Dr. Cecil Jacobson was indignant, even pained, as he peered down from the witness stand, describing several of the prosecution`s allegations about his reproductive practice as ”insulting.”
He portrayed himself as a dedicated physician devoted to helping high-risk women have children, a doctor who spent years soldiering away in his lab ”instead of receiving professorships and chairmanships all over the world.”
”I never did anything fraudulent,” he declared at one point during testimony Wednesday in federal court here.
Jacobson, 55, is charged with 52 counts of fraud and perjury.
The prosecution alleges he falsely told women they were pregnant so they would keep coming back for treatment-until he eventually told them the fetus had died.
It also alleges he used his own sperm to father up to 75 children after telling the parents the sperm was coming from an anonymous donor.
When asked by his own lawyer, James Tate, if he had ever used his own semen, Jacobson turned to the eight-woman, four-man jury and said, ”I`ll get very personal if you don`t mind.”
He then said he had been a semen donor while in medical school.
”Did there come a time when you became a donor to your own patients?”
Tate asked.
”In very isolated circumstances, yes,” Jacobson replied.
He said it first happened when semen didn`t arrive on time and he had a patient ready for insemination.
Later, he said, when he relocated his practice from the District of Columbia to Vienna, Va., it was ”more difficult to get donor semen delivered out there.” He said frozen semen did not work as well as fresh.
But he also said he continued to have other donors besides himself and he felt what he was doing was ”absolutely” medically correct.
Jacobson, the father of seven children with his wife, Joyce, said he used his own semen with patients over a 20-year period. But he also said that because he was concerned about confidentiality, he destroyed records six months after each baby was born to a patient who had received donor semen; so he could not confirm in how many instances his sperm led to the birth of a particular child.
Jacobson also testified that when he was the donor, he kept the $20 fee he charged patients for an anonymous donor and did not report it on his income taxes because of ”the anonymity issue.”
Under cross-examination by prosecutor Randy Bellows, Jacobson acknowledged that although he performed more than 200 pregnancy tests a year in 1986 and 1987, he did not read information that came with the kits advising that their results could be affected by a hormone he was giving patients.
Bellows cited cases in which Jacobson told patients as many as 10 times that they were pregnant, and yet there were no live births.
”Are you positive that the women who came in,” Bellows asked, ”every time you told them they were pregnant, they were?”
Jacobson said he believed the ”vast majority” were, although ”there were some women where I probably made a mistake, and for that I`m sorry.”
When Bellows began his cross-examination, Jacobson almost bristled with annoyance. Several times he turned to address the jury rather the prosecutor. ”To the best of my knowledge, I`ve never lied to anyone,” he told Bellows at the outset.
Bellows then read from a 1989 statement Jacobson had given under oath, in which he denied using his own sperm to inseminate patients.
”Did you say something you knew to be untrue?” Bellows asked.
”I answered that under the rules of medical confidentiality,” Jacobson replied, saying he would not reveal the name of any donor to ”any outside inquisitor.”
Jacobson`s tone with Bellows ranged from peeved to sarcastic.
At one point, when Bellows suggested he would describe a case in a certain way to protect the privacy of the patient, Jacobson said caustically, ”That would be nice.”
The case is expected to go to the jury Thursday.
