“There are no words to describe the joy” that Pauline Chambless felt when she held her daughter, Jessica, for the first time in 1987.

After all, the new mom had been trying to have a baby for 14 long years. After multiple miscarriages and disappointments, she finally had her perfect baby girl — all thanks to her fertility doctor, Kim McMorries, and an anonymous sperm donor.

She might have felt differently if she’d known they were the same man.

Fast-forward to 2020. Jessica, now 33, had grown up knowing that she was conceived by a donor.

“Mom was completely honest, and it made me feel special,” the medical-spa manager tells The Post. “I knew how hard she’d tried to have me. She also shared everything she knew about my biological father — that he was a tall medical student, with red hair who loved music. I’d often wonder if one day I’d meet him.”

She also wondered about the rest of her biological family — what if she had siblings? Plus, she had some hard-to-explain health issues, and wanted to know more about her medical history. So in January, the Houston, Texas, resident decided to take a DNA test.

When the results came in on Feb. 23, “My heart was pounding so hard — I could hear it,” says Jessica, whose last name is Stavena. She called her mom, now 67, in San Antonio.

“My husband had Mom on speakerphone as I clicked to see my relatives,” says Jessica. “Suddenly, I had three half-siblings: two sisters and a brother. I was ecstatic.”

Jumping on Facebook, Jessica sent friend requests. Minutes later, a message arrived from her long-lost half-sister, Eve Wiley.

“Hi!” it read. “Do you know the details of our birth story? Was Dr. McMorries your mom’s doctor?”

Jessica confirmed, and then read Wiley’s reply aloud: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he is also our biological father.”

Pauline managed to croak out, “What?” before mother and daughter fell into shocked silence.

Pauline first walked into Dr. McMorries’ office in Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1984, after years of struggling to conceive.

“He was the fertility doctor in our area,” says Pauline. “You couldn’t have asked for a more caring, polite, likable person and doctor.”

Pauline and her husband needed donor sperm, so McMorries had them fill out a questionnaire about their preferred donor characteristics — hair color, height, nationality. Pauline was told that their answers would be used to match them to anonymous donors.

For two and a half years, Pauline underwent rounds of artificial insemination at McMorries’ office. Some led to pregnancies, all of which miscarried at around six weeks.

“It was devastating,” says Pauline. But she was glad to have a doctor she could trust. “Over that period of time, you build up trust for someone who appears to be doing his very best to try to help you conceive. I put my faith in him.”

Finally, in 1986, a pregnancy stuck. Pauline’s doctor coached her through her pregnancy — and delivered Jessica on the big day.

“As soon as I got to the hospital in labor, he came and stayed by my side, through delivery until an hour after Jessica was born,” says Pauline.

“To give birth to your baby in front of your husband, while the doctor delivering her is the biological father? It blows my mind that he thought that was OK.”

As Eve’s words hung in the air, Jessica and Pauline’s minds were racing.

“I just thought, ‘No, that’s absolutely impossible,’” says Pauline. “I would never have agreed for my doctor to donate sperm.”

“I felt like I’d been hit by a ton of bricks,” says Jessica. “My mind was spinning, trying to understand what Eve had written. How could that possibly be true?”

But it was: They were victims of fertility fraud, defined by Indiana University law professor Jody Lyneé Madeira as “illicit inseminations — an intentional act that occurs when a doctor knowingly uses his own sperm to inseminate a female patient without her consent.”

Wiley, who grew up near Jessica and Pauline, had learned all of this the hard way in 2018. Her mom had also struggled with infertility and gone to McMorries for help. For years, Wiley believed that her biological dad was a sperm donor in California — until a DNA test pointed to McMorries.

Wiley confronted the doctor, and he wrote her a letter acknowledging that he had mixed his sperm with other donors’ — ostensibly to improve her mother’s chances of conception. In other reports, McMorries claims that he asked Wiley’s mom for permission to combine sperm from a local donor in East Texas (which she denies). He also claims that telling her about using his own sperm would have broken the anonymity agreement he signed when he donated his sample.

In Texas, if a health care provider uses human sperm, eggs or embryos from an unauthorized donor, it’s considered a sexual assault — but that law was only passed in 2019. Some believe that McMorries’ actions weren’t illegal back in the day. Madeira disagrees.

“It was always unlawful to intentionally deceive patients about the medical treatment they would receive,” she says. “And let’s be honest — no patient expected that their doctor might be their donor.”

Unfortunately, she says, “The problem is that these cases are coming to light decades later, after statutes of limitation have run [out], and after most patients’ records have been destroyed. This makes these charges very difficult to prosecute, although it’s easier to bring a civil suit.”

Although Madeira filed a complaint against McMorries with the Texas Medical Board, the board did not take action against the doctor, who is still practicing medicine at his clinic in Nacogdoches. McMorries declined to comment to The Post.

Mom and daughter are still reeling from the fertility fraud bombshell.

“It breaks my heart that she wanted to find her biological father for so long,” Pauline says tearfully. “Now it’s just a hardship to her.”

Jessica is also brought to tears when thinking about her mom.

“She didn’t consent to this,” she says. “Seeing his picture, I think, ‘How could he? Who made him God?’ I just can’t get past the anger and hurt for my mom.”

She is also concerned about the implications for future generations.

“Three of our siblings live in the same town, and two of them have children that go to the same school. How was he going to prevent accidental incest?” Jessica says. “Every day you wake up with an emotional hangover because you have gone through so many feelings.”

Neither Jessica nor Pauline has tried to contact McMorries. Jessica has discovered seven half-siblings so far, and expects that number to grow as more people take DNA tests. Although hers upended her life, she doesn’t regret having taken it.

“Knowledge is power,” she says.

For Pauline, the most important thing is that she still has a “wonderful daughter,” which she wouldn’t “change for anything.” But she’s still struggling to process the memory of McMorries in the delivery room.

“Now I look back and think, he must have known she was his,” she says. “At the time, I thought how lucky I was to have this great doctor.”