"Medical Rape": Fertility Doctor Who Used His Own Sperm Faces Another Lawsuit

Last week's $8.75 million jury award against Dr. Paul Jones, who used his own sperm to impregnate patients, seemed to be the immediate end of legal jeopardy for the Grand Junction-based fertility specialist, since other lawsuits against him had reportedly been resolved.

Turns out, though, that another complaint, involving a woman and two daughters who are biologically linked to the doctor (they're identified in the original May 2021 suit as Jane, Janet and Jana Doe), remains active and carries the possibility of even more big damages.

Attorney Paula Greisen of Denver-based King Greisen has been involved in many high-profile issues, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop controversy and the firing of Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson, whom she represents. But she still finds the actions of Jones in relation to the three Does shocking. "It is essentially medical rape of the mother," says Greisen, who believes the suit she's handling could be followed by others. "I think it's just the beginning."

According to Greisen, the current complaint flowed from the one whose trial recently concluded; that case was pressed on behalf of Cheryl Emmons, John Emmons, Maia Emmons-Boring and Tahnee Scott. "One of my clients was contacted by a plaintiff in the Emmons-Boring case, who said, 'Hey, I think we're half-sisters.' And after further investigation, DNA testing confirmed that Dr. Jones was the biological male donor."

The Doe daughters were born after inseminations in 1986 and 1987, but that decade was hardly the only one in which Jones used his own fresh sperm samples on patients. "It is my understanding, based on his deposition in the Emmons-Boring case, that donors were never used, and that he did this for a period of thirty years," Greisen says of Jones, who gave up his medical license in 2019, after his actions were made public.

Women’s Health Care of Western Colorado, the clinic where Jones worked, and Dr. Stephan Meacham, one of his colleagues at the business, are also named as defendants. "The clinic had no procedures in place to obtain donor specimens. So they lied to patients, which is a breach of fiduciary duty," Greisen argues. "And it's our understanding that Dr. Meacham was also having his patients be inseminated with Dr. Jones's samples."

When state representative Kerry Tipper learned that there was no specific statute against Jones's actions on the Colorado books, she sponsored HB20-1014, titled "Misuse of Human Reproductive Material," which passed both chambers of the General Assembly and was signed in 2020. But Greisen doesn't agree that what happened to her clients was technically within the law at the time.

"I believe it was illegal already," she emphasizes. "Whether or not they charged him with a crime is always within the discretion of the prosecution. But if you take ten dollars from somebody's wallet, it's a crime. And if you put your semen into someone who doesn't know what you're doing, in my opinion, that's an assault." She says that Jones and the other defendants also committed fraud, since patients were told the donors "were either medical students or other doctors, and that they'd try to match the parents' physical characteristics."

Jones is hardly the only fertility doctor to use his own sperm. Indiana's Dr. Donald Cline impregnated approximately fifty patients; he's the subject of the new Netflix documentary Our Father. Such physicians "thought this would never be discovered and that they had complete impunity, because things like ancestry.com didn't exist and there was no way to track the donors," Greisen says. "But they were wrong."

Click to read Jane Doe, et al., v. Dr. Paul Jones, et al., Cheryl Emmons, et al., v. Paul B. Jones, et al. and House Bill 20-1014.