Somewhere in the Netherlands, there are men who have unknowingly fathered dozens of children through sperm donation. At least one man has sired up to 125 children.
Those are the startling conclusions of a national registry to track the number of sperm donors in the Netherlands. Initial data from the registry, released this week, identified 85 mass donors: men to whom more than 25 descendants can be traced.
The data revealed that children born via artificial insemination may have a larger number of half-siblings than the Dutch government previously thought, raising concerns about consanguinity and the risk of genetic anomalies, as those children eventually seek partners and have children of their own.
In a letter submitted to the Dutch Parliament on Monday, Vincent Karremans, the minister for youth, prevention and sport, said that poor oversight and record-keeping by fertility clinics had led to mass donation, sometimes resulting in more than 25 children per donor, without the donor’s knowledge. A new law, passed on April 1, requires more careful tracking of how sperm donations are used.
“I deeply regret that these excesses have been discovered,” Mr. Karremans said, offering support to the parents who were clients of those clinics, whose children may have dozens of half-siblings.
Since 2018, Dutch law has limited the number of children born to each donor to 12. Before that, each donor could legally father up to 25 children through the process.
The registry data showed that there have been nearly 24,000 instances of donated semen used for in vitro fertilization between 2004 and 2018, the first period for which clinics have records. The Netherlands has had guidelines since 1992 for keeping donor records, but they were loosely enforced, according to Donorkind, a volunteer organization that supports families who have used sperm donation.
“For donor children, it’s just chaos,” Inge Poorthuis, a Donorkind board member, said in a phone interview.
The group has heard from distraught mothers as well as from donors, who are overwhelmed at the prospect of having fathered so many children, Ms. Poorthuis said. On Tuesday, Donorkind wrote to the Dutch Parliament demanding that the government release the exact number of people who have been affected by the mass donations. Donorkind has also asked the Dutch authorities to consider introducing regulations to govern the import of donor sperm to Netherlands.
Sperm donation has been a thriving global business since 1978, when the first child was born through in vitro fertilization, but the industry is poorly regulated. Some countries, including the Netherlands, have limits on the number of children that each donor may produce, but there are no standard international guidelines, even though some countries export donor sperm. While industry norms vary widely, most donors in the Netherlands receive modest compensation, often less than a hundred dollars with each donation, while the fees paid by prospective parents to the clinics can run to thousands of dollars.
Donorkind is also considering action against private fertility clinics, arguing that they should be subject to tighter regulations. The industry has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, particularly after two major scandals in the Netherlands involving men who purposely fathered hundreds of children. (The story of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, who fathered more than 500 children around the world, led to a Netflix series.)
The industry, Ms. Poorthuis said, is focused excessively on profit. “They’re just not careful with creating life,” she said.
The new registry revealed that fertility clinics have not followed existing guidelines, deliberately using the same donor for multiple mothers or sharing semen among multiple clinics without proper checks, according to a statement on Monday from the Dutch Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
In some cases, individuals donated to multiple clinics, without the clinics’ knowledge, due in part to the country’s strict privacy laws, the society said. Some mothers may have also chosen to use a single donor for multiple children, and the clinics may not have taken into account how many children the donor had already fathered, resulting in donors exceeding the limits.
“We want to offer our apologies on behalf of the profession,” Marieke Schoonenberg, head of the society, told the Dutch news outlet NOS. “We have not done the right thing.”
The new legislation, known as the Artificial Fertilization Donor Data Act, assigns a code to all donors and mothers to track where and how donor sperm is used. Clinics and practitioners who ignore the guidelines can be sanctioned through the Netherlands’ civil courts, said Tim Bennebroek, a spokesman for Mr. Karremans, the cabinet minister.
The new rules would not apply to imported sperm.
“There is no support for this at the European level yet,” Mr. Bennebroek said.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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