At the moment, far too many true crime documentaries function as little more than an episode of “Dateline.” They report information but lack analysis or even thoughtful ideas about how to use the medium of film to tell a story at once shocking and infuriating. Such is the case with “Our Father” on Netflix, about a fertility doctor who secretly used his own sample to artificially inseminate more than 90 patients.
For years, Dr. Donald Cline was one of the better-known fertility specialists in his Indianapolis community. His patients were led to believe they were being inseminated either with sperm from donors or their own husbands. But Cline had other plans, which he did not disclose to his patients: He used his own sperm. One of his subsequent offspring is named Jacoba Ballard, who was the first to realize something was amiss when she submitted her DNA to 23andMe.
Cline’s deception began to unravel as Ballard found she was related to more and more siblings — an alarming number and the majority of whom live within a 25-mile radius of one another: “I walk around and I could be related to anyone,” she says. A group of the siblings eventually confronted Cline in person and he admitted to what he had done, 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 destabilizing event this has been for each of them individually. Some of them speculate that he may have passed along autoimmune disorders. The ripple effects of what he did are substantial, for these siblings as well as their parents, and they were met with a staggering lack of concern or outrage from anyone in an official capacity.
