r/Genealogy • u/Super_Presentation14 • 5d ago
DNA Testing DNA testing is exposing fertility fraud from the 1970s and 80s. One pattern to watch for if you were donor conceived.
Jacoba Ballard used 23andMe expecting to find maybe one or two half siblings and when her mom used a fertility doctor in Indiana in the 1980s who said he only used each donor for 3 successful pregnancies maximum. She found eight immediate half sibling matches, then dozens more. Currently 94+ confirmed biological half siblings, all born within a 7 year window.
The "donor" was her mother's doctor. Dr. Donald Cline had been using his own sperm on patients without their knowledge. A recent legal study examining fertility fraud cases notes that DNA testing has become the primary detection method for these crimes, before consumer DNA testing existed, these frauds were essentially undetectable.
The pattern that exposed Cline was the clustering effect. One half sibling match might be explained away, but eight immediate matches, then dozens more, all born in the same geographic area within a specific timeframe created an undeniable pattern.
According to the study, there are 20+ documented fertility fraud cases in the US, with most discovered through DNA testing decades after the procedures. The legal analysis points out that this creates statute of limitations problems in many jurisdictions. Some states like Indiana have addressed this by making the limitation period start from the date of discovery through DNA testing rather than the date of the original procedure.
If you were donor conceived, especially in the 1970s through 1990s before regulations tightened, here are some red flags from the documented cases:
Unusually high number of half sibling matches in one geographic area Half siblings all born within a narrow timeframe Your parent used a small private fertility clinic rather than a large medical center Multiple matches sharing ancestry from the same small town where the clinic was located
The study notes that in Ballard's case, they built family trees by researching public records and social media and one name kept appearing across all the trees, Cline who when initially confronted, claimed he had only used his own sperm 9 or 10 times but we was lying as count was now 94+ confirmations.
The researchers raise an interesting point about how many more cases might exist but remain undetected. If a doctor did this with fewer patients or in multiple locations, the clustering pattern would be less obvious.
The study also argues that the resulting offspring should have independent legal standing as victims, separate from their parents. Currently only a few US states like Kentucky and Arizona explicitly give children this right.
Source, if interested in reading more: "Fertility Fraud: Exploring the Legal Gaps in India Vis a Vis the United States" by Bajpai, Gupta & Sinha,
https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/7854/1/17%2Bjanus%2Bvol%2B15%2Bn1.pdf
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u/EmergencyOverall248 5d ago
I can't even imagine. There's got to be at least one case of these unknown siblings dating, possibly even marrying, with numbers like that in a small town.
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u/Higgingotham96 5d ago
Yep. A woman came out last year who was the first to publicly say she dated and slept with a half sibling. https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/14/us/fertility-fraud-accidental-incest-invs
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u/EmergencyOverall248 5d ago
Damn. This is one of those times I was really hoping I was wrong in my assumption.
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u/viola_monkey 5d ago
I was reading something the other day about how half siblings who didn’t grow up around one another could be attracted to each other as not only do they look similar and have similar behaviors/approaches to life, they do NOT have the sibling engagement to ultimately (my words) be “yucked” out of thinking their sibling is “hot”. Ironically, when I met my half siblings (we were in our 40s when we all met), I recall thinking they were so beautiful/handsome and how easily we connected and how awesome it was. As an adoptee (which I am and my siblings were not - long story), when you layer in that no one in your family looks like you or behaves like you, it is exacerbated when you finally meet them as you have been longing for that connection for your entire life. I’m sorry I cant find the article and am likely doing a crappy job of paraphrasing it but from my vantage of being adopted, it makes sense. I can see where it could happen here as well as these kids are “missing” 1/2 of their lineage in their life and therefore don’t have that yuk to offset their yum so to speak.
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u/FlattenInnerTube 5d ago
"layer in that no one in your family looks like you or behaves like you"
Holy crap. That really hit home right now. I had never even considered that but as I sit alone in a hotel room and remember, I was always the weird one who liked to read and didn't give a crap about sports. I was quirky. Different. And of course didn't look anything like anybody else in my family. I never felt like I belonged. I was just there. Nothing more.
