Hide Article Text (OCR)
Receptionist: No sign of other sperm donorsALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A doctor accused of artificially inseminating patients with his own sperm would sometimes divide the same sample among multiple patients, two former employees say.Those two and a third former employee testified Tuesday they were convinced that Dr. Cecil Jacobson used his own sperm and that they saw no evidence of other donors.Jacobson is being tried in U.S. District Court on 52 counts of fraud and perjury.He is accused of using his own sperm to father up to 75 children by his patientswhile claiming he was using anonymousdonors.Former receptionist Launi Jean Robertson said she became convinced that Jacobson was the donor by “the presence of semen specimens ... when I hadn’t seenany donor deliveries at all.”She said she also decided he must be splitting the same sample among multiple insemination patients. “There was only a certain amount (of sperm) there and a number of patients coming in,” she said.Former laboratory assistant Gudrun Slaughter said she came to the same conclusion.Renee Bushman, who worked for Jacobson for eight years as a receptionist, said Jacobson at first would say he was going down the hall to meet a donor. Eventually he stopped saying that and “he’d go in the bathroom,” she said, adding that she never saw any evidence of any other donor.Jacobson also is accused of using hormone treatments to trick other women into believing they were pregnant when they were not.Nina McClain testified that in August 1987 Jacobson told her she was pregnant. He identified the baby on sonograms, but later he told her the baby “was gone and had been reabsorbed back into the body,” she said.“He described it as being like a bruise that disappears back into the body,” she said, adding that Jacobson told her the miscarriage may have been caused by a virus.Now, McClain said, “I sincerely, honestly believe that he knew there was no child there. At 13 or 14 weeks he should have known what a (fetal) sac looked like and what a fetus looked like.”Dr. Mary Damewood, an infertility specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said she examined 1,000 Jacobson patient records and found hundreds of such cases.
Newspaper Details
Burlington Times News
Burlington, North Carolina, US
Wed, Feb 19, 1992
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Claudia R.
USA 25 Mar 2019
Other Publications Near Burlington, North Carolina
Burlington Daily Times News
Burlington Daily Times
Burlington Saturday Times News
Burlington Sunday Times News
Burlington Daily News
