A doctor charged with misleading women into thinking they were pregnant and using his own semen to impregnate other women says he has spent his life trying to help women conceive healthy children.
"As God is my witness, my friend, I have never harmed a patient," said Cecil B. Jacobson, who lives in Provo.A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., indicted Jacobson last Monday on 53 counts of fraud and perjury, charging that he grossly abused the trust relationship between a doctor and his patients. Jacobson pleaded not guilty to the charges Friday. Trial is set for Feb. 10.
The U.S. District Court indictment stems from his treatment of patients who sought medical assistance to become pregnant.
The indictment alleges Jacobson defrauded certain women and their husbands by inseminating the women with his own sperm.
"There's no way I'm ever going to discuss anything as intimate as that," he told the Deseret News in a brief interview Monday.
The Washington Post reported that Jacobson, 55, said that on "a few occasions" in the 1980s he used his own sperm to inseminate women who came to his Reproductive Genetics Center Ltd. clinic in Vienna, Va.
"If it was true, I wouldn't reveal that," Jacobson said.
"What would it matter if I did. . . . You can understand the concern any doctor has using donor semen." According to the Post, Jacobson said he knew his semen was safe because he hadn't slept with anyone but his wife in 33 years of marriage.
Semen found in sperm banks is suspect not only because of the AIDS epidemic but because of various other diseases it can carry, Jacobson said.
Prosecutors will attempt to prove that Jacobson violated the promised privacy of insemination patients because in some cases he knew he was the donor. Jacobson said his patients never knew who the donors were and that government prosecutors violated patients' privacy by telling them the doctor may have used his own sperm.
The indictment alleges Jacobson led couples to believe he had a genuine donor-insemination program in which he used carefully screened donors who matched a husband's physical characteristics. Because of Jacobson's conduct, the indictment charges, numerous children were conceived and born for whom the doctor is the biological father.
Jacobson is also charged with fraudulently administering and prescribing hormones and medications that stimulated pregnancy. He said that injections of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) do indeed aid conception. Government prosecutors, Jacobson said, fail to mention that many of his patients became pregnant using HCG.
"We never had an abnormal child in this procedure," he said.
Jacobson, a Utah native who attended college at Utah State University and the University of Utah, practiced medicine in Vienna, Va., from 1976 to 1988. He has published numerous scholarly papers in medical journals and served on the President's Committee for Mental Retardation in the 1970s. Jacobson is credited with performing the nation's first amniocentesis, a procedure used to detect fetal abnormalities.
He said the indictment has ruined his medical career.
"How it ever got turned into a criminal proceeding is a mystery to me," he said. He said the same group of patients and attorneys that are making the current accusations previously sued him for malpractice.
"I'm really shocked. I spent my life trying to help people," he said. "This destroyed me and destroyed the whole field of helping older women have children."