Because in her family, in Indianapolis, Jacoba Ballard was the only blue-eyed blonde, she long thought she was adopted. Until her parents admit to her that they had to call on a sperm donation to give birth to her. So, when the young woman buys a DNA test and registers on a website allowing her origins to be traced, she imagines herself “finding one or two half-brothers or half-sisters”. These are… seven brothers and sisters who appear. Abnormal in a country where, for ethical reasons, a sperm donor cannot allow the birth of more than three children.
One doctor: 94 children
Jacoba investigates and discovers a common point with his half-siblings: parents who went through the office of Dr. Donald Cline, gynecologist and recognized specialist in infertility. The sordid truth comes out: from the 1970s, the doctor inseminated his patients with… his own sperm. At least 94 children have thus been born.
→ TESTIMONIALS. Sperm donation: “I wanted to help couples become parents”
The chilling story is told in the documentary Our father to all, available on Netflix. In front of his screen, the viewer wonders, petrified: How to understand his gesture? Feeling of omnipotence? Willingness to take oneself for God and to give life? Philanthropist, good husband, good Christian (he was a pillar of his evangelical parish), the doctor displayed biblical quotations in his office, including “Grow and Multiply” ? To hear it, he simply wanted “to serve”. Never, during his trial, will he consider having committed something “bad”. He will only be symbolically condemned by justice.
The victims are living a nightmare. It is already not easy to learn that the man who raised you is not your biological father, but how, moreover, to be at peace with oneself when one was born of a fraud? “You don’t know who you are anymore”says a young woman.
Good practices and an upheaval
In France too, in the 1970s and 1980s, the legal vagueness surrounding artificial insemination would have favored abuses of this type. This was before the establishment of rules of good practice, a new version of which has just been updated, mid-May, in the continuity of the revision of bioethics laws. This update incorporates, among other things, what will be a major upheaval: the lifting of donor anonymity, from 1is September 2022.
Any child born from this date will be able, once adult, if he wishes – and if his parents have revealed to him that he is the result of a donation – to have access to information or to the identity of his parent. . Those who, in France, have already taken steps themselves – going so far as to hire a private detective – to identify their donor assure us: it is not a question of finding a relative, but of knowing where we come from, why we have these physical traits, from whom we hold certain character traits…
Legitimate process of self-knowledge or excessive emphasis on the biological, in the construction of identity? Requests for access to data will in any case now be handled by a special commission, made up of associations, doctors, experts, etc. Calls for applications are underway to set it up. To no longer leave the quest for origins to chance and to the D system.