Court asks serial sperm donor to stop after fathering 550 children
Dutch judges stopped a man believed to have fathered over 550 children through sperm donations.
The 41-year-old sperm donor, named Jonathan Jacob Meijer, was sued for upping the risk of incest.
M was taken to court by a donor children rights NGO and the mother of a kid he allegedly fathered.
UK Guardian reports that Dutch guidelines say a donor mustn’t father more than 25 children in 12 families.
But at the court sitting on M’s case, the judges said the man had helped produce between 550 and 600 children.
In the scandal, it was revealed that more than 100 of M’s children were born in Dutch clinics and others privately.
He also donated to a Danish clinic which then dispatched his semen to private addresses in various countries.
“The donor deliberately misinformed prospective parents about the number of children he had already fathered in the past,” the district court in The Hague 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 was said that M, who lives in the Netherlands, started donating sperm in 2007.
The court, in its verdict, prohibited the defendant from donating his semen to any more prospective parents.
Thera Hesselink, the presiding judge in the case, said M may also not contact any prospective parents with the wish that he was willing to donate semen or advertise his services to prospective parents.
The judge further stated that he must not join organisations that establish contact between prospective parents.
Hasselink said M would face an £88,000 fine for each transgression and additional fines if he flouts the order.
The mother of one of the children in the court case, who was identified simply as Eva, said she was grateful that the court had stopped the man from “mass donations that have spread like wildfire to other countries”.
