Netflix has dropped its next biggest hit, with ‘Our Father’ arriving on screens around the world
‘Our Father’ centres around Dr Donald Cline, who is a fertility doctor that secretly used his own sperm while inseminating his IVF patients.
Dr Cline was a well-respected, top fertility doctor in Indiana, who says he used the sperm of anonymous medical residents.
The film’s director, Lucie Jourdan, told The Guardian “it was a very specific directive that you never ever tell your children you had fertility issues or insemination.”
The documentary sees the former doctor fathering at least 50 children throughout the 1970s and ’80s. But there are fears the true number could be well over 100.
“This was part of the dialogue he had with his patients. They were trusting their doctor to give them the right advice,” Jourdan says.
In the film’s trailer, Dr Cline’s children say they learned about him through DNA kits.
“When I opened up Ancestry, I had over 3,000 hits,” one said.
Where is Donald Cline now?
There was no state or federal law to criminalise Dr Cline’s action.
He retired from medicine in 2009, and was charged with two counts of felony obstruction of justice. The documentary shows he was fined $500 and given a year probation.
In 2018, Cline surrendered his license to the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana. He has also been stopped from applying to reinstate his license.
Indiana became the first U.S. state to make it a criminal offence for fertility doctors to use their own sperm when their patients do not offer their consent.
