Wendy Babst, a retired police detective, discovered the disturbing truth about her biological father's identity after purchasing an DNA kit for a bit of casual genealogy exploration after retiring. Theories cover the gamut - one of the daughters he raised insists his secret inseminations were merely an extension of a lifelong devotion to patients and their well-being. Fortier died in 2006 at age 94 in good standing, having never lost his license, and only appears in the film in brief audio clips. But what motivated his deep deception, which led one former patient to sue him, resulting in a settlement in 2001?īaby God can only offer speculation. I thought, 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."īy all accounts, Fortier, Wendi's covert biological father, was more than smart - he was brilliant. "I'd think, 'Gee, it's really funny that she doesn't really resemble her father's side of the family at all. Over time, Holm recalls, she would fleetingly reflect on the fact that Wendi didn't look anything like the man Holm married. Old home movies that look like something straight out of Mad Men show a pregnant Holm, and then Holm and her happy husband with their toddler Wendi. Unbeknownst to her until many years later, Fortier injected her with his own. She found Fortier in the phone book under fertility specialists, made an appointment and was instructed to bring in samples of her husband's sperm. Babst's mother, Cathy Holm, describes being a 22-year-old bride in the 1960s, when motherhood was expected to immediately follow marriage and all her friends already had kids but she couldn't get pregnant. Frank Silver, a gynecologist who practiced with Fortier years ago and thinks he probably talked himself into believing he was doing a great service, though "bad means don't justify the end."įortier, who opened a Las Vegas practice in 1945, is estimated to have hundreds of children, who now range in age from their thirties to their seventies, with more continuing to come forward. "In those days, they didn't even understand DNA," says Dr. "Do you want to say that your father was a monster? And what does that say about you?"Ĭathy Holm, holding daughter Wendi, was a young newlywed in the 1960s when she sought the help of fertility specialist Dr. He recalls feeling out of sync growing up as a socially awkward child of the extroverted, socially adept man he thought was his father. "People who don't share DNA with their parents, and don't know they don't share DNA with their parents, may feel that they're not just different but somehow wrong," Gulko says. And Fortier's unscrupulous actions from decades ago reverberate for Gulko today in ways the 50-something scientist can only begin to comprehend. Yet as Gulko stands next to a photo of the balding, bespectacled Fortier, the father-son resemblance is impossible to miss. Quincy Fortier is his biological father.Īt this point, the late Fortier is such a stranger to Gulko, he's not even sure how to pronounce the physician's last name. Gulko has recently discovered the shocking secret that Dr. We soon learn Gulko isn't just being interviewed as a genomics expert for the film about an infamous fertility specialist who artificially inseminated countless women without their knowledge or consent. Mary was suing him for $14 million.When we first meet geneticist Brad Gulko in the new HBO documentary Baby God, he's peering into a microscope and reflecting on the precision of today's genetic tests. Mary, who was at the time of the lawsuit was 50, was devastated to find out that her children weren't her husband's and had to seek mental health counselling. HBO's documentary 'Baby God' gives insight into this particular case as it tells the story of Dr Fortier's crude and unethical methods. In this, she alleged that the doctor never told her he was going to use a mixture of biological materials from both her husband and a donor (Fortier himself) during the procedure. Soon enough in 1996, Mary Craddock filed a lawsuit against the then 88-year-old Fortier. That was until the sibling duo made the discovery decades afterwards that Fortier was the real biological father after Heather went to work for him in 1994. Eventually, she went on to have two children - a daughter Heather and a son Cameron - with the help of Dr Fortier and everything else was history. She had been facing immense difficulty conceiving with her husband. In the 1970s, Mary Craddock was a young woman when she visited Nevada fertility specialist Dr Quincy Fortier to get artificially inseminated.
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