Our Father review: Netflix documentary is a biting indictment against the state of women’s reproductive rights

Language: English The mark of any effective movie is if it succeeds in making you want to immediately read up all about its origins by the time the end credits roll. Our Father is the kind of outing that makes it frankly impossible to stop reading everything about the unbelievable story at the centre of the heart-wrenching documentary. The premise is that preposterous and the nature of injustice, stomach-churning. Directed by Lucie Jourdan, the 97-minute film is built around the seeming improbability of one question: What if you woke up one day and found out that your mother’s fertility doctor is actually your biological father?   Detailing an egregious violation of authority and consent, Our Father centres the crimes of Dr Donald Cline, a renowned Indianapolis doctor who secretly inseminated numerous patients with his own sperm without their knowledge. Back in the 1980s, the field of fertility treatments and artificial insemination was relatively new: there were no sperm banks and the pool of available donors was fairly small. Doctors were usually tasked with finding donors themselves, often among medical trainees and Cline was already considered an expert. The women who came to him for help were given the same assurances: Young medical students were being used as sperm donors, each no more than three times so as to limit any problems of consanguinity (the likelihood of unwitting half-siblings becoming romantically involved) that may arise in the future.   [caption id=“attachment_10667531” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] At the time of broadcast, there are 94 children known to have been covertly fathered by Cline | Our Father on Netflix. Photograph: Netflix[/caption] Cline’s remarkably high success rate in reversing fertility issues and favourable standing in the close-knit community as a devout Christian and church elder helped forge trust among his patients. Put simply, there was little reason for anyone to doubt his ways, allowing Cline to covertly father at least 94 children. As the film suggests, he only stopped at the end of the decade, but only because sperm banks started becoming more prevalent. Even more horrifying is the revelation that at the time there was no legal framework in Indianapolis that could frame Cline’s acts as a crime. In fact, the monstrosity of his acts came to light only three decades later  — single handedly due to the advent of at-home DNA testing kits. Jacoba Ballard was 10 when her parents told her that they had used donor sperm to conceive her. Ballard suspected as much, growing up as the only blonde, blue-eyed member in a family of brunettes. By her own admission, Ballard had always yearned for a sibling and in 2014, Ballard, then in her 30s, contacted Cline — the doctor who treated her mother’s fertility issues — to inquire about possible siblings. Cline wasn’t of much help, casually informing her that he had destroyed the records so there might not be any way for her to find her half-siblings.   The setback only strengthened Ballard’s resolve to find answers. Soon, she purchased a DNA home kit and resorted to 23andMe — a website that promised a comprehensive ancestry breakdown — to find her possible family members. The results stunned her — the matches indicated that Ballard might have seven biological half-siblings, all located in close proximity to her. In that moment, Ballard knew something was amiss: for one, the number was technically not possible considering no donor was supposed to father more than three children.

