Review | Netflix’s Our Father review: new documentary about a fertility doctor who secretly used his sperm to inseminate patients doesn’t dig deep enough

Dr Donald Cline’s patients were led to believe they were being inseminated either with sperm from donors or their own husbands – it was actually his

Our Father examines how his offspring tried to bring the fertility specialist to justice, but the show never digs deep and has several distasteful re-enactments

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Jacoba Ballard in a still from Netflix’s Our Father. The documentary follows the actions of her biological father, a fertility doctor in the US who fathered almost 100 children without his patients’ consent. Photo: Netflix

Published: 7:15am, 18 May 2022

Far too many true crime documentaries lack analysis or even thoughtful ideas about how to tell stories that are at once shocking and infuriating through film. Such is the case with Our Father on Netflix, a documentary about a fertility doctor who secretly used his own sperm to artificially inseminate more than 90 patients.

For years, Dr Donald Cline was one of the better-known fertility specialists in his Indianapolis community in the US state of Indiana. His patients were led to believe they were being inseminated either with sperm from donors or their own husbands.

Instead, Cline used his own sperm. One of his subsequent offspring, Jacoba Ballard, was the first to realise something was amiss when she submitted her DNA to genetic testing company 23andMe. Cline’s deception began to unravel as Ballard found she was related to an alarming number of people, most of whom lived within 25 miles (40km) of one another: “I walk around and I could be related to anyone,” she says.

Donald Cline secretly used his own sperm to artificially inseminate more than 90 patients. Photo: @BetterknowYou/Twitter

A group of the siblings confronted Cline in person and he admitted to his actions, framing it as a good deed rather than a colossal violation of his patients’ consent. According to the siblings, he has been uninterested or unwilling to acknowledge what a destabilising event this has been for them. Some of them speculate that he may have passed along autoimmune disorders.

The ripple effects of what he did are substantial, for the siblings as well as their parents, and they met a staggering lack of concern or outrage from anyone in an official capacity. “It’s a sick individual who puts himself in a position to do that,” says one of the siblings.

The logistics are even worse. At the time Cline was practising medicine, sperm samples weren’t frozen but needed to be “live” and inseminated no more than an hour or so after ejaculation. That meant that Cline would go into his office, perform a sex act into a cup and, moments later, walk into an exam room, where he then injected his sperm into unwitting patients.

“I was raped and didn’t even know it,” is how one of the mothers puts it. The film includes recreations – a dubious decision in and of itself – and there is one scene all but showing the doctor’s office activities that feels especially misjudged. You don’t need to see an actor’s head bobbing vigorously to be disgusted by what Cline did.