Episode Intro:

Most of us feel a natural compassion for anyone who learns they may not be able to have a biological child. The diagnosis of infertility is devastating to receive. Mothers and fathers across the world  who desperately want to have children of their own but discover they can’t are left hurting, to say the least. So, when the $54 billion fertility industry offers them a solution, it’s no surprise that many couples save up their money and follow the fertility industry’s advice. That solution, however, comes with more than just a hefty dollar sign. The fertility industry often operates at the expense of babies, mothers, and fathers everywhere. 

In the mid-1970s, as the now-booming fertility industry was just gaining traction in the U.S., Cheryl and Peter Rousseau decided they wanted to have a baby, but knew they would need help from doctors to do so. Turning to Cheryl’s OB/GYN for help, the couple decided to use a sperm donor to get Cheryl pregnant. After Cheryl got pregnant, life seemingly continued as normal.

In 2018, her now 41-year-old daughter Barbara Gordon, wanted to learn more about her paternal genetic background. She knew nothing about her biological father – the sperm donor who had helped to create her, so she did what more than 26 million other Americans have done – she took an at-home DNA test through both Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com. It seemed like a simple process, but Barbara could never have imagined what she would soon learn about who her father really was. The results of this test would lead to a lawsuit, years of legal action, and a 2.2 million dollar payout- but not for her. 

Podcast Intro:

You’re listening to Conceiving Crime, the podcast dedicated to Investigating crimes past and present involving sex, procreation, pregnancy, birth, and all things human reproduction. I’m your host, Sami Parker. See the full show notes & links to resources from this episode at ConceivingCrime.com.

Peter and Cheryl Rousseau

Peter and Cheryl Rousseau were married in October of 1974. They each brought children from previous relationships into the marriage, but, like many couples, they wanted a biological child of their own – together. Peter, however, had undergone a vasectomy prior to marrying Cheryl. When he sought to have that vasectomy reversed, he learned it would be impossible. But – the couple still wanted a baby.

Cheryl turned to her trusted gynecologist, Dr. John Coates III, to inquire about artificial insemination using donor sperm. He told her that yes, his office did participate in the procedure but he informed her that Peter must first obtain a letter from an attorney stating that he would raise any child born to his wife through the use of another man’s sperm as his own child. Peter did as instructed and Cheryl asked Dr. Coates to find a donor who resembled her husband. Dr. Coates eventually told the couple that he had found a medical student who matched the physical attributes of Peter and who was willing to be the couple’s anonymous sperm donor. For some reason, they didn’t personally look at the sperm donor. Assuming they could trust the recommendation of Dr. Coates, they paid Dr. Coates $75 cash. It seemed like a win-win. A medical student would earn some money, and Cheryl and Peter would get their desired baby. 

At the time of this story, donor sperm had been used for nearly 100 years in the United States and was seen as a valid way to help couples like Peter and Cheryl create their much-wanted child.

To begin the process, Cheryl began monitoring her body for ovulation, reporting the information to Dr. Coates’ office over a matter of months. One morning, Dr. Coates called Cheryl into a room at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, Vermont. Cheryl was brought into a room, and soon after, Dr. Coates entered – not from the hall but from a side room. He told her to remove her clothes from the waist down, and then he left her alone for five minutes as he went back into the side room. After a while he re-emerged from the room with a syringe full of semen in hand. Dr. Coates opened Cheryl's legs, inserted the syringe, closed her legs back together, and told her to be still for a few minutes. Then…he left. 

As she had hoped, Cheryl became pregnant following the artificial insemination, but she ultimately suffered a miscarriage. The following month, she repeated that same process with Dr. Coates. She checked for signs of ovulation and went to the hospital. He had her remove her clothes from the waist down, he went to the side room for a few minutes, then returned with a syringe full of semen, inserted the syringe into her, and left.

