World Desk : dhakamirror.com
A Dutch judge has ordered a “mass sperm donor” who’s already fathered at least 550 children to stop donating.
The man donated sperm in the Netherlands and abroad, including to Danish sperm bank Cryos, but also offered his sperm up via online platforms.
The man identified as Jonathan (41) could be fined more than €100,000 (ã88,000) if he tries to donate again, the BBC reported.
He was banned from donating to fertility clinics in the Netherlands in 2017 after it emerged he had fathered more than 100 children, the report said. But he did not stop and continued donating sperm abroad and online.
The court also ordered Jonathan to write to clinics abroad asking them to destroy any of his semen they have in stock, except doses reserved for parents who already had children by him, Reuters reported.
The shocking revelation came to light after a foundation and the mother of one of the children filed a lawsuit against him in The Hague.
Dutch clinical guidelines say a donor should not father more than 25 children in 12 families. But the judges said the man had helped produce between 550 and 600 children since he started donating sperm in 2007.
The court therefore “prohibits the defendant from donating his semen to new prospective parents after the issuing of this judgment”, judge Thera Hesselink said on Friday. The judge who heard the civil case said the donor “misinformed prospective parents about the number of children he had already fathered in the past.”
The mother of one of the children in the court case, identified only as “Eva”, said she was grateful that the court had stopped the man from “mass donations that [have] spread like wildfire to other countries”.
“I’m asking the donor to respect our interests and to accept the verdict, because our children deserve to be left alone,” she said in a statement.
The man is also not permitted to contact any prospective parents “with the wish that he was willing to donate semenâ€æ advertise his services to prospective parents or join any organisation that establishes contact between prospective parents”, the judge said.
“All these parents are now confronted with the fact that the children in their family are part of a huge kinship network, with hundreds of half-siblings, which they did not choose,” it said.
The case is the latest in a series of fertility scandals to hit the Netherlands. In 2020, a deceased gynaecologist was accused of fathering at least 17 children with women who believed they were receiving sperm from anonymous donors.
In 2019, it emerged that a Rotterdam doctor had fathered at least 49 children while inseminating women seeking fertility treatment.