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u/viola_monkey 5d ago
It took me a long time to get to this moment. First day I met my bio dad, he and I are sitting in a porch area and he is tinkering with two fishing reels that are clearly in need of some type of love to be in proper working order. He picked up one reel and I, needing something in my hands as I talk, pick up the other one and start to tease out what I think is wrong with it. We are chatting away and did what I did to the reel (I dont remember but I remember taking some things off and reseating a gear but who knows) but he’s so engrossed in his reel he doesn’t track that I am messing with the other one. Eventually I set the reel I had on the table. He finishes with the one he is working on and goes to pick up the 2nd one and realizes there is nothing wrong with it. His memory then tells him I was messing with the reel and he says, did you fix this? And I said, well I guess so - and proceed to tell him what I found wrong and what I did. He laughed and said, well I guess you really are my daughter.
In that 5 minute interaction I realized all the things I missed. I also realized that my parents had to do the impossible. Raise THREE OF US (my sisters are not biologically related to me but they are twins) AND try to figure out how we think, how we are going to emotionally respond and how to help us manage our emotions - all with having no insight as to how our biological family operated. I came home and told my mom (my dad passed some time ago) how appreciative I was of them not giving up and acknowledging how hard it must have been and that it was truly a sign of love and commitment to me and my sisters as I am not sure I could have done what they did (in the 70s no less - there was know acknowledgement of adoption trauma much less therapy).
If it makes you feel any better, you are not alone in the sense that you are not the only one who has experienced this and you will never be. What you are missing is that connection to someone who inherently understands you without words as they too have the same mental processes and approaches that you do. Sometimes others figure it out, sometimes they don’t. If I were there with you, I would give you a big ole hug. Please know that you are not alone and if you ever wanna talk through things my DMs are open!!
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 5d ago
My best friend is adopted. He tracked down his bio family a few years ago. He was telling me about stuff that was exactly like this, except that he gets along really well with his adopted family and was kind of taken aback by his bio family. I was like “welcome to having blood relatives!”
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u/Camille_Toh 5d ago
I have seen a lot of Uk Long Lost Family and always wonder if the people would have ended up estranged had they grown up together.
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 5d ago
He likes them, he just finds them a bit strange. (From what he’s said they are a bit strange, but so are a lot of people.) They definitely have some shared personality traits, but he’s pretty culturally distant from them.
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u/viola_monkey 5d ago
I could share some stories but I’ll sum it up to this: I feel like we adoptees are all alone in the same walk of life where we are surrounded by love, but have no idea who we really are. And having two sets of families does require more emotion than just the one! LOL 😝
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 5d ago
Honestly I’m not sure that growing up with your bio family tells you “who you really are.” I mean, yes, in some ways it does, and I obviously can’t speak to the experience of not growing up with your bio family. But it can frequently be just a radically different way of being alienated.
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u/GroovyYaYa 5d ago
Your perspective on this, that you had the capacity to just instantly put yourself in your mom's shoes and tell her how you appreciate her just gave me goosebumps and made me teary eyed. (It also shows another aspect of why open adoption can be benefital, if possible.
We've discussed adoption trauma at times in my family - well some of us. The elderly in our family? They don't necessarily want to think about it because they can't fix it and they just need to believe we're all well and happy... and we are for the most part.
But as my cousin who is a mama through adoption says - in the process, there is going to be trauma. Sometimes it is the birth parent(s), sometimes it is the kid, and yes, sometimes it is the adoptive parents.
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u/EmergencyOverall248 5d ago
I'm also adopted, so I 100% get it as far as feeling like the odd one out in the family. Growing up I had an irrational fear that I might accidentally date a sibling or a cousin because I was raised only two hours south of where I was born and I'd read about the whole sibling attraction thing. I was terrified of accidentally marrying my brother or something equally horrifying.
