New rules which went into effect at the beginning of April in the Netherlands will affect sperm donor laws going forward, and will retroactively affect sperm donations dating back to 2004.
Since 2018, the Netherlands’ limit on sperm donations has been 25 children. However, there was no way to enforce or track this without violating a donor anonymity agreement. Now, the country has a usable national register for sperm donors and an effective tracking system to count how many times a child is conceived with a donor’s sperm. This will allow a new limit of 12 children conceived per sperm donor.
This will be tracked by assigning 12 maternal codes to a sperm donor who will also have his own code. Once that number of children has been conceived by that donor, the donor will no longer be legally allowed to donate within the Netherlands. As of yet there are no restrictions for those donors to continue to donate outside of the country. This new development allows for donor anonymity while still stringently tracking their donations.
Ties Van der Meer, chairman of the Donor Child Foundation, says this decision was made in favor of donor-conceived children who can no longer “date carefree” without ensuring through DNA testing that they aren’t accidentally dating a half brother or sister.
READ: Young woman learns she has at least 60 known half-siblings due to sperm donation
Van der Meer explained to NOS, a Dutch news source, that previously the “rate of incest was high” because the rules were not “properly enforced.” He went on to say that there has been a national register for sperm donors since 2004, but due to privacy issues for the donors, there was no way to track how many children were conceived per donor.
This unfortunately has led to the abuse of sperm donation and the creation of mass donors — those with over 25 biological children — like Jonathan Meijer, the man made famous by Netflix with the documentary “The Man With 1000 Kids,” and fertility doctors such as Jan Karbaat, Jan Wildschut, and Jos Beek, who all unethically used their own sperm to impregnate dozens of their patients.
“Finally, there is now a truly reliable measure of how many half-brothers and sisters you have as donor child,” says Van der Meer of the Donor Child Foundation. And with these changes being retroactive, “that means that there will be clarity from 2004. Donor children can ask about how many half-brothers and sisters they have from next month. In the coming period, we will find out whether the doctors have kept to the agreements.”
Aside from the possibility of accidental incest, donor-conceived individuals sometimes feel they have been “mass produced” and even betrayed once they learn the truth about their biological parentage. A Harvard Medical School study revealed that nearly half of children conceived as a result of egg or sperm donation sought out psychological or psychiatric care after learning how they were conceived.
