Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 18, 1992 TAG: 9202180368
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BABY-MAKING
COURTROOMS these days haven't been producing news stories appropriate for the entire family to read. In Indianapolis, ex-boxing champ Mike Tyson was found guilty of raping an 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant. In Milwaukee, gruesome details of Jeffrey Dahmer's killing spree were on display before a jury decided he was legally responsible for his actions. In Bedford, Kenneth Stewart was convicted of a horrible Mother's Day murder of his wife and 5-month-old child.Now in Alexandria, an infertility doctor is being tried on charges that he used hormone injections to trick patients into believing they were pregnant when they were not. He also is accused of using his own sperm to artificially inseminate many other women.
The case of Dr. Cecil Jacobson lacks the violence of the Tyson, Dahmer and Stewart cases, but isn't without its own dark drama. It certainly has plenty of pathos.
If the allegations against Jacobson are true, he used his own sperm to impregnate as many as 75 women, mostly from the Washington area, between 1976 and 1988. That means the children would be half brothers and half sisters.
Then there are the women who'd been told by the fertility doctor that they were pregnant, then that they had suffered miscarriages; now they're being told they were never pregnant.
One woman, Deborah S. Gregory, testified that Jacobson had shown her sonograms of what he said was the fetus, had made it seem real by calling it Junior. "He indicated that this was the baby's arm and that `junior' was sucking his thumb." Later, she said, Jacobson told her the baby had died or had been "reabsorbed" into her body. An obstetrician who had examined Gregory and another of Jacobson's patients testified he found no signs whatsoever of the pregnancies Jacobson had told them existed.
Jacobson closed his fertility clinic in Vienna, Va., and moved to Provo, Utah, after the Virginia Board of Medicine found sufficient evidence to revoke his medical license in 1989. He says he's innocent of the 52 felony counts of fraud and perjury brought against him.
Whatever the outcome of his trial, it points to the need for better rules and regulations for those claiming to be baby-making experts. (Jacobson called himself a baby-maker. He used to tell patients, "God doesn't give you babies. I do.")
Infertility medicine is an exciting, fairly new field of practice that promises much to wannabe parents who have trouble conceiving in the conventional way. But it may be more prone to abuse than some other fields. The government and the medical profession must see to it that charlatans are kept out. As U.S. Attorney Richard Cullun of Richmond put it: The kind of practices of which Jacobson is accused are "basic fraud of the cruelest sort."