While most sperm donors who gain media attention have intentionally fathered hundreds or thousands of children, one Dutch donor is making headlines for the opposite reason. After donating sperm, he and 84 other men were horrified to discover that the sperm was being sold around the world, and that he has fathered 50 children.
Key Takeaways:
- Nico Kuyt donated sperm in his 30s, between 1998 and 2000, both for infertile couples and for scientific research.
- The limit in the Netherlands is supposed to be 25 children per donor.
- In 2004, he was contacted by the fertility clinic where he donated and was informed he had fathered 30 children.
- Today, that number has risen to 50 as his sperm was sold to people seeking donors abroad.
The Details:
Kuyt donated in the late 1990s to Medisch Centrum Kinderwens (MCK), a Dutch fertility clinic now embroiled in a nationwide scandal. Like other donors, Kuyt thought he would only be helping a handful of infertile couples, and contributing to scientific and medical research.
Instead, the clinic sold his sperm, and that of other donors, to buyers around the world. Though he keeps in touch with as many of his children as he can, he is furious at what was taken from him.
“It is theft of something very intimate,” he said. “It is playing with life. That is absolutely forbidden. You must respect life at all costs.”
Though he said he is happy to have his children, to know them and keep them in his life, he worries there are still more out there. “Look, it wasn’t the intention, and I do find it a bit much — it’s a lot of work,” he said. “And a lot more will come, of course, when they are old enough to find out.”
Why It Matters:
Michiel Aten, a 64-year-old former preacher, created a support group for sperm donors like himself and Kuyt; Aten has fathered 21 children that he knows of. He blames the situation on the inherent greed in the fertility industry:
Think about cattle, where there was a watertight system that functioned for 30 years and a farmer who didn’t register a calf got an immediate €100 fine. But they completely broke the rules …
The desire for children is so great, people are prepared to pay a lot of money. And young men can be extremely fertile, as I was myself: I had a gift from nature and others could profit from it, so I gave it away and I hoped that other people could be happy.
The fact that a clinic went so recklessly over the boundaries — I can’t explain it any other way than that they wanted to make money.
The clinic is believed to have affected 1,200 children and 900 mothers.
While MCK is currently making headlines, it is just one example of a larger problem with the fertility industry. In the Netherlands alone, a disturbing analysis found that half of all children conceived at just one fertility clinic — the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) sperm bank — have at least 25 siblings.
Clinics were found to have blatantly ignored regulations, using sperm from the same donor more than 25 times, exchanging sperm without notifying the donors, and allowing the same donors to donate sperm at multiple clinics. There are at least 3,000 people in the Netherlands who have 25 or more siblings they don’t know about.
Additionally, at least 10 fertility doctors were known to have used their own sperm. One of them, Jan Karbaat, is believed to have fathered thousands of children. Officials have begun to publicly worry about the risk of accidental incest as these donor-conceived children become adults.
The Bottom Line:
The fertility industry has dehumanized children, turning them into products to be bought and sold — items that would-be parents are entitled to at any cost, so long as they’re willing to spend the money.
“I am a human being, yet I was conceived with a technique that had its origins in animal husbandry,” one person wrote in a book for Anonymous Us. “Worst of all, farmers kept better records of their cattle’s genealogy than assisted reproductive clinics … how could the doctors, sworn to ‘first do no harm’ create a system where I now face the pain and loss of my own identity and heritage.”
