Doc’s Gone Wild – Sometimes We All Need An Extra Hand by Pat Conrad MD
If you haven’t seen the comedy “Idiocracy”, rent it immediately. It’s about a mediocre guy awakening in the future to find that he’s the smartest person on a planet now overpopulated by highly fertile morons. Actually, it’s a documentary. (Actually, if you read nothing below, make sure you watch this clip!)
This story is not really a parallel, but it reminded me of the movie. Like the dim, arrogant nuts also seem to be overly procreative. It’s after-hours, you have a full schedule tomorrow, and you are out of stock. What’s a busy but compassionate fertility specialist to do? A patient of retired OB/GYN Donald Cline, MD “took a saliva-based DNA test through a private personal genomics company and found that she was related to at least eight other people in its database.” Two others learned that their mothers were both Cline patients, and “that they were related to 70 relatives of Cline.” The kindly fertilizer initially denied using his own sperm to inseminate patients, a lie that later bought him his conviction on criminal charges. The initial affidavit stated that he had admitted to his clinic children that he had donated sperm “about 50 times starting in the 1970s.”
The poor caring guy tried to use contributions from “medical or dental residents or medical students” but when he ran, uh, short, Cline “said he used his own sperm whenever he didn’t have a donor sample available.”
So two years after being charged, zany Dr. Cline pled guilty to very ironically cited obstruction charges, when clearly there was not enough obstruction where the swimmers were concerned. A psychologist witness testified that Cline suffers from depression and adjustment disorder. The judge noted his age and apparent remorse; some of the misbegotten delivered impact statements, one of them mourning her “loss of identity.”
He was sentenced to 365 days in jail, all suspended, and was not even placed on probation. “‘I followed suggested guidelines of the period,’ Cline wrote, according to court records. ‘I also did nothing morally or legally wrong.'” Weeelllll, on the one had there was lack of informed consent, fraud, and obvious willful mischief. Maybe he broke not standards accepted for medieval barbers, but it’s likely there were informed consent standards pertaining by the Disco Decade. On the other had, he broke no criminal statute specific enough for the prosecutors to pursue. A spokesperson for the “Donor Sibling Registry, said she was not surprised that additional charges had not been brought against Cline. ‘He didn’t break any laws, because there are no laws,’ she said. ‘The reproductive medicine industry in regards to sperm donations…is generally a free-for-all and at the expense of the very children we are creating.’”
A DonorChildren page stated that Cline had found God, which must have set things nicely back into perspective.
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Actually, the opening of the story is based on a science fiction novella from 1951 – THE MARCHING MORONS by C.M. Kornbluth. A freak accident results in a dental patient being put into suspended animation. When we awakes, he is the smartest person in the world. Why? Because higher educated couples have fewer children than less educated ones. Over time, guess who wins out. What happened 67 years ago is still true today.
Hey, he said the donors were successful college educated professionals. Nothing dishonest about that – it’s just a matter of perspective.
I’d say that this is a case of “be careful what you wish for” for the patients – you tell the genie you want to be on top of the world, and he makes you a cell tower repairman. Those people would have fallen over each other to get the sperm of a rich successful doctor with his own practice and great bedside manner into their ova, but suddenly when it comes down th WHICH rich successful doctor, they get picky. Can’t have it both ways.
The world is full of orphans – They could have adopted.