A retired Indianapolis fertility doctor accused of inseminating patients with his own sperm will serve no jail time after pleading guilty Thursday to charges that he lied to investigators.
A Marion County judge gave Dr. Donald Cline a one-year suspended sentence, but ruled his actions justified him having a felony criminal record.
The 79-year-old doctor had pleaded guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice and faced up to three years in prison on each charge.
Some of the now-adult children of Cline’s former patients filed a complaint with the Indiana attorney general’s office in 2014 after they became suspicious that Cline had inseminated some of his patients with his own sperm.
The daughter of one of his patients discovered eight unknown siblings following a commercial DNA test, which led to the revelation Dr Cline was her father.
Dr. Donald Cline, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist seen here in 2007, accused of inseminating patients with his own sperm pled guilty to charges that he lied to investigators
Cline, who retired in 2009, initially wrote to investigators denying the allegations.
Paternity tests indicate Cline is likely the biological father of at least two of his patients’ children, according to court records.
Those children allege that online genetic tests show he may be the father of 20 others.
Cline told six adults who believed they were his children that he had donated his own sperm about 50 times starting in the 1970s, according to court documents.
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.
When the first two half-sisters matched up, and discovered there were nine siblings fathered by the same man, rather than the maximum of three patients were led to believe donors were allowed to father, they got suspicious.
They then discovered a genetic link to Doug Cline, the doctor’s son.
Doug Cline told the half-sisters over Facebook that his father had admitted using his own sperm.
Then, in an in-person meeting, the doctor told the two women he had felt pressured at the time to do so because he didn’t always have access to fresh sperm.
He felt he was helping out because the women really wanted babies, he told them, according to court documents.
No other charges were filed against Cline because Indiana doesn’t specifically prohibit fertility doctors from using their own sperm.
A prominent instance in which a fertility doctor secretly used his own sperm was Cecil Jacobson, who may have fathered as many as 70 children from 1976 to 1998 in Vienna, Virginia.