GoKawiilOther donor-conceived people who have been able to track down siblings have found they have tens or even hundreds of them. One donor-conceived woman who found 25 half-siblings over the course of seven years told the Guardian, “It does make you feel a bit mass-produced.”
We need international limits on the number of children a single donor can contribute to, a European fertility organization argued yesterday. At a conference in London, members laid out plans to start with a Europe-wide limit.
Today many countries, including the UK, have banned anonymous egg and sperm donation. But anonymity can’t be guaranteed even in places where it is technically allowed. Genetic tests offered by companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, along with genetic registries, have made it much easier for donor-conceived people to find parents and siblings who share