The title says it all. What are the odds of having someone you look alike but you are not related? Is it as many odds as you can have to stand in the same room full of strangers but you may not know one of these strangers is your blood? What if you discovered that you are not an only child but you have a half sibling or two? But what if they are more than 50? Yes, I said fifty. Again, what are the odds, right?

In this documentary entitled, Our Father, streaming now in Netflix. this is a story about infertility and sperm donors and it is also about a Doctor Cline, the main subject of the documentary. In the title, it may seem to sound good when you read it, like that’s what I thought in the first glance before I even watch the trailer not knowing that this documentary is more interesting than what I thought.

The Documentary starts with Jacob Ballard who took a DNA Test, linking her to multiple match-siblings. After finding out the results, she discovered that she has at least seven siblings. Later then, introduced the fertility doctor of Jacoba’s mother, Doctor Cline. He has been a fertility doctor from the 70s and the 80s. He has quite the reputation because he is well known with his successful work but little did the ladies that go to him knew, after few years his successful work will mark on the history of the medical field.

Doctor Cline has impregnated women by using his sperm to inseminate dozens of women in Indianapolis. The film itself is rather disturbing especially during time when the sibling-count number gets higher and higher. The documentary consists of some of the women he inseminated and the children that were made out of the insemination. Some of the siblings have met in person and reunited. Not knowing what the future holds, these children tried to tell the story to the world however there’s no such law yet that was made to convict Dr. Cline for his actions.

Imagine, thinking that your father that you have grown up with is actually not your father, instead, your real father is the man that helped your mom inseminate eggs inside her or just the thought of walking in the streets not knowing that .02 % of the population are your siblings. Will there be a huge possibility that you have dated a sibling but you just both didn’t know that you were related? I mean, it was discovered that there are 94 Cline siblings and still counting.

The documentary is so disturbing that it made people that are going through infertility think twice of doing the insemination coz what if it happens again and there’s one doctor who thinks this is some kind of game and a cult practice to have children as much as he can. I also noticed in the film that they focused on showing the effect of the incident not only on the numbers of siblings that they have recorded but also the fact that most of them have underlying illnesses that they might’ve caught because of their poor Cline-genes. Some of them have auto-immune diseases and other chronic illness.

What is not good is that Cline was not the only doctor who got caught doing the same. There are plenty of doctors in the world as well to have done what he did. The documentary surprisingly focused on Cline’s conflicted ‘religion’, there are theories that Cline must have been part of a cult or a movement that was repeatedly mentioned in the film which was Quiverfull. These people categorize themselves as those who believes that having children as many as they can is their main calling, which was quickly compared to what Dr. Cline was doing. Cline was also a religious one, the show even showed some bible verses which were connecting him to his intention of having as many children as he can get.

Just by watching the show, it make me think how in the world this doctor was not even sentenced to longer jail time. Cline was only charged with two counts of obstruction of justice in 2017. He retired in 2009 but got his medical license revoked just on 2018 which was not serving any justice to what he did anymore.

As for the rest of the siblings, they’re still looking for more and hoping no doctors will ever do the same crime out of any beliefs they have because what Cline did is inhumane.

All in all this film is very cringey and I kinda left thinking and searching for all the 90+ siblings because I just wonder if they get to see every single of them.