable discharge. In 1979, he opened his fertility clinic in the Indianapolis area.

In 1963, Cline hit four-year-old Angela Golden after she darted into the road. Angely sadly died at the hospital from her injuries. After that, those who knew Cline said he doubled down on Jesus. As he aged, Cline became an elder in his church, holding group baptisms at his home.

Side note about Angel Golden’s death. In the Netflix documentary, Our Father, Anglea Golden’s death is reenacted, and Golden is played by a white child even though she was black. Why the filmmaker created a reenactment and then change the color of the child’s skin is unknown, but the Golden family is bothered by this for obvious reasons and questions why the reenactment was needed. Cline’s fraudulent behavior is sensational enough.

A deeply religious person, Cline, peppered his office with scripture, crosses, and pictures of Jesus and Mary. One of his favorite pieces of scripture is Jeremiah 1:5 — Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.

Through the 1970s and 80s, Cline was renowned for his fertility techniques, boasting a 100% success rate, which is crazy considering almost nothing in life carries a 100% guarantee except death. He was a gifted surgeon who gave his patients the ability to bear children and get pregnant.

Plea to the Attorney General

Jacoba wanted to file a complaint against Donald Cline. She contacted the state Attorney General of Indiana. She received a letter stating her complaint was received and that someone would be in touch. Jacoba never heard from the Attorney General’s office. She then contacted the U.S. Attorney General and received the same silence.

She then reached out to local news agencies, hoping one would pick up the story, but none did until she sent a Facebook message to Angela Ganote. In her letter to Angela, Jacoba laid out all the facts, and immediately, Angela took the story to her producer.

Initially, Angela reached out to Cline, and he adamantly denied using his sperm in his clinic, that the sperm he used came from medical students. Angela asked him if he would like to see the DNA evidence or provide a sample of his DNA, but he refused, which is quite a turn for someone who so freely shared his DNA with women who did not ask for it — a red flag of a control freak.

How Sperm Banks are Supposed to Work

Potential donors go through a rigorous interview process. You are disqualified if you have a family history of genetic diseases, autoimmune disorders, cancer, or mental illness.

Gay men are disqualified if they have had sex with another man. If you have visited an area with high rates of AIDS/HIV and had sex with anyone in that area, you are disqualified. If you are or have a history of intravenous drug use, you are disqualified from donating sperm.

This screening process can take six to eight months, and donors can be paid anywhere from $40 to $100 per sample. Sperm donors come from every walk of life, but most are college students, which makes sense. College students need that cash for school. However, sperm banks may want to consider raising their rates. $100 can buy you about 16 pages in a chemistry book these days.

These donor profiles are placed into a database, and patients can choose which donors they are interested in using for their fertility needs. At Cline’s clinic, the database was a notebook that patients could browse, not that it mattered because Cline would violate that agreement, regardless.

Cline’s Patients

Dianna Kiesler went to Cline and took her husband’s sperm with her for the insemination. Since the inseminations used live sperm, samples had to be used within an hour. She became pregnant with her daughter, Julie.

Julie discovered the truth about her parentage after taking an at-home DNA test. Finding she was not her father’s child caused Julie to have an identity crisis and broke her father’s heart.

Liz White, whose husband was infertile, sought the help of Cline. She underwent 15 artificial inseminations before becoming pregnant with her son Matt. As she thinks back to her visits with Cline, she is disgusted. While she waited, naked from the waist down, Cline was masturbating in his office under the guise of gathering the donor sperm. Cline even told Liz and her husband he would use sperm from a donor who resembled her husband.

Matt discovered he was the product of artificial insemination when he asked about his parents’ blood types after learning about punnet squares in his high school biology class. Matt had no interest in locating his biological father until he saw Angela Ganote’s report about Cline fathering children without his patient’s consent. Cline was also his mother’s fertility doctor.

Matt did a DNA test and discovered that he had 13 half-siblings, all fathered by Cline.

Cline Gives Himself Away

Soon after her initial contact with Cline, Jacoba began recording their phone conversation. In one exchange from 2016, Cline admitted using his sperm instead of donor samples: “You know, I thought I was doing the right thing. I only donated my samples nine or ten times.”

Somehow, this is not a justification or an excuse.

