Somewhere in the Netherlands, there is a man who has a father without his knowledge to dozens of children through donations of sperm. At least one man raised up to 125 children.
These are the surprising conclusions of national registrations to track the number of sperm donors in the Netherlands. The first data from the registry, released this week, identified 85 mass donors. A man who can track more than 25 offspring.
The data reveal that children born from artificial insemination may have more semi-siblings than the Dutch government previously thought, raising concerns about kinship and the risk of genetic abnormalities as they ultimately seek partners and have their own children.
In a letter filed Monday to the Dutch Parliament, Minister of Youth, Prevention and Sports, Vincent Kalemans said that inadequate surveillance and record keeping by fertility clinics will lead to large donations and more than 25 children per donor without donor knowledge. The new law passed on April 1 requires more careful tracking how sperm donations are used.
“I deeply regret discovering these excesses,” Kalemans provides support to parents, a clinic client whose children may have dozens of siblings.
Since 2018, Dutch law has limited the number of children born to each donor to 12. Before that, each donor was able to legally father up to 25 children through this process.
Registry data showed that between 2004 and 2018, the first period in which the clinic has records, there were almost 24,000 instances of donated semen used for in vitro fertilization. The Netherlands have guidelines for maintaining donor records since 1992, but they were loosely enforced, according to Donorkind, a volunteer organization that supports families who used sperm donations.
“For a donor child, it’s just a mess,” Inge Poorthus, a member of the Donorkind board of directors, said in a telephone interview.
This group has been heard from distraught mothers and donors. Donors are overwhelmed by the prospect of having so many children, Pooh Tuiss said. On Tuesday, Donorkind wrote to the Dutch Parliament, demanding that the government disclose the exact number affected by the mass donations. Donorkind is also asking Dutch authorities to consider introducing regulations to control the import of donor sperm into the Netherlands.
Sperm donation has been a thriving global business since 1978, when the first child was born from in vitro fertilization, but the industry is poorly regulated. In some countries, including the Netherlands, there is a limit to the number of children each donor can produce, but even though some countries export donor sperm, there are no standard international guidelines. Industry norms vary widely, but most donors in the Netherlands can cost less than $100 per donation, and the fees paid by clinic parents to the clinic can be thousands of dollars.
Donorkind also considers actions towards private fertility clinics, claiming that they should be subject to stricter regulations. The industry has been exposed to an increasing number of scrutiny in recent years, especially after two major scandals involving men who intentionally gave birth to hundreds of children in the Netherlands. (The story of Jonathan Jacob Major, who has given birth to more than 500 children around the world, led to the Netflix series.)
Thusis said the industry is overly focusing on profits. “They are not cautious about creating life,” she said.
The new registry revealed that fertility clinics are not following existing guidelines, according to a statement Monday from the Dutch Obstetrics and Gynecology Association.
In some cases, individuals who have donated to multiple clinics without knowledge of the clinic, partly due to individuals’ strict privacy laws. It is also possible that some mothers have chosen to use a single donor for multiple children, and clinics may not consider the number of children the donor already had a father, and donors are over the limit.
“I would like to provide an apology on behalf of my profession,” association director Marieke Schoonnberg told Dutch news outlet Nos. “We’re not doing the right thing.”
A new law known as the Artificial Fertilizer Donor Data Act assigns codes to all donors and mothers to track where and how donor sperm is used. Practitioners and practitioners who ignore the guidelines could be approved through a Dutch civil court, said Tim Benebroke, a spokesman for Minister Kaleman.
The new rules do not apply to imported sperm.
“There is no support for this at the European level yet,” Bennebrog said.
