Serial sperm donor who fathered 550 children sued for increasing incest risk

The civil case is being brought against blacklisted Jonathan Jacob Meijer to stop him from offering his services

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A serial sperm donor who has fathered 550 children is being sued amid accusations his prolific donations increases the risk of accidental incest.

The Netherlands’ Donorkind Foundation is taking Jonathan Jacob Meijer to court to stop him donating sperm and accuses him of lying about the number of children he has fathered.

Dutch sperm clinic guidelines say donors should donate a maximum of 25 children or to 12 women to prevent inbreeding, incest or psychological problems for donor children.

'Possible consequences make me sick to my stomach'

The civil case is being brought by a Dutch mother of one of Mr Meijer’s children, who has been named only as Eva and had the child in 2018.  

‘If I had known he had already fathered more than 100 children I would never have chosen him,’ she said.

‘If I think about the consequences this could have for my child I am sick to my stomach.’

Donorkind wants the court to order Mr Meijer to stop donating and to find out which clinics he has donated to.

It also wants all his sperm in storage to be destroyed unless it is reserved for a woman who already has one of his children.

"We are taking action against this man because the government is doing nothing," Donorkind foundation chairman Ties van der Meer said.

“He has a global reach via the internet and he does business with large, international sperm banks.”

Donation blacklist

Mr Meijer, 41, a musician from The Hague, is on a Dutch donation blacklist but has continued to donate abroad, including in Denmark and Ukraine, Donorkind said.

The 41-year-old has also approached prospective parents looking for home insemination online and on social media and shown no signs of changing his behaviour, the foundation said.

Mr Meijer, who now lives in Kenya, sometimes used the alias Ruud, when offering to be a sperm donor, the AD newspaper said.

He refused to comment when questioned by AD and Dutch broadcaster NOS.

The Dutch gynaecologists’ association NVOG raised the alarm about Mr Meijer in 2017 after it emerged he had fathered at least 102 children through ten different clinics in the Netherlands.

Last year, Donorkind said it had identified ten doctors who had illegally used their own sperm to create children in the Netherlands, which is working on a central register of sperm donors.