Court Revives Donor Child's Malpractice Claim Against Fertility Doctor Donald Cline on Appeal

Donald Cline ran a fertility practice in the Indianapolis area for decades, telling patients he used carefully screened donors or a husband's own sample. Instead, he repeatedly inseminated women with his own sperm without their knowledge or consent. The deception stayed hidden until consumer DNA tests began connecting strangers who turned out to be half-siblings. Testing has since linked at least 94 children to Cline, a story told in the 2022 Netflix documentary "Our Father."

The people harmed were the mothers, who made deeply personal medical decisions based on a lie, and the donor children, many of whom learned only as adults that their fertility doctor was their biological father. Indiana had no law aimed at this conduct when it happened. State lawmakers passed a criminal fertility-fraud statute in 2019, but it could not reach Cline's earlier acts, leaving civil suits as the main path to accountability.

Wilson Kehoe Winingham has represented some of Cline's offspring. Separate from the firm's own cases, three civil suits brought by donor children settled in 2022 for a combined total of about $1.35 million, roughly $450,000 per case: about $100,000 from Cline and his clinic, Indianapolis Infertility, plus $350,000 from the Indiana Patient's Compensation Fund.

One of the firm's clients, identified in court only as Anonymous Child 1 to protect her privacy, sued Cline for medical malpractice. The Marion Superior Court threw the case out on summary judgment, ruling that the two-year malpractice deadline had already passed. William Winingham took the dismissal to the Indiana Court of Appeals. He argued that his client filed as soon as DNA testing confirmed Cline was her biological father, and that an earlier, unconfirmed suspicion was not enough to start the clock.

On May 22, 2025, the Court of Appeals reversed. Judge Elaine Brown, joined by Chief Judge Robert Altice and Judge Elizabeth Tavitas, held that "a genuine issue of material fact exists as to when the appellant learned that Cline had used his own sperm," and that mere suspicion of malpractice was not enough to trigger the statutory time period. The court sent the case back to the trial court, where it can now move forward and could be decided by a jury.