In that same conversation, Cline pleaded with Jacoba to pull the story from the media, stating that his marriage was on the rocks after 57 years. Cline’s wife considered his acts adultery. Yeah, no shit.

The Walls Begin to Close In

Jacoba took the recordings to state prosecutors, who now had the evidence they needed to prosecute Cline. In the State of Indiana, rape has to fit two criteria. It has to be an act of force, and it has to be nonconsensual. Since no force applied to Cline’s patients, the act did not meet the State’s rape criteria. It also did not meet the standards for assault or battery since the women consented to the procedure. However, when Cline gave his statements to investigators, he stated he had never used his samples at his clinic. Now prosecutors have him on the record saying the opposite.

The State obtained a warrant for Cline’s DNA and performed an independent DNA test that found Cline has a 99.9997% probability of being the father of some thirteen odd children from former patients.

Cline was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice. He pleaded guilty so the case would not go to trial. Cline was sentenced to a year in jail, but the judge suspended that sentence and charged him with a $500 fine. At the time of Cline’s arrest, no law in Indiana made illicit donor insemination a crime. Since then, Jacoba and her siblings have lobbied to change that, and in 2018, it became illegal in Indiana to inseminate someone with sperm to which they did not consent.

Side note on this new law. The state legislature had trouble getting enough votes to pass this law outright, and Jacoba and her siblings had to fight for two additional years to get it passed, which is outrageous.

But Why?

None of this information explains why Cline fraudulently inseminated his patients with his sperm. What was his motive?

Through her investigation, Jacoba discovered that some people she was dealing with at the state level had email addresses for a fundamental Christian organization called Quiverfull.

The idea behind Quiverfull is to have your quiver full of arrows, arrows meaning children. Quiverfull’s mission is to have devout white Christians produce as many children as possible and educate them in the ways of the Lord before sending them into the world where they will strive to take their place in government, enacting a biblical state. In this organization, women as seen as little more than chattel.

In addition, Quiverfull's mission is to repopulate the white race to balance out ethnic diversity and replacement theory. Replacement theory is the idea that people of color will outbreed Caucasians, replacing them. Replacement theory is an unsubstantiated premise put out by white supremacists to sow fear in fragile white society.

The Quiverfull theory goes along with Cline’s religious fundamentalism. However, Cline’s involvement in the Quiverfull moments is unknown beyond associating with Quiverfull members.

Sexual Motivation?

That your doctor just masturbated and then came to the root in your undercarriage is disturbing. Cline maintains his motivations were not sexual, yet we have an individual flooded with endorphins after ejaculating, intending to inseminate his seaman into his patients without their consent. This screams of sexual dominance akin to rape.

Anyone who says rape is about sex did not read the memo. Rape is about control and misogyny. While rape is often, and wrongly, associated with force, rape’s major component is lack of consent. And what Cline did was, without a doubt, nonconsensual. If we polled Cline’s patients, who received his unwanted sperm, to see which of them would have consented if he offered his sample, we would come up short on takers.

The lack of respect Cline showed his patients reveals darker motives. Cline was not a doctor concerned with his patient’s well-being. He was concerned with being in control.

Where are things today?

By 2018, over 50 people had been located through DNA evidence to have been fathered by Cline. Four years later, in 2022, that number is 94 and counting.

Since home DNA testing kits came on the market, 44 doctors have been found to have used their sperm to inseminate their patients without patient consent.

Cline’s rheumatoid arthritis would have excluded him from being a donor, and most children he fathered have autoimmune disorders.

Sources

Jourdan, Lucie (2022). Our Father: Netflix Documentary.

Madeira, Jody L., “Understanding Illicit Insemination and Fertility Fraud from Patient Experience to Legal Reform” (2020). Articles by Maurer Faculty. 2902. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/2902

Rafford, Clair, “‘It’s just 100% wrong’: Family of child killed by Donald Cline responds to Netflix movie” (2022). Indianapolis Star. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/2022/06/10/our-father-netflix-film-family-child-killed-responds-movie/7543416001/

Tron, Gina. Who is Jacoba Ballard, One of Dr. Donald Cline’s Many Biological Children? Oxygen True Crime. https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/who-is-jacoba-ballard-donald-cline-children-netflix-our-father#:~:text=Jacoba%20Ballard%2C%20who%20is%20featured,impregnate%20patients%20without%20their%20knowledge.