In March of 1977, after that second round of artificial insemination, Cheryl again learned she was pregnant, and in December of 1977, she and Peter welcomed a baby girl. When Cheryl went to see Dr. Coates for her six-week follow-up, he asked her the name of the baby. She told him her name was Barbara, which unbeknownst to Cheryl, was also the name of Dr. Coates’ wife. He asked Cheryl if she had named her daughter after his wife, which Cheryl found to be a strange question. 

Presumably, life went on as normal for the Rousseau family after Barbara’s much-anticipated birth. It is unclear at what point in her life Barbara learned of the circumstances surrounding her conception, but four decades later, now a mother to her own children, the truth would finally come out. 

Rising popularity in the use of donated genetic material

According to a National Survey of Family Growth, the first recorded occurrence in the United States of medically successful sperm donation, specifically the act of artificial insemination, was carried out in the 1880s at a hospital in Philadelphia. And it was… as The Atlantic described it in 2016… an “ethical nightmare.” 

It was 1884 when a 31-year-old woman decided to visit Dr. William Pancoast at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia after she and her husband were having trouble conceiving. Testing led to the discovery that the husband was sterile, likely due to a bout of gonorrhea. After two months of treatment, however, it was determined that his seminal ducts were permanently blocked and pregnancy – even through artificial means – would not be possible.

With no solution for the couple, Dr. Pancoast decided to ask his medical students during class one day if they had any thoughts or ideas concerning the couple’s case. It was suggested by a student that semen be collected from the “best looking” member of the class and used to artificially inseminate the woman. Without getting the consent of the couple, Dr. Pancoast decided to move forward with the idea.

He called the wife to his office under the guise of performing further fertility testing. While the wife was unconscious through the use of chloroform, Dr. Pancoast inseminated her with a rubber syringe that carried the sperm of an unknown donor, and then packed her cervix with gauze. There were six medical students present in the room watching  what amounts to an assault unfold. Each of them was under an oath of secrecy. The woman became pregnant, believing it was her husband’s child and still unaware of the violation the men had carried out. 

When the woman gave birth to a son nine months later, Dr. Pancoast confessed the truth of the child’s conception to the woman’s husband. The husband instructed Dr. Pancoast to keep the information a secret from his wife. And it remained a secret until 25 years later, when – Dr. Pancoast now dead – his former student, Dr. Addison Davis Hard, who had been present at the insemination, revealed everything. In a letter published in a journal called Medical World, Dr. Hard shared the details of the first officially successful artificial insemination. He even drove to New York City to meet the couple’s son, now 25-years-old, so he could meet the first person who was successfully conceived using artificial insemination. It remains unclear if the mother ever learned the truth about her son’s father or of the assault that had been carried out on her. Dr. Hard would eventually suggest the use of artificial insemination as an act of eugenics. He argued that “artificial impregnation offers valuable advantages,” such as the ability to choose sperm that was considered to carry the “promise of good and healthy offspring.” It’s the practice of using sperm from men with specific qualities in order to make designer babies. An ethical debate then and an ethical debate now. 

Historically, parents who have opted for artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization using donor sperm have kept the decision to themselves, even putting the intended father’s name on the birth certificate and never even knowing the name of the child’s biological father. The idea that the child may ever want to know or need to know who her biological father is seemed less important than the adults’ desire for a child and anonymity regarding the child’s conception. 

Efforts would be made to ensure the biological father matched the intended father’s physical characteristics to reduce the risk that their family and friends would question the child’s paternity. It was a secret that was meant to be carried to the grave. Regardless, it was difficult for anyone who did learn the truth about their conception to find out who the donor – their biological father – truly was. Until now. At-home DNA tests originated in 2005 with The Genographic Project from National Geographic, with the goal of analyzing historical patterns in DNA to better understand migration. The project unintentionally became the first direct-to-consumer DNA test when they invited the public an opportunity to be involved. The leaders of the Genographic Project joked that they may even sell 1,000 kits within a few years. They ended up selling 10,000 DNA kits on the first day. The demand for at-home DNA tests suddenly became apparent- introducing 23andme and Ancestry.com. By 2015, over one million people had been tested, and nearly double that in the following year. With the rise in popularity, long-held family secrets and biological connections that were never meant to be discovered (pause) were discovered.

