'Our Father' on Netflix Illustrates Just One More Way The United States Is Failing Women

I'm an avid re-watcher. I hate starting new shows, movies, you name it. Obviously I usually enjoy them once I've begun but getting over that mental block that tells me to avoid the unknown and stick to something guaranteed to make me feel good is a struggle.

Well recently I was once again reminded why. The world is a scary place and not all stories have a perfectly wrapped up, happy ending.

About a week ago I sat down to eat dinner and decided to take a chance on the Netflix #1 in the US, it was a documentary called Our Father. I must've been feeling some type of way because I even chose this over a documentary about Marilyn Monroe's death, something I have studied extensively since I was in the 7th grade for no apparent reason.

If you haven't seen it, buckle up, you're in for a ride. Our Father is a documentary mostly narrated by Jacoba Ballard, a woman who believed she was the biological child of her mother and a medical student sperm donor. After a 23andme test Jacoba learns that her mother's fertility doctor, Donald Cline, was in fact her biological father, and here's the kicker, she wasn't the only one.

By the time the documentary was released 94 siblings who are all offspring of Cline have been identified.

The documentary reveals that Dr. Cline had been using his own sperm to impregnate women who thought they were receiving donor sperm from healthy anonymous medical students.

In some cases the patients of Dr. Cline even brought in their own husband's sperm and believed Dr. Cline was using the sperm of their spouse, only to find out decades later this wasn't the case.

How many patients exactly Dr. Cline inseminated with his own sperm we don't know. We also don't know why. Dr. Cline himself doesn't offer much in the way of explanation.

In one instance he seems to suggest he was just "helping" women who came to him desperate for a child, but this is unsupported by the fact that he also discarded some of his patients husband's sperm, when they showed up for their appointment with a sample in hand.

Maybe we will never know why, but I knew what was coming next as I watched the documentary. I felt rage, anger, disgust and yet I knew. I'm not a lawyer, but ever since Legally Blonde I have a semi interest in law and I knew I couldn't say definitively what actual law he had actually broken and when I realized that I was horrified.

He got away with it. And I was left wondering how I had never thought of insemination not having federal laws regulating it before.

This brings up so many more questions than just those surrounding this specific case. If you do a quick google search on artificial insemination laws you will find that many states even have issues regarding parental rights due to artificial insemination. Some would argue that a man who gives his sperm but has never met the mother and is otherwise completely out of the picture still retains legal rights to any child who results from his sperm donation. This isn't an area that's anywhere near as regulated as say adoption and it causes confusion and legal issues for women in every possible area you could think of.

In the case of Dr. Cline the law doesn't protect these women who believed they were receiving their husband's own sperm or the sperm of an approved medical student, but instead received their doctors.

There are plenty of very practical reasons why what Dr. Cline did should've been illegal even at the time it was happening.

There was no regulation on how many sperm samples of his own sperm he gave out. Which, as you see in the documentary results in dozens of children being born in a 50 mile radius of one another who are related without even knowing it. Inbreeding is a genuine concern here.

Many sperm banks also boast fairly high standards when it comes to who can qualify as a donor. They may take into account factors such as medical history and current medical prognosis, physical appearance, and even your IQ and level of education.

It turns out Dr. Cline had a slew of health problems that were never disclosed to his patients, which might've been fine had he not been injecting them with his own sperm, which inevitably lead to dozens of children who now also have serious health issues.

The biggest issue here though had to be the complete lack of consent. I understand these women wanted a child, but who could genuinely argue that a desire for a child means they don't have any right to know who the other party involved in creating this child is. Women have a right to know at least basic details about the sperm donor whose sperm is being used to impregnate them and the fact that this wasn't always a given is horrifying.

It's just another way in which a woman's body is violated and the law will refuse to do anything about it.

Perhaps more disturbing has been some public opinion on this story.

I saw a comment, a few like this actually, usually from men interestingly enough, who agreed that it was wrong, disturbing and creepy but these people felt that because these women at the end of the day "got what they wanted," why are they so upset?

If you go to the IMDB page for 'Our Father' you will in fact see multiple reviews like this.

On one hand you understand from a literal perspective what they mean. Many of the women admitted to desperately wanting a child, and a child they got.

And some of the women, including one featured in the documentary actually, despite feeling violated, still felt overwhelmingly thankful for her child, rather than focusing on other emotions she might've been feeling.

This cavalier attitude towards the violation of trust and the doctor/patient relationship here however is problematic at best, because it misses the consent part.

So far I haven't seen anyone who wasn't bothered by Dr. Cline's lack of concern at creating so many offspring in a small area where they could likely grow up and meet. I haven't seen anyone who wasn't horrified that he would use his own sperm knowing his medical history and create so many more people who would grow up with health issues.