Determined to uncover the truth, Ballard started corresponding with her matches and together, they embarked on an investigation to identify their biological father, originally suspecting that it was a medical student based on what Cline had conveyed to their respective mothers. But the truth turned out to be way more sinister. As more and more siblings emerged, so did the shocking facts: Cline lied to their mothers when he told them that the sperm samples were from anonymous donors when in fact, he was covertly inseminating them with his own semen without their knowledge. It gets more horrifying — even in cases when the husbands of his patients provided their own samples, Cline chose to inject the women with his sperm. Much of the film — constructed with archival audio footage, court hearings, powerful first-hand testimonies of his victims (mothers and daughters/sons)  and stylised recreations with actors — chronicles Ballard’s pain-staking two-year-long efforts to hold Cline accountable for his gross breach of consent and trust. The narrative contrasts the impossibly long road to justice (In 2016, Cline was only charged with making false statements to the attorney general; the judge fined him $500 and gave him no jail time) with the devastating trauma endured by Cine’s children on discovering that their entire lives was basically a lie. Jourdan frames Our Father as nothing short of a horror story (the film is fittingly backed by Blumhouse Productions), employing Cline’s own words against him. The debut director manages to conjure tension in the recreations, managing to convey a vivid understanding of the spatial geography of Cline’s clinic. As a result, scenes that establish the proximity between doctor and patient — as the women lay down in an exam room, their legs spread, their feets in stirrups, Cline was next door masturbating — acquire a nauseating urgency. In fact, Our Father isn’t really interested in questioning Cline’s culpability. Instead, the film assumes his lack of remorse in taking advantage of vulnerable patients as sufficient proof of malicious intent. It’s one of the many strengths of the documentary — Jourdan’s ability to give a voice to the victims and by extension, posing significant questions about the extent of Cline’s wrongdoing.   [caption id=“attachment_10667581” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Dr Donald Cline | Our Father - Netflix[/caption] As far as the film and the victims are concerned, Cline’s methods of insemination amount to sexual assault. One of the victims observes that in hindsight, she was raped 15 times without even knowing about it. Another confesses that had Cline asked her permission to inseminate her with his sperm, she wouldn’t have consented to it — irrespective of how badly she wanted a child. Almost all of the children fathered by Cline have some kind of auto-immune disorders passed onto them by Cline, whose rheumatoid arthritis — revealed in the film by an ex-colleague — should have ideally disqualified him as a potential donor. The fact that he didn’t stop despite being unfit for artificial insemination paints a stark portrait of a narcissistic sociopath. More than once in the film, we can hear Cline confidently claim in audio recordings that he used his semen “sparingly” — Our Father exists to overwrite that lie. After all, 94 children (and counting) don’t end up being born sparingly.

That the infuriatingly deficient legal systems failed to see him as a criminal or offer any protection to his victims makes a solid case for the documentary’s existence.  

In that sense, Our Father is at its most compelling when it reaches for the wider contradictions of the unforgivable circumstances. One of the constant threads of Our Father is the tussle between religion and science: Cline carried out most of the artificial inseminations in an office stacked with Christian paraphernalia and invoked his Christianity on more than occasion, to justify his actions to Ballard. Ballard, a product of science and a staunch believer of God, on the other hand, refuses to let Cline use God to nullify his wrongdoing.   Toward the end of the film, we’re introduced to one of Cline’s victims who knew him socially and ended up giving birth to his twin daughters. When she finds out the truth decades later, she remains torn between anger and gratitude. In fact, the lack of choice that Cline’s actions afforded the women comes to a head when one of his daughters confesses that he acted as her own gynecologist — long before she knew that Cline fathered her. Most of his children live within a 25-mile radius of each other and the possibility of their children dating their half-siblings remains a constant threat. Take for instance, Lisa Shepherd-Stidham, identified in the film as “Sibling 22,” whose children go to school with the children of another sibling and whose husband was the softball coach for both of them. Still, the film gets occasionally waylaid in asking the more disturbing questions, appearing content in just laying out the heinous crime in full display. Some of the heightened melodrama of the recreations are questionable and potentially risk reducing the nightmarish crime into pulp. That’s not to say that Our Father isn’t necessary or gripping — the timing of the film, for instance, comes at a time when women’s reproductive rights continue to be a thorny subject across the world.   Still, it’s hard to not feel that Our Father would have gained a tad more perspective. Midway through the film, Jourdan establishes the religious Cline’s connections to Quiverfull, a cult that supposedly endorses white supremacy through a strength in numbers procreation stance. It’s the closest the film comes to investigating Cline’s motives, uncovering in the process his racist and sexist beliefs (women were only meant to be useful for breeding according to Quiverfull) and yet the film doesn’t go all the way through in examining the line of questioning.   As a result, the central figure of Our Father casts an intimidating picture (at one point, we can hear him say that he doesn’t look at these people and consider them his children) despite not appearing in-person during the runtime. But Jourdan’s compassionate retelling manages to do what the law refused to: brand him as pure evil. Our Father is streaming on Netflix

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.