Mother Testifies That Baby Girl Looks Like Her Doctor

A patient of an infertility doctor accused of artificially inseminating women with his own sperm testified Wednesday that she almost immediately noticed her daughter’s resemblance to the doctor.

The woman, testifying under the pseudonym of Mary Green, said that when she and her husband saw pictures of their 3-day-old daughter, “we both said: ‘Whoa! Who does she look like?’ We both had the same feeling that she looked a lot like Dr. Jacobson.”

Another patient of Dr. Cecil B. Jacobson, using the pseudonym Mary Johnson, testified that Jacobson promised her that “he had a perfect match for my husband” when she was artificially inseminated. She said the doctor told her that the donor was a medical student who was “happily married and a religious man and that he was free of disease.”

The woman said she did not want the donor to know who received his sperm because she was “scared of blackmail or the father coming back and trying to claim our child.” She said she would “absolutely not” have used Jacobson’s insemination service if he had told her that he would be the sperm donor.

Jacobson is being tried on fraud and perjury charges in a suburban Virginia court.

His attorney, James Tate, has acknowledged that Jacobson mixed his own sperm with that of some patients’ husbands--but only with their consent. In any case, Tate has said that it is not illegal for a doctor to donate sperm.

The woman testifying as Mary Green said Jacobson told her the donor would never know the identity of his child but that the doctor now “knows he has a child out there, and at this point, I know who her father is, and she looks just like him.”