In 1984, Steve Broder, The co-owner of what would eventually become California Cryobank, one of the nation’s biggest sperm banks, said that keeping sperm donors anonymous prevents “complications.” He explained, “After all, what guy who’s been paid $25 for his sperm, which is what we pay, wants to take the chance of being confronted 20 years later by one or three children, each claiming he is their biological father and each wanting love or a loan or something?” 

Over the decades, the practice of using donor sperm grew in popularity – but the individual acts remained shrouded in secrecy. Then in 1968 came the end of a lengthy legal battle that would lead to changes in the law. In People v. Sorensen, the California Supreme Court ultimately upheld the criminal conviction of a man for failing to support his donor-conceived child. He claimed that since the child was not biologically his, he had no obligation to support him or her. The court ruled, however, that because there was no ‘natural father’ of the child, it could only look for a lawful father of the child. That lawful father was Sorensen, who had given his consent for his wife to use donor sperm.

In 1973, the Uniform Parentage Act said that if a wife is artificially inseminated with donor sperm under a doctor’s supervision and with her husband’s consent, then the law would treat the husband as if he were the biological father. Then, in 1977 – the same year Cheryl and Peter agreed to use a sperm donor to conceive a child – the first sperm ‘bank’ opened in California. That year, 3,576 children were created using donor sperm in the United States – including Barbara Gordon. Records were scarcely kept of either the children conceived or of the donors who aided in their conception. 

Today, it is estimated that the number of children born via sperm donation each year in the United States is anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000. Some of them are conceived using artificial insemination or intrauterine insemination while others are conceived via IVF when the donor’s sperm is united with the mother’s egg before being placed into the mother’s uterus. Though sperm donor names are still kept hidden, as the practice has become more socially acceptable, parents have become more open with their children. The wide availability of DNA testing means that these children can grow up and search for the biological connections that will lead them to their biological parent. Many donor-conceived individuals are astonished to learn just how many siblings they have. Case in point: A Dutch man who was a habitual sperm donor was eventually and finally ordered to stop donating sperm after it was learned that he allegedly fathered more than 550 children – children who run the risk of meeting, of dating, and of entering into intimate relationships with each other, never knowing the truth – an ethical nightmare.

Rising Action

Barbara Gordon, like many people who don’t know one or both of their biological parents, naturally wanted to know more about her biological father, especially when one of her children was dealing with a health concern. Her 15-year-old son was experiencing pain in his hips, which was determined to be caused by a genetic issue in which the ball of the hip grows too big for the socket. It was a condition that would require surgery. Wanting to know more about her paternal genetics in order to learn if there were additional health concerns to be aware of for her children, Barbara took the at-home DNA tests and worked with a trained geneticist. It was then determined that her biological father was not an anonymous medical student as her parents, Cheryl and Peter, had been told. Barbara was shocked to learn that her biological father was “almost certainly” the very doctor who her parents had trusted, and who had even been the one to deliver her at Central Vermont Medical Center in December of 1977. Dr. John Coates III.

According to Cheryl and Peter’s attorney, Jerry O’Neill, in October of 2018, after learning that her mother’s doctor was her biological father, Barbara wrote to Dr. Coates, telling him about the genetic analysis she had completed. It showed that Dr. Coates was the only male child of both the lineages she had traced. The only other person who could possibly be her biological father would have to be a full-blooded brother of Dr. Coates. Barbara asked him to help her locate her biological father, but he failed to respond to her request. O’Neill, the attorney, said Barbara then attempted to reach out to Dr. Coates’ known children that he had with his wife, but they also ignored her. 