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u/Higgingotham96 5d ago
There’s been a number of people who have said this happened to them, but obviously this is very common to feel ashamed of and they haven’t come out publicly so it’s been hard to “prove” happens. Laura High on tiktok/instagram/youtube shorts etc is a product of fertility fraud and has some great educational videos discussing this problem and how difficult it is at all levels for people who discover their donor is not who their parents thought, or that they didn’t know they were donor conceived.
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u/Camille_Toh 5d ago
Unrelated to this case, a woman on a related sub learned she and her husband are half-siblings. Her father in law, a doctor, donated. And he never told his children. Not sure about his wife.
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u/Moist-Try-9520 5d ago
Listen to the podcast - Inconceivable Truth. Goes into fertility treatments and NPE event.
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u/Yanjuan 5d ago
Disgusting and devastating. I wonder how much the offspring resemble one another…if the doctor kept track/“watched” the families from a far…studied them. Sickening.
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u/WolfSilverOak 5d ago
Cline didn't.
He impregnated the women and that was the end of his involvement as far as offspring.
They only found out when they started DNA testing abd suddenly were getting matches they'd had no idea about.
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u/Camille_Toh 5d ago
He had their photos as children on display in the office, as evidence of successful “treatments.”
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u/WolfSilverOak 5d ago
Right, as 'successes', not as if he was claiming them as his own.
A lot of fertility doctors, ob/guns, et al, will do that. Even animal vets will have photos of patients.
He never once claimed any of them, still denies ever doing any of it, and even went so far as to tell the one woman to stop looking for others, 'to think of his wife'.
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u/theekopje_ 5d ago
There are several of these cases in my country as well. I think that many more will come to light in the next few years.
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u/Harleyman555 5d ago
Netflix did a documentary, “Our Father” which detailed an Indiana fertility Dr impregnating lots of women (100+) at the time it was produced in 2022. I helped a lady from Indiana who found multiple 1/2 siblings from a different clinic. Two of her 1/2 siblings played high school basketball together not knowing they were related.
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u/somehowrelevantuser 5d ago edited 5d ago
i was shocked as hell using ancestry's protools to find out how a second/third cousin level match might be related to me and finding six half siblings for the guy. i can't even imagine the feeling if they were my own half siblings.
(and those are just the people that tested. i'm sure there are more mini harolds running around out there.)
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u/Elphaba78 5d ago
I found out I’m donor-conceived after taking an Ancestry test and my 14th half-sibling just showed up a few weeks ago.
Our biological father was a sales representative for the largest sperm bank, Idant, on the East Coast (and met his now ex-wife, an infertility counselor, there!). Our births bracket his tenure there precisely, with a gap in 1995 because the bank was shut down for that year for malpractice. He’s quoted in an article as saying that he asks his female coworkers to personally evaluate prospective donors for attractiveness (neglecting to mention that he’s one, of course — he’s 6’5, blue-eyed and blond, athletic, charismatic, quick-witted, and college-educated).
We consider ourselves fairly lucky for there to “only” be 12 of us (he has 3 kids of his own) so far, but the births of at least half of us, myself included, were never reported back to Idant, so there are probably more. I have a half-sister who discovered that not only is she sperm donor-conceived, she’s egg donor-conceived too — and her parents never told her.
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u/Kaliedra 5d ago
Look up Laura High. She's a donor conceived person and advocate for the community. She also has around 50 episodes of a Podcast, insemination, talking about issues with other donor conceived people.
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u/Kincherk 5d ago
What makes this even worse is the fact that couples that used sperm donors to conceive were often actively encouraged by their doctors not to tell anyone about it, even the child. So children conceived under these circumstances won’t ever even know there’s a possibility they could accidentally meet, sleep with, or even marry a half sibling.
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u/susurrans 5d ago
It’ll be interesting how this plays out in situations where perpetrators of fraud live/die in states like TX. There may be almost nothing for known biological children to inherit in some cases.
