A fertility doctor used his own sperm to secretly get patients pregnant. A lawyer working with the victims is now pushing to make fertility fraud a criminal offense.

• Liz White said she was impregnated by her fertility specialist without her knowledge or consent.
• White and her son, Matthew, appear in the Netflix film "Our Father" about Dr. Donald Cline.

Lying back on a treatment table and placing her feet in stirrups, Liz White waited patiently for her fertility specialist, Dr. Donald Cline, to enter the room with the sperm of an anonymous donor.

She said that Cline had given her husband a diagnosis of infertility and told the young couple that their only chance of having a baby was for her to undergo artificial insemination.

"It was the first time I felt it was hopeful," Liz White said in the Netflix film "Our Father," recalling the moment Cline injected her with the sample.

She said she was delighted to conceive a child after 15 attempts at his practice. But decades later, she said she was shocked when her son, Matt White, did a home DNA test and discovered that his biological father was Cline himself.

Cline has fathered at least 94 children by deceiving patients

Matt White's results also showed that he had scores of half-siblings whose unwitting mothers were impregnated by the prominent Indianapolis doctor from the 1960s to '80s.

At the last count, Cline had sired no fewer than 94 children. He would masturbate in his office, walk into the treatment room next door, and administer his sperm with a syringe.

"It's just too fucked up," Matt White said in "Our Father," adding, "It takes a sick individual to put themselves in the position to be able to do that."

Liz White, now 69 years old, told the filmmakers that when she found out the truth, her first words were, "I was raped 15 times and didn't know it."

She said she read a copy of the Indiana sexual-assault law and was convinced it legislated against perpetrators such as Cline.

But, she recalled, the assistant district attorney said that no law existed, and that the doctor could not be charged with rape because his actions needed to have the components of force and non-consent.

"The issue for me is that there was no consent," Liz White said in the film. She went on, "He didn't give me a choice."

The mom joined forces with Jacoba Ballard, one of her son's half-siblings, to campaign for a change in the law. Jody Madeira, a legal expert, steered them through the process.

A legal expert said that perpetrators of fertility fraud should be heavily punished

"It matters that a doctor usurped upon the judgment of his patients, even if it was 30 or 40 years ago or more," Madeira told Insider. She said the behavior of physicians such as Cline should be categorized as a felony punishable by five years in jail and a $10,000 fine per victim.

The professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law helped Cline's victims lobby policymakers to make fertility fraud a criminal offense. The law has since been written into statute in Indiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Madeira, who said the measure is set to pass in Illinois and Ohio, is also pressing for it to be enforced at the federal level.

"Cline directly input himself into the family trees of these individuals," said Madeira, who is writing a book about fertility fraud as a follow-up to her 2017 book, "Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception." She added, "I had no doubt that what he did was a crime."

As for the psychological effect on the half-siblings and their parents, Dr. Lucy Hutner, a reproductive psychiatrist, told Insider they were likely to have suffered "an enormous trauma."

A psychiatrist calls the effects of fertility fraud devastating

Hutner, a cofounder of Phoebe, a digital platform for pregnancy and postpartum, said Cline's actions were a "devastating betrayal."

But she said she hoped his victims would take some time to focus on the devotion of those who raised them, whether or not they had the same DNA.

Hutner said, "Biology and genetics are much less important than the people who've provided you with support, care, and love throughout your life."