O’Neill filed a complaint against Dr. Coates and the hospital on December 4, 2018 on behalf of Cheryl and Peter, seeking damages for medical negligence, fraud, battery, and breach of contract among other claims. He also requested a court order to obtain a sample of Dr. Coates’ DNA so that an official paternity test could be performed, proving once and for all that he fathered Barbara. Though Vermont state law does not allow DNA paternity tests to be carried out on sperm donors, in July of 2019, a federal judge ordered that Dr. Coates supply a DNA sample regardless. 

Dr. Coates, however, refused to admit that he was Barbara’s biological father, denying his paternity for more than a year. The hospital, now called University of Vermont Health Network at Central Vermont Medical Center, essentially denied all involvement in the case, saying it should not be named in the complaint because Dr. Coates worked in a private practice and was not employed by the hospital. 

In December 2021, The Vermont Board of Medical Practice reprimanded Dr. Coates, and a panel of the board recommended the revocation of his medical license for “gross violation” of Vermont law and for misleading investigators following a hearing which Dr. Coates did not attend. At the hearing Cheryl told the board, “Doctors have such power over us.” She said she was “dumbfounded” when she learned of his violation of her trust.  Dr. Coates’ attorney, however, argued that since Dr. Coates was now 80 years old and retired, what he had done didn’t even matter. 

In January 2021, Dr. Coates was still denying he was the biological father of Barbara. Yet, he also claimed that he had never used a medical student as a sperm donor. Instead, he claimed he had used a revolving group of five men he knew. At this point, Barbara took matters into her own hands. She placed an ad in a local newspaper offering a free DNA test to anyone who fit a specific criteria, including that they were born through Dr. Coates’ office between 1974 and 2009 using artificial insemination or IVF. Through that ad, Cheryl and Peter learned of another woman, who we’ll call “M.” M.’s mother – called “S.B.” in the court documents – had been Dr. Coates’ patient for three to four years, undergoing artificial insemination and ultimately becoming pregnant by – as Dr. Coates had told her – an anonymous medical student with physical characteristics similar to her husband. Sound familiar? DNA testing revealed that M. had a 92.3% chance of being Barbara’s half-sister. The doctor’s secrets had begun to unravel.

More than a year later, and more than three years since Barbara first took the DNA tests, Dr. Coates’ license was finally officially revoked by the full Vermont Board of Medical Practice in February 2022. The board ordered him to pay a $4,000 fine. 

A month later, Dr. Coates took the stand in a civil trial in a federal court in Burlington, Vermont. The full truth of Barbara’s conception was about to be revealed once and for all. On the stand, Dr. Coates was ultimately forced to tell the truth when DNA results showed with 99.99% certainty that he was Barbara’s biological father. Instead of using a medical student like he had previously claimed, on the day that he artificially inseminated Cheryl, Dr. Coates, went into a separate office, masturbated, returned to the exam room, and used his own sperm to impregnate her. He said under oath that he did not inform Cheryl that he had done this. When he was asked why he initially lied, Dr. Coates claimed he simply didn’t remember that he had used his own sperm and that he could not recall Cheryl as a former patient.

Among this allegation though, Cheryl recalled Dr. Coates’ reaction to being informed of Barbara’s name. If you’ll recall, Barbara happened to be the name of Dr. Coates’ wife. Cheryl remembered Dr. Coates asking her if she had named her daughter after his wife, which Cheryl found to be a strange question at the time, but no more than that. Looking back, she saw it much differently. Most people aren’t naming their kids after their doctor's wife- why would Dr. Coates even consider this? It also points to the fact that it seems very unlikely that Dr. Coates would have simply forgotten about Cheryl and her daughter, Barbara. Especially considering his deliberate involvement in her conception. 

