As the popularity of at-home DNA tests grows, so does the number of fertility doctors who have been accused of secretly using their own sperm to inseminate patients. There are more than two dozen such physicians in the U.S. alone, according to Baby God, a new documentary premiering December 2 on HBO. “The headlines have focused on the perpetrators,” said the film’s director, Hannah Olson. “I was interested in what it feels like for the victim.”
Olson’s film focuses on the late Dr. Quincy Fortier, a Las Vegas fertility specialist who practiced medicine for more than 60 years, was named Doctor of the Year in 1991 by the Clark County Medical Society, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal—and may have fathered hundreds of children without their mothers’ knowledge or consent. After learning about Fortier, Olson made contact with Wendi Babst, a recently retired detective who had taken up genealogy, discovered Fortier was her father, and began investigating him on her own. Olson followed her quest.
The film has a vérité quality. Viewers meet several other half-siblings and their mothers—one of whom learns of her abuse in the film, albeit in a mercifully off-camera conversation—as Babst endeavors to uncover Fortier’s intentions. She needs to know whether her father was good or evil. “There’s got to be some influence of his genetics in me. I just want to know what that is,” Babst tells the camera.
Society at large also has questions about the motivations behind this phenomenon. In many cases, the doctors’ actions were open secrets; Fortier himself admits to using his own specimen in an old audio interview. Frozen sperm wasn’t normally utilized in procedures until the late ’80s. Until that point, some considered the practice of doctors donating sperm—at a time when the human genome and inherited traits weren’t fully understood—to be somewhat commensurate with giving blood.
That justification is hard to swallow in a post-MeToo world. Whatever the motivation, the behavior is an execution of power over sex without consent. “There were some historical components that allowed it to happen,” Olson said—this was an undiscoverable crime, for instance, and one ostensibly committed out of necessity. “But the attitude that went along with the crime persists: doctor knows best.” Olson explores how patient consent relates to sexual consent, and how power affects both.
Many doctors, including Fortier, did not have good intentions—as Babst learns in the film. The women Fortier inseminated usually intended to receive their husband’s sperm. In more than one case, they hadn’t sought insemination at all. The film unfolds more or less on the same timeline as Babst’s investigation. At the midpoint, the former detective discovers an act of profound abuse. “We kept digging and it kept getting darker,” Olson said.
Watching Babst grapple with the depth of her biological father’s crimes and the truth of her genetic inheritance is difficult, but Olson wants viewers to sit with it. One scene contains a 15-second close-up of her nervously scraping a fingernail up and down her thigh. Later, she marvels that she spent her career chasing criminals and fighting monsters, only to learn there is a monster living inside her.
That is part of Fortier’s legacy as the baby god. The film’s title carries several valances: The doctor had great power; he wielded it specifically in the act of creation; and as a result, he became immortal. He saw thousands of patients over his career. His son Quincy Fortier Jr.—whom the doctor also raised—estimates that he has hundreds of unknown siblings, and many of them now have children and grandchildren of their own.
“Often, for victims of sexual violence, the journey toward closure can be painful. In this case, it goes on forever,” Olson said.
The film undercuts the idea that anyone can spit into a vial, mail it to a lab, and receive some kind of certainty about who they are. It brims with affecting home videos of Fortier’s secret children with their unsuspecting parents, and with footage of the doctor’s journals and drawings, all providing clues but not answers.
One of Babst’s newly discovered half-siblings, Brad Gulko—who has a Ph.D. and whose work focuses on human genomics, either a shocking irony or a predetermined inevitability—says in Baby God that he believes “in the biological and psychological manifestations of genetics.” When Olson recently caught up with Gulko, though, he told her something interesting: “that DNA is not fate, but it is bias,” she said. Perhaps Fortier’s descendants have the ability to turn off some of his traits. That would certainly be a comfort to the many who have yet to discover their connection to him; Olson says five more of his children have been found since the film’s completion.
Babst’s investigation also leads her to Jonathan Stensland, another half-sibling. While Babst and Gulko describe themselves as clinical and closed, respectively—traits they now trace to Fortier—Stensland appears contemplative and open. When Babst meets with him, he tells her, “I don’t feel like the violence is carried inside me. But the consciousness of the violence was born into me.”
Baby God is a rumination on the inheritability of violence, whether genetically through DNA or epigenetically through trauma. “It’s in you,” Olson said. “You are this thing. Or are you? I wanted the film to raise those kinds of questions.”
Did she find answers? “I found more questions.”
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