SINS OF THE FATHER

HIS patients saw him as a hero, the kind and gentle doctor who had allowed them to achieve their dream of motherhood.

American fertility specialist Dr Donald Cline’s office walls were adorned with photographs of the babies whose desperate mothers he’d helped to conceive.

But what many of these women didn’t realise was that instead of using sperm from anonymous donors – as he’d led them to believe he would – he was inseminating them using his own sperm. And scattered across the state were scores of kids he’d fathered.

Now, decades on, more than 50 so-called “Cline children” have been identified and it’s suspected there could be others who are wandering