The case of the serial sperm donor

In 2015, Vanessa van Ewijk, a carpenter in the Netherlands, decided that she wanted to have a child. She was 34 and single, and so, like many women, she sought out a sperm donor.

She considered conceiving through a fertility clinic, but the cost was prohibitive for her. Instead, she found an ideal candidate through a website called Desire for a Child, one of a growing number of online sperm markets that match candidate donors directly with potential recipients. Van Ewijk was drawn to one profile in particular, that of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a Dutch musician in his 30s.

Meijer was handsome, with blue eyes and a mane of curly blond hair. Van Ewijk liked how genuine he appeared. “I spoke to him on the phone and he seemed gentle and kind and well-behaved,” she said. “He liked music, and he talked about his thoughts on life. He didn’t come on strong in any sense. He seemed like the boy next door.”

About a month later, after some back-and-forth, she and Meijer arranged to meet at Central Station, a busy railway hub in The Hague. He provided her with his sperm, and in return she paid him 165 euros, about $200, and covered his travel costs. Months later she gave birth to a daughter — her first child and, Meijer told her, his eighth. (Meijer declined to be interviewed for this article but did answer some questions by email, and stated that he did not grant permission for his name to be published.)

In 2017, when she decided to conceive again, she reached out once more to Meijer. Once again he met with her and, for a similarly modest fee, provided a container of his semen; once again she became pregnant, and gave birth to a boy.

Even before then, however, van Ewijk had learned some unsettling news. She had connected on Facebook with another single mother who also had used Meijer as a donor, and who told her that, according to an investigation in 2017 by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, he had fathered at least 102 children in the Netherlands through numerous fertility clinics, a tally that did not include his private donations through websites.

Van Ewijk wanted her children to be full siblings, so she still wanted Meijer to be the donor. Nonetheless, she was alarmed. The Netherlands is a small country, home to 17 million people; the more half-siblings there are in the population who are unknown to one another, the greater the odds that two of them might meet unwittingly and produce children of their own — children with a heightened risk of carrying hereditary defects.

Furious, van Ewijk confronted Meijer. He admitted that he had produced at least 175 children and conceded that there might be more.

“He said, ‘I’m just helping women make their biggest wish come true,’” van Ewijk recalled. “I said: ‘You’re not helping anymore! How do I tell my kids that they could possibly have 300 siblings?’”

She may have only known the half of it.

The first child of in vitro fertilization was born in 1978, and in the decades since, sperm donation has become a thriving global business, as fertility clinics, sperm banks and private donors have sought to meet the demand of parents eager to conceive.

As an industry, however, it is poorly regulated. A patchwork of laws ostensibly addresses who can donate, where and how often, in part to avoid introducing or amplifying genetic disabilities in a population. In Germany, a sperm-clinic donor may not produce more than 15 children; in the United Kingdom the cap is 10 families of unlimited children. In the Netherlands, Dutch law prohibits donating anonymously, and nonbinding guidelines limit clinic donors to 25 children and from donating at more than one clinic in the country. In the United States there are no legal limits, only guidelines from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine: 25 children per donor in a population of 800,000.

Regulation is even more scarce internationally. There is little to stop a sperm donor from donating at clinics in countries other than his own, or at global agencies like Cryos International, the world’s biggest sperm clinic, in Denmark, which ships semen to more than 100 countries.

“There’s nothing in the U.S. or anywhere that would keep a donor from donating at more than one sperm bank,” said Wendy Kramer, a co-founder and the executive director of the Donor Sibling Registry, an organization in the United States that supports donor families. “The sperm banks claim that they ask the donor if they’ve donated anywhere else, but nobody knows if they really do.”

And few if any laws govern private donations, of the kind that van Ewijk and Meijer arranged through the internet. Through these gaps, several cases have emerged of donors who have fathered scores of children or more, and of grown children discovering, often through social media, that they have not just a handful of half-siblings but dozens of them.

In 2019, the Dutch Donor Child Foundation, an advocacy group that facilitates legal and emotional support for donor-conceived people and their families and helps search for biological relatives, determined through DNA testing that Dr. Jan Karbaat, a fertility specialist who died in 2017, had secretly fathered at least 68 children, born to women who visited his clinic near Rotterdam.

In 2017, after confronting Meijer, van Ewijk notified the Dutch Donor Child Foundation that he had many more children than he had initially revealed, and that he had been donating sperm at several clinics. The group already knew of him, from other mothers with the same complaint.

The foundation soon determined that Meijer had privately fathered at least 80 children in the Netherlands, in addition to the 102 that the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport had identified through 11 clinics in the country. The government ordered all Dutch sperm clinics to stop using Meijer’s semen.

The issue of serial sperm donation has been recognized in other countries as well. Christina Motejl, a lawyer in Berlin, is a member of Donor Offspring Europe, a network of organizations of donor-conceived adults in Europe. She said that the group was concerned about donors who travel around Europe trying to father as many children as possible.

“It’s kind of disgusting in a narcissistic way,” she said. “No sane person would want 100 children or more. The big question is why? These men want confirmation that they’re a great guy and everybody wants them.”

A mother in Australia who purchased Meijer’s sperm through Cryos and had a child said she was disturbed by how many children he turned out to have. (She asked that her name not be used, for privacy reasons.) She and 50 or so other mothers who used his sperm have formed a group, Moms on a Mission, to try to get him to stop donating.

Their goal is to connect with as many other parents as they can, to find out the true number of offspring he has produced, so that their children can contact each other as they get older. Many of the mothers wonder how their children will ever be able to have a relationship with their biological father when he has so many other children. The group also advocates for the creation of an international database of sperm donors.

“That way these men can’t just donate whenever they want and create all these children in the world without parents even consenting to the fact,” the Australian mother said. “I can’t imagine what our son is going to think when he finds out.”