Now available to stream on BINGE, the riveting new documentary Baby God is about an American doctor who secretly used his own sperm to inseminate hundreds of women. Here’s Eliza Janssen on what makes the doco so interesting and important.
Directed and produced by Hannah Olson, Baby God is the latest documentary on BINGE that’ll send shivers down your spine and cause you to question your faith in authority. It’s the perfect feature for those who have obsessed over true crime series such as I’ll Be Gone In The Dark.
But instead of focusing on murder and death, Baby God provides a disturbing look into the beginning of life. Namely, a corrupt Nevada fertility doctor who used his own sperm to inseminate countless women without their consent or even their awareness.
With the ripple effects of Dr. Quincy Fortier’s sickening actions still being felt today, Olson’s documentary takes a sensitive approach to interviewing the mothers and children involved. Baby God is the father of all medical cautionary tales; here’s what makes it so important.
Miracle worker or medical predator?
Built up from family photos and grainy archival footage, Baby God brings its audience into an entirely different culture of parenting: Las Vegas in the 1960s, when a huge amount of the city’s population were young fertile women, working in nightlife and hospitality.
Cathy Holm, one of Fortier’s now-elderly victims, summarises her life goals back then as such: “Get married. Have kids. Have a good life.” She never expected that her husband’s sperm samples would be swapped with the fertility specialist’s own semen. The resulting child, Wendi Pabst, is one of Baby God‘s main narrators. It’s truly heartbreaking to see her standing over her criminal father’s grave, barely able to whisper out how she feels about him, saying “I just don’t understand what gave you the right to do what you did.”
Fortier died in 2006 at age 94, his reputation mostly unsullied. He still has his defenders; namely one of his daughters who answers flatly, “about what?” when asked how she feels about her father’s covert insemination of at least hundreds of women.
A fascinating look at DNA vs upbringing
“…They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”
So goes the first stanza of This Be The Verse, a poem by Philip Larkin. Whether we like it or not, our whole lives are indeed dictated by an inescapable combination of DNA and upbringing.
For the clueless descendants of Dr. Quincy Fortier, some of the doctor’s traits could be seen as genetic gifts. One unknowingly inseminated mother recalls watching her teenage daughter and wondering to herself: “where’d she get all these brains? She didn’t get them from me, and I didn’t think her father was all that smart.”
Baby God does not attempt to shock viewers, releasing its sordid details with a thoughtful, gradual pace. It reminded me of Sarah Polley’s terrific documentary The Stories We Tell. Like Polley’s highly personal discovery of her true parentage, Baby God is a bittersweet look back into the past. How would these people’s lives be different if someone had intervened, or told the truth before now?
What was he thinking?!
Whilst ancestry services and even Baby God itself may bring closure to the victims, we will never know Fortier’s exact motivations. With its drastic title and disturbing claims that Fortier was known to experiment on even himself, performing his own circumcision (!!!!), the documentary stops just short of suggesting that Fortier was driven by a sick God complex of sorts.
Ultimately, the reason behind Fortier’s insidious malpractice isn’t so important to Baby God. Instead, Olson admirably makes this a story of survivors rather than yet another tale of feel-bad true crime.
Best of all, Baby God brings the “Fortier people” together, giving the reeling offspring a chance to commiserate with one another. The film’s upsetting final text reveals they may very well not be alone: we are told that more than two dozen US doctors have been accused of secretly inseminating patients with their own sperm.
