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Ballard, advocates pushing for federal fertility fraud bill
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” - Jeremiah 1:5
Jacoba Ballard learned when she was 10 years old that she was donor-conceived. More than two decades later, she has connected with more than 90 half-siblings, with Dr. Donald Cline as their biological father.
As she and her half-siblings’ advocacy is detailed in the Netflix documentary “Our Father,” Cline’s unscrupulous practice over several decades was, to Ballard, “some sick game” or experiment. She has ruminated about the “Why.”
Ballard, her half-siblings and advocates are working to ensure that those like Cline are held accountable for this deception. Their efforts are honed on a federal law that would criminalize illicit donor inseminations. Relatable statutes now exist in Indiana and 10 other states.
The saga began in 2014 when Ballard, then 35, ordered a DNA test through 23andMe. The test revealed that she had seven half-siblings.
For her, it was immediate excitement that became concern. This as she found that medical residents who worked for Cline were not to donate their sperm more than three times.
They all matched with a second cousin, who confirmed that Cline was related. The dots started to connect.
Ballard then filed a complaint with the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, but it was not acknowledged initially. The dynamic began to change when she got in touch with Fox59’s Angela Ganote.
Cline denied to Ganote that he was their father and did not agree to take a DNA test. While she did not identify Cline, Ganote nonetheless aired a segment on Fox59 about Ballard’s findings.
A meeting was set up soon after between Cline, Ballard and her half-siblings. With him appearing to tote a handgun, she notes in the documentary how Cline asked each of them about their professions, as if he was ranking them.
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
In owning up to implanting his own sperm, Cline blankly said he did so because their mothers were desperate to have children. Liz White, one of Cline’s patients, asserts in the documentary that she was raped 15 times and did not know it.
Cline yearned that the revelations would ruin his marriage and his standing in his church and the community. He sought to hide behind medical privacy, but Ballard and Ganote kept pushing. A breakthrough of sorts came when Ballard met with former Marion County Prosecutor Tim Delaney.
Delaney stated then that Cline’s actions could not legally be considered rape or battery. He reasoned that they were not actionable offenses because his patients had consented to the inseminations themselves.
Cline ultimately pleaded guilty in 2017 to two counts of obstruction of justice, predicated on lying about using his sperm in correspondence with the attorney general’s office. Though ordered to pay a $500 fine, his sentences were suspended. He surrendered his medical license in 2018.
Ballard and her half-siblings, with help from Maurer School of Law professor Jody Madeira, saw the passage of Senate Bill 174 in the Indiana legislature in 2019. The statute denotes misrepresentation of a medical procedure or human reproductive material as a Level 6 felony.
Since Cline’s disposition, no less than 44 other doctors across the country have been determined to have inseminated their patients with their sperm. Cases of this deception occurring nationwide range as far back as the 1940s.
“To know that the state and other states don’t consider that sexual battery, sexual assault, rape, it’s really disheartening,” Ballard related in a recent discussion with Madeira and the Banner Graphic.
“It’s the willful use of power to overcome someone in a vulnerable position,” Madeira said to Cline’s intent. “Doctors are supposed to be the ones who protect vulnerable patients by treating them with therapeutic methods, not with sexuality in the guise of a clinical touch.”
Ballard has served as a paramedic with Putnam County EMS and as a firefighter with the Reelsville Volunteer Fire Department. She now has an undiagnosed autoimmune sickness, and some of her half-siblings have similar complications. Cline, meanwhile, was found to have rheumatoid arthritis.
“It’s gone from a moment to a movement, I think,” Madeira said, referencing how the documentary, and indeed Ballard’s persistence, brought fertility fraud out. “I think there’s been a real change in how people see questions of sexual assault.”
The effort for a federal fertility fraud bill got under way after Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.) reached out to Ballard after watching the documentary. The Protecting Families from Fertility Fraud Act was thus introduced last July to bring the issue to Congress.
Bice’s proposal was brought back and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee because of its criminal component. An underlying consideration is doctors, as well as samples, being able to move across state lines.
“Out of all of the many, many discussions about fertility fraud, it’s the thing that punches people in the gut,” Madeira added about the documentary’s reach.
Ballard and six others traveled to Washington, D.C., in late-January and gave testimony at a roundtable hosted by Bice. H.R. 451 now has 32 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Jim Baird.
As demonstrated in the documentary, the very idea of belonging was frayed for Ballard and her half-siblings. But the work to hold Cline to his actions made her realize a purpose to protect those with infertility.
“This bill means so much to me,” Ballard said as to her efforts honoring her mother, who died with cancer five months ago. “We need for the community to support me and my mom. It’s her legacy.”