PORTLAND,Ore. (KOIN) — Wendi Babst’s odyssey captured in a new HBO documentary began after she retired from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office after 31 years, including 13 as a detective.
“I retired from my job and I need some more things to keep me busy, and I thought maybe I would do some geneology,” she said in the documentary, “Baby God.”
Her retirement surprise came after she did a DNA test.
“When I first looked at it, I thought that I had multiple first cousin matches and I knew that couldn’t be correct because I don’t have any first cousins and my only uncle died before I was born and never had children,” she said. “So I look at it more closely and realize they’re not cousins. They are actually half siblings. And it took me just a few minutes to kind of put it together. And meanwhile, I have someone messaging me with information through the system and right away within just a few minutes, I realized that my mom’s fertility doctor and the doctor who delivered me was my biological father.”
She’s talking about Dr. Quincy Fortier. Her parents had gone to see him during the short time they lived in Las Vegas for help getting pregnant. A half-century later, DNA revealed the truth.
“You just don’t look at yourself the same way anymore. Every time I looked in the mirror, especially in the early times, you know, I really just didn’t, it’s almost like you don’t know the face looking back at you, because now half of you is not who you thought you were.”
Wendi discovered she has at least 30 siblings from Dr. Fortier — and who knows how many more.
She said there were times she was angry.
“There have been throughout this process, you know, grieving for my family that I thought I knew. And then, you know, just this righteous anger, like how could you make that decision for my mother?”
She’s connected with some of her siblings and now sees them as a gift.
“We’re all, I think, wrestling, especially now with the film coming out, with this idea that there were some really dark things in the story, but we’re all here. We can’t change that. And you know, now can we have these relationships and make them develop?”