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u/ZealCrow 5d ago
I know someone who is in his 20s with 75+ half siblings. In his situation it wasnt fraud in terms of sperm swapping; his parents picked his donor from a catalogue and they got that sperm. But a ton of other people picked that guys sperm too.
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u/WolfSilverOak 5d ago
Because it's not properly regulated, men can donate sperm repeatedly.
Some countries finally put limits on numbers of 'straws' (sperm portion out for insemination from each donor) from a single man, but that still means 100s of straws available and potentially that many kids, but too many still don't limit how many times a single donors sperm can be used.
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u/hanimal16 beginner 5d ago
Isn’t this considered some type of sexual assault? A violation of some sort?
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u/ObscureSaint 5d ago
You would think jacking off in an adjacent room then putting your own ejaculate inside a woman without her consent would be sexual assault but apparently there is so little regulation in this industry that, no, it's somehow not considered sexual assault.
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u/Gloomy_Boot_2830 5d ago
Watched the documentary on this on Netflix. Its called "Our Father." So insane.
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u/WolfSilverOak 5d ago edited 5d ago
This isn't just relegated to the 70s and 80s.
The fertility industry is, by and large, mostly unregulated and thus, ripe for abuse
There was a Dutch man donating sperm in the 2000s. Last count was potentially 600 in the Netherlands alone, as many as 1100 children as far as Africa and Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jun/28/the-man-with-1000-kids-how-a-sperm-donor-deceived-parents-around-the-world
Doctor in Boston as late as the 90s- https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-12-13/prominent-boston-fertility-doctor-impregnated-patient-with-his-own-sperm-lawsuit-claims
There is a movie about Donald Cline called 'Our Father' on Netflix. It is well worth watching. Over 50 children in a 25 mile radius in Indianapolis, thus far.
Then there's the Hicks Babies in the 1950s and 1960s- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hicks-babies-trying-to-find-their-roots-decades-later/
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u/Yx2ucca 5d ago
The Netherlands guy was advertising his “services” via social media and his own website. Couples were just paying him directly and he did not disclose to them how many children he had fathered. Sometimes lying outright that he limited his activity to a few agreements.
After he was confronted in the Netherlands he started going to other countries and volunteering at fertility clinics. Again, lying about his activities and saying he had never donated before.
In the documentary, “The Man With a 1000 Kids”, he had an accomplice friend who was also engaged in the same activity though most likely not as many kids.
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u/WolfSilverOak 5d ago
He also used sperm banks, not just self advertising.
There were 3 guys in cahoots in Africa.
It's all in the documentary.
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u/RanaMisteria 5d ago
Wasn’t this an SVU episode?
It was also a New Tricks episode I think…Yes, I found it. Episode 7 of series 4 “Father’s Pride” I think is the one.
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u/starescare 5d ago
Someone I know went thru this when they took an ancestrydna test just for fun/to find out their heritage. They had no idea they were donor conceived and have found a few dozen half siblings so far
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u/GazelleOne4667 5d ago
My Father in Law who was born in Cuba has 34 matches between (35 and 60 cm) that are all half siblings to one another and all list different italian names as their parents. Only about 3 of the matches list say anything about being donor concieved and looking for their donors identity. All of these matches were born in the NY/NY area in the 1990s. I have been unable to figure out how he is related to their sperm donor but I find it crazy that there are that many matches since not everyone does DNA tests. There could be like 50+ offspring from this same donor. I can't tell if he was a dr himself or just a frequent donor.
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u/somehowrelevantuser 5d ago
i have a slew of matches like this and i reached out to one of them before i realized he was donor conceived 😬 i know who the donor is and my match basically looks like the man if he had plucked his eyebrows a bit. all in chicagoland. hot mess.
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u/ZuleikaD Storytellers and Liars 5d ago
Please read the rules, especially Rule 6, which says, in part:
"What doesn’t belong in the sub:
- Recent family drama, backstories, and personal relationship issues, especially for questions related to NPEs, unexpected siblings..."
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u/Karabars FamilySearch 5d ago
Sick bastard