A 77-year-old fertility doctor who is accused of impregnating patients with his own sperm is now facing felony charges after nine children of former patients found out they were siblings.
Dr. Donald J. Cline was charged in Indiana on Friday with two felony counts of obstruction of justice, NBC News reports. Cline appeared in Marion Superior Court on Monday and was released on the condition that he return to court on Oct. 17.
Cline pleaded not guilty to both charges, according to NBC.
An Indiana woman who took an at-home DNA test in 2014 was the first to grow suspicious of Cline when she realized that she was related to eight other users on genome testing website 23andMe. Further DNA testing revealed that all of those tested were siblings, according to court documents reported by NBC.
It was revealed later that the mothers of the siblings had all been inseminated at Cline’s clinic during a span of eight years starting in the 1970s, while Cline denied at the time that he had used his sperm and that he had used donations from dental and medical students.
[NBC]
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