![]() 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. Watch on HBO Max.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. A very different film could be made from these tangents that Olson avoids. The movie also offers a peek into the Wild West of women’s health in 1960s Las Vegas when, as one of the doctor’s barfly male colleagues grins, nearly three-quarters of the town was female with a sizable fraction of showgirls. Fortier’s legally adopted daughters briefly mention he was also a self-circumcised hypnotist. Olson’s poetic b-roll and Will Epstein’s soft, pulsing piano score buff away the lurid shocks. Another son discovers that his mother was the doctor’s 17-year-old stepdaughter who had been gaslit into believing her boy was a virgin birth. Fortier’s first patients in the 1940s, never meant to have children, but accepted that her boy was a gift from god. One son finds that his mother, one of Dr. Fortier’s offspring, particularly those who seem to have inherited strands of his personality, like Brad Gulko, a geneticist, and Wendi Babst, a methodical retired detective, want to find good intentions behind his lies. What it might say, when you gather the fragments of this studiously unsalacious film, is that the surest test of human connection is empathy.
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