What I’m watching: a pair of impactful documentariesDate: 5/23/2022 On Netflix: “Our Father”
I’ve been a horror film fan since junior high school and it is clear to me that there is no fiction that can have the potential for real fright than the truth.
“Our Father” is an example of that situation.
The new documentary is about infertility expert Dr. Donald Cline, who practiced in Indiana. Cline told his patients that he would use the sperm of qualified students at a nearby medical school.
Although there is evidence that he did do that, he also used his own sperm at least 99 times and never told his patients what he was doing.
The problem is that the donors are supposed to go through a rigorous vetting, as another fertility doctor explained. The effort is to determine the health history of the donors, and as little as 30 percent actually qualify.
In Cline’s case, there was no vetting of his own health history, something that plays a major role in this story.
This story is told through the experiences of the children born out of this situation. Jacoba Ballard supplied a DNA sample to the website 23andMe and found that she had seven half-siblings she never knew she had.
She started contacting these people and investigating why this could have happened. The result was a growing number of half-siblings.
Ballard and many of her half-siblings were determined not only to confront Cline but learn why he did what he did.
The information they uncovered was indeed frightening and a complete betrayal of medical ethics.
The film handles this story with both openness and empathy. While the subject matter may seem at first as sensationalistic the documentary speaks to very important issues.
It is truly frightening, though, at what some people are capable of doing.
On Netflix: “Meltdown: Three Mile Island”
And if an unethical doctor isn’t frightening enough, perhaps the fact of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island would scare you.
The fact that the conditions at the failed nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania came within a half-hour of a complete core meltdown will chill you.
This mini-series takes an in-depth look at what is considered the worst nuclear accident in the history of this country.
While the events from 1979 may seem as ancient history to some, the accident at Three Mile Island spelled a turning point in the advancement of nuclear power as a safe and clean way to generate electricity. Considering the discussions today about clean sources of power, this film presents a balanced discussion about why nuclear ultimately dropped out of the energy portfolio.
The film interviews a wide number of people, ranging from residents of the nearby community who first embraced the presence of Three Mile Island to government officials who even now want to minimize the importance of the event to the whistleblower who was able to make a huge difference.
That whistleblower was Richard Parks, a veteran of the Navy’s nuclear power training and an advocate for nuclear energy. Parks, though, was trained to do things correctly, and what he saw when hired to participate in the cleanup made him very concerned.
His actions were able to stop the hasty cleanup and uncovered the contradictions between what the utility company involved was telling residents and the state government.
An impressively detailed series, this is a must-watch as we continue to speak about energy issues.
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