But I have seen several reviews where the consent doesn't seem to factor into their feelings about what Dr. Cline did. You wanted a baby, you got a baby? What's the problem here?

Am I surprised that so many people fail to see how a lack of consent before putting something into someone's body would be traumatizing? No.

Am I horrified and disgusted? Yes.

These women had a right to know the truth in regards to where the donor sperm was coming from. It was being used to impregnate them with a child they would raise for the rest of their lives.

They had a right to know if it was their husbands, or if it was a medical students, or if it was their doctors sperm. They have a right to know. Or rather they should have. We now know legally this right isn't federally protected.

If you want to be artificially inseminated it's a crap shoot and you are in for whatever your doctor wants you in for.

This documentary offers a few theories as to why Dr. Cline was injecting his sperm into so many patients and they cover everything from a horrifying racially motivated plan to create a massive Aryan race, to a weirdly religious, over enthusiastic take on the Bible's encouragement to be fruitful and multiply.

I think these theories probably distracted some viewers and took away from the strength of the documentary as a whole. If you look through reviews you will see many people particularly annoyed by these theories and it really seemed to pull attention from the bigger problem at hand.

We don't know why. We probably will never know why Dr. Cline did what he did. He himself never offered a substantial answer or one that made sense with the evidence presented.

If you ask me I think it was just a career move, plain and simple. Imagine how good your success rate would be if you had an unlimited supply of sperm just sitting in your office and could take appointments anytime and have it ready to go.

You probably would see a bump in your success rate I'd imagine.

But that aside, the why isn't important. It is important, but as with so many things in this world we probably will never know why. And even if we got a straight answer chances are it wouldn't be satisfying. Nothing he could say would ever make anyone who was in this situation feel better about it.

Rather I think the strongest part of the documentary, the part most people did and could relate to and the part they could have easily expanded upon to take up the whole run time was the experience.

Biology isn't everything, but it matters. Just the knowledge of it matters.

We build our identities around the things we know, the questions we can answer, not the things we are still trying to find the whys to.

When your identity shifts in any way, by any amount, no matter how slight, it can rock your world.

When I was 27 years old I found out I had a sister. A half sister 10 years older than me from my father's previous relationship. She had been adopted and now as an adult was reaching out.

When my father told me I was furious.

Not at her. Not at the fact that I suddenly had a sister. Not at my father for having another child. I was just furious no one told me.

Many of us live on a balancing beam without even knowing it. We walk the line and every new piece of information we receive is carefully placed and distributed so as not to disturb the balance. When news like this comes along to remind us how messy the world is, it can rock you.

I was mad my dad hadn't told me. Plain and simple. I didn't want to be dealing with this news at 27 when so much already felt unsteady.

My dad eventually asked when I thought would've been the right time to tell me. "I don't know, like when I was born," I said.

I meant it. When you grow up with information, it just becomes a part of you. It's part of your natural balance already and you live with it.

When it's throw at you later in life you are lucky if you aren't completely knocked on your ass by it.

My frustration and confusion and all I had to do to mentally regroup and get myself to a place where I could forgive my dad and meet my sister and watch us become family, my piece was just a fraction of what this can feel like, I know. I had a best case scenario. My mom wasn't in the picture when this sister was born so I didn't have that to work through. My sister is an amazing, uplifting and all around wonderful human being. When we met I felt as if I'd already known her all my life, so that was a magical experience. And my dad loves to be a dad. He will do whatever it takes to maintain his relationship with all his kids. I know that in my soul to be true. I was lucky and I still struggled.

As the siblings go through their interviews and share their stories you can see how this news has affected them. How they've had to work through and reevaluate everything they thought was true.

Getting the news that your world isn't what you thought it was will always be jarring. There are so many things that we can never be sure of. It's not hard to understand why anyone would at least want to know as much traceable information about themselves as they could.

It's about so much more then just whether or not someone wants a child, it's about having agency over your own body and knowing what's going into it. It's about these mothers knowing how their children came to be, so the children can know and work through that information as well.

Dr. Cline took this away from these women and their children. They never had a choice. They never had the opportunity to decide for themselves, do I want a baby so bad I'm willing to have it with anyone, even my doctor? Or would I prefer to see another doctor or select a different donor? Or try another method?

Dr. Cline's decision to callously ignore these genuine concerns and the feelings of the women he treated and all the children who were to come has changed hundreds of lives at this point when you count both his offspring and their mothers.

My heart is with everyone who was a victim of Dr. Cline. Both mothers and children. Finding out your world isn't what you thought it was is often a harrowing experience and realizing you have no recourse against the person who changed your world is terrifying.

Maybe someday this country will choose to protect women and children in the same way it protects men like Dr. Cline.

I'm not holding my breath.