The Man With 1000 Kids: The questions all parents should ask before embarking on sperm donation

A new Netflix documentary, The Man With 1000 Kids, has shone a light on the often-underreported world of sperm donation. This procedure sees couples who are unable to have children themselves matching up donated sperm with the mother’s own eggs, to conceive children that still share some genetic tie to them. It can also be utilised by single women who do not have a partner to conceive a child with. In many countries, there are banks of donated sperm from which prospective mothers can choose. 

Jonathan Meijer, the Dutch man at the centre of the documentary, often appeared as an attractive potential donor. He was handsome, blonde-haired and tall – all good genes to pass on. He was a regular donor at a number of sperm banks in his native Netherlands. But he didn’t stop there. He continued donating sperm to banks in other countries, and also stepped into the world of private sperm donation – sometimes connecting with women directly online without the professional and regulated middlemen of the clinics and sperm banks. 

He flagrantly ignored rules in most countries which cap the number of times one donor’s sperm can be used. Despite efforts to ban him from donating sperm, Meijer compulsively continued fathering more and more children, and in most instances deceived the women as to just how many times he had already donated sperm.  

The documentary shows the devastating impact Meijer’s actions have had on the hundreds of women who utilised his services, who are now discovering their children have 1,000 half-siblings around the world unbeknownst to them. While an undoubtedly extreme case and not representative of the majority of men who donate sperm, Meijer raises important and challenging questions about the ethics of this form of fertility treatment. 

Secrets and anonymity

Meijer is not the first case of a compulsive, secret donor. There have been several instances around the world in the years since sperm donation became technologically possible of a man. Often a doctor or worker at the clinic or sperm bank itself, secretly used his own sperm again and again to conceive children, without the mothers being aware of how many siblings had been already born. 

The psychology of such men is unclear: some speculate it is a vanity project to father an enormous brood, others believe it may be about control and power. Maybe some genuinely think they are helping. Either way, it can have enormous consequences. What if two of Meijer’s 1,000-plus offspring meet as adults, get together and commit unintentional incest? It may sound unlikely, but there is a recognised phenomenon of people who are biologically related but grow up apart feeling intense desire or attraction to each other if they later meet.  

Originally in the UK, sperm donors were assured of lifelong anonymity. But in recent times it has become increasingly clear the toll this lays on the children conceived by donated sperm. Evidence has mounted that for many children, separation from their biological father (or mother, in the case or donated eggs or embryos) can lead to challenges around identity as they grow up.

Many donor-conceived children, no matter how much they love their parents, are keen to find out where part of them comes from and who their third parent is. The law has been changed in the UK to allow such children, once they turn 18, to contact the authorities and be given the identity of the sperm donor. 

Despite this welcome shift in policy, many fear not enough attention is being paid to the needs and concerns of donor-conceived children. Some children themselves have pointed to the contradictory irony at the heart of sperm donation. It only exists to ensure that partially infertile couples can have children with some genetic continuity with them, and yet the “genetic kinship” between donor and child is seen as entirely irrelevant or expendable. 

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A primal wound?

Studies into adopted children have examined what is sometimes called the “primal wound” of growing up separated from your biological family. Even if necessary for the child’s protection, it is psychologically scarring to be removed from your family and can cause lifelong emotional problems. Is it therefore at all wise or kind to deliberately set about creating children with such a wound, through sperm or egg donation? 

It is estimated up to 85% of couples who conceive a child with donor sperm never tell them. This might be seen as the loving or kind option, shielding their child from the potential trauma of knowing they have biological parents out there somewhere. But it is also fairly disrespectful too – living out a lie to your own flesh and blood year after year, deliberately obscuring the truth about your child’s origins to avoid difficult conversations. 

In adoption, the advice to parents has been for decades now not to hide the child’s story and birth family, but instead to celebrate and highlight where they come from in an effort to honour their life and origins. 

Consumerism and natural law

There are also other ethical concerns, especially around giving parents the power to choose their own children’s attributes. Sperm donation, especially in the United States, has become a big business for some. It is increasingly commercialised and prospective parents can pay top dollar for high quality sperm which supposedly comes from high IQ, musical or athletic donors. 

In Europe there are more regulations typically, and parental choice is restricted to things such as ethnic origin. Either way, it inevitably turns the mysterious process of creating life into something consumerist, driven not by God’s unknowable purposes but the parent’s own specific desires. 

Some Christian traditions, notably Catholicism have long been hostile to almost all forms of fertility treatment, including sperm donation. Drawing on theological traditions around ‘natural law’, the Catholic Church teaches that it is wrong to separate the act of sex from the act of procreation, leading it to reject both contraception and reproductive technology which allows the creation of a child beyond the confines of the marriage bed. 

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Protestants have historically been more open to these new kinds of technology, arguing that the benefits of allowing infertile couples to conceive largely outweigh concerns around interfering with God’s created order. But, as we’ve seen, there are other pressing ethical questions beyond natural law to consider, most notably how donor-conceived children will be affected by the means by which they came into the world. 

Clearly, living with infertility is a heavy and painful burden on couples, none of whom will pursue conceiving via donated sperm lightly or frivolously. But it is incumbent on those who do to think carefully about the implications for the life they are creating, sometimes at great expense. 

Are they simply thinking about their own desires for a child, without considering what that same child will feel about their decisions? Are they prepared to include the donor father in their family in some way, honouring the indelible tie he will have with their child? Are they ready to be radically honest with their child about where they came from and why, refusing the easy comfort of obfuscating the truth despite knowing it might be painful? 

One child conceived via donor sperm put it this way: ‘‘Just as infertility is grieved, because people grieve the loss of having and raising their own genetic children, so too can that loss be mirrored by not knowing or being raised by one’s own genetic parents. Indeed, for many, this loss is exacerbated when it is intentionally and institutionally created, unlike infertility.” 

Until Christians are ready to wrestle with these concerns, it seems unwise to pursue starting a family via donated sperm, even if the donor is nothing like Jonathan Meijer.  

Check out the full Matters of Life & Death show on this topic here.

Tim Wyatt is a freelance journalist and co-host of Matters of Life & Death.