On March 31, 2022, a federal court jury awarded Cheryl $5.25 million after just one day of deliberations. She was awarded $250,000 in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages – the amount her attorneys had requested. The jury declared Dr. Coates’ behavior “wrongful and offensive.” A judge determined, however, that Peter did not prove he had suffered damages as a result of Dr. Coates’ deception, and, therefore, his claims were not sent to the jury for consideration. It was also determined that Peter could not sue for fraud. Dr. Coates’ attorney argued that Dr. Coates had no dealings with Peter and that he wasn’t present whenever Dr. Coates and Cheryl met.

In August of 2022, a federal judge ruled that Dr. Coates only had to pay Cheryl half of the $5.25 million, saying that the jury had been wrong in calculating the damages that were owed to her. Instead, Dr. Coates would have to pay Cheryl $2.2 million. 

Barbara on the other hand appears to have been awarded a mere $9,000 to cover the costs of her legal fees. 

As for the 1978 artificial insemination we discussed earlier, a second lawsuit against Dr. Coates was filed in June of 2021 by M.’s mother S.B. – revealed to be Shirley Brown. Except Shirley had not only been Dr. Coates’ patient, she had worked with him in the hospital and had a professional relationship with him. When she learned what he had done, she said she felt “deceived, used, betrayed, like a guinea pig.” She called it “medical rape.”

Her daughter, M., testified at the medical board hearing, saying “to be born out of such a violation to my mother, and [to know] my biological father is the violator. I don’t know how I will ever come to terms with it.”

M’s mother is seeking damages in excess of $75,000.

Barbara may have other unknown half-siblings in the world other than M., but for now, they appear to be the only two who have come forward. Barbara explained that she is “vehemently against the process of using donors to conceive children” and that she believes it’s important for genetic offspring to know their biological parents when possible.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a one-off story. Dr. Coates isn’t the only doctor to use his own sperm on a patient and carry out such an act of betrayal. During the same time period that Dr. Coates was using his own sperm to inseminate his patients without their knowledge or consent, Dr. Donald Cline in Indiana was doing the same. He was known for using fresh sperm rather than frozen – a fact that is chilling in hindsight – and he is estimated to have fathered at least 94 children this way. Some of Cline’s patients believed they were being inseminated with their husband’s sperm. His deceptions inspired a Netflix documentary called Our Father. As his growing number of children began efforts to bring charges against him, Cline threatened them. Eventually he was put on trial for two counts of felony, obstruction of justice, and for lying during the investigation. He pleaded guilty, paid a measly $500 fine, lost his medical license, and received two suspended sentences – no jail time- equivalent to a slap on the wrist. There was no law on the books in Indiana that said a doctor couldn’t inseminate his patients with his own sperm.

Cultural Change

When infertility stands in a couple's way of having a child, using donor sperm or eggs to help them create a baby seems like a valid solution, and a beautiful gift. After all – new human life is always good. But the further you stray from the natural process of the creation of new life, the more complicated and burdensome things become for everyone involved. As Barbara’s story shows, concerns abound regarding the use of donor egg and sperm. 

Remember how Dr. Coates’ attorney argued that what he had done was all water under the bridge? For Barbara and other individuals conceived using donor sperm or egg, learning the circumstances of their conception – of who their biological parents really are – is a pivotal turning point in their lives. It can’t be swept under the rug or buried in the past. For them, learning the truth can make them question everything.

Barbara doesn’t know how many half-siblings she has, or if they number as many as 94 as in Cline’s case. She may never know. But as a result of learning the means of her conception, she feels she cannot support the practice of donor conception.

Other individuals conceived using donor sperm or eggs have expressed similar sentiments. They say that not knowing who their donor – their biological parent is – is like “being lost in the middle of a great, featureless ocean.” 

Sperm donation perpetuates the fiction that a legal father is equivalent to and can replace a biological father for the children born from these arrangements in all cases. Children like Barbara and M. are abandoned before birth by their biological fathers and denied the right to the answer to the most basic question a person can ask about themselves: Who am I and where do I belong in the family tree of history?

Outro

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