Scandals: The Cruelest Kind of Fraud

They came to Dr. Cecil Jacobson’s Vienna, Va., clinic from all over the Washington area, women and men desperate to conceive a child. As a fertility specialist, Jacobson was highly recommended. He was a brilliant geneticist who helped pioneer the amniocentesis procedure in the U.S. During office visits he liked to call himself “the babymaker.” “God doesn’t give you babies,” he would tell his patients. “I do.”

They gave him their trust and their money, but according to a federal indictment handed up last week, he deceived them. Not only did the babymaker tell women they were pregnant when they weren’t, say federal officials, but he secretly inseminated others with his own seed, fathering at least seven children for couples who thought they were receiving legitimate donor sperm. “It’s basic fraud of the cruelest sort,” said U.S. Attorney Richard Cullen, whose office is prosecuting the case.

The extraordinary charges cap several years of civil proceedings against the 55-year-old physician, who first came to the attention of authorities after what seemed to be an unusual string of false pregnancies. According to the government, Jacobson was giving patients hormone treatments that simulated the effects of early pregnancy. At hearings before a committee of the Virginia Board of Medicine in 1989, several women wept as they described how Jacobson would show them sonograms of what he said was their fetus, pointing out nonexistent heartbeats, fetal movements and thumb-sucking. He would give them fetal snapshots to take home — only to announce several weeks later that their baby had died.

The Virginia board found sufficient evidence to warrant revoking Jacobson’s medical license, despite pleadings by his attorney that the board was paying too much attention to the complaints of “disappointed women who had difficulty conceiving” and ignoring “the other side of the coin,” the fact that he had treated a lot of other women who did get pregnant. Jacobson agreed to give up his practice and moved to Provo, Utah, where his father lives.

The latest charges come from some of those other women. Acting on a tip, several patients requested genetic tests, which revealed the doctor himself had fathered their babies. According to the indictment, Jacobson conned patients into thinking he had an elaborate system for matching sperm donors to particular physical, mental and social characteristics. But in some cases, says the government, he was the sole donor.

Jacobson faces 53 felony charges. At his arraignment late last week, he proclaimed his innocence. His attorney asserted that if the doctor had used his own sperm, he had done so in the interests of providing a sample that was “clean and good” in a time of AIDS.

The disturbing case of Dr. Jacobson underscores a problem that has plagued the booming field of infertility medicine. Doctors can claim to be experts on the basis of scant experience or training. There is no board certification and little regulation. Now Jacobson has single-handedly made it time for the Federal Government and organized medicine to crack down on those who prey on the infertile.