INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - An Indianapolis fertility doctor is being accused of using his own sperm to artificially inseminate patients and not informing them of what he did.
Donald Cline, 77, appeared in court Monday to face two counts of obstruction of justice, both felonies.
The children of his former patients filed complaints with the Indiana Attorney General's Office with the intent to find out how many offspring had the same donor and other details. Dr. Cline denied being the sperm donor. But DNA tests revealed he was paternally matched to two complainants by 99.9 percent.
Cline said he may have donated his own sperm to up to 50 patients.
"It's been a longstanding joke that I am not related. Obviously I am my mom's. I don't look like anybody on either side of the family," said the daughter of one of Cline's former patients.
Dr. Cline said he was only trying to help women who really wanted children. Cline treated hundreds of women for years at his office on West 86th Street.
In court Monday, the judge ordered Cline to stay away from his former patients and their families. But those families have a lot of concerns.
After learning about Dr. Cline's alleged actions in his fertility clinics, a woman who asked not to be identified had a conversation with her mother, who was his patient at one time.
The daughter shared with Eyewitness News that her mother didn't feel 100 percent comfortable looking back at her experiences with Cline.
The retired fertility doctor interviewed with Eyewitness News in 2004. Now, court documents say he told his family he used his own sperm while treating women at least on 50 different occassions.
Two women recently met after learning they are his offspring after researching their DNA. They fear there are others, especially after learning about her mother's visits to Dr. Cline when trying to have children.
"She said he was kind. But he would bring them in during ovulation time and drape a sheet where she could not see what he was doing, and he would do an internal exam saying he was checking for over stimulated ovaries and a cervical check. But there was a speculum involved and she would not know what he was doing because she could not see," said the daughter. "How dare you take people's feelings and twist them like this? How dare you victimize possibly hundreds of people, and hundreds of couples, and then all of their children are now victims too, so it just expands from there."
The concerned woman and her family know they are not alone and want testing made available to anyone who believes they may be a victim of Dr. Cline.
In court documents, Cline says he just wanted to help women who really wanted children, and at the time didn't think he was doing anything wrong.
Cline will return to the City-County Building for pretrial next month on the felony obstruction of justice charges.
More about the case:
According to court documents, it started when an Indiana woman took a DNA test and discovered that her father was not her biological father.
The woman's mother had been a patient of Dr. Cline's in the 1980s. He allegedly told the woman's mother that he would use sperm from a resident or medical student, and never suggested that he would be the sperm donor.
The woman's DNA test through 23andMe showed that she was related to at least eight others on the site. According to court documents, at least three of those eight people were the children of mothers who had visited Dr. Cline for artificial insemination.
In a meeting between former patients' children and Dr. Cline's adult son and daughter, they said their father admitted to donating his own sperm over seven years - as many as 50 times, whenever he didn't have a donor sample available.
Cline said he did wrong by inseminating the women with his own sperm, but felt he was helping them because they wanted a baby, according to court documents. He also said he felt pressured to use his own sperm because he didn't always have access to fresh sperm. He also said he never used a sperm bank, despite his children's claims that he did.
Cline also said if a woman came back for another baby, he would use his own sperm to produce full siblings. He claimed he presented the mothers with a "consent for artificial donor insemination" form, but since the medical records are over seven years old, he said they've been shredded.
The youngest sibling was born in 1986. Dr. Cline said he wasn't sure when he stopped using his own sperm to inseminate women. He apologized for his actions and said since he found God, he knows what he did was wrong.
Cline's attorney released a statement on his behalf Monday afternoon, saying, in full:
"Today Dr. Donald Cline entered a plea of 'not guilty' in response to two charges alleging he obstructed justice. There seems to be some confusion in the media as to the 'crime' that Dr. Cline was actually charged. The charges arise solely from his written response to inquiries from the Indiana Attorney General's office and nothing more. He is not accused of hiding documents, influencing witnesses or otherwise not cooperating with the AG's investigation. Because we are at the beginning of the criminal procedure, any further comments must be reserved so that the judicial process can proceed in the appropriate manner.
"Dr. Cline is represented by Tracy Betz of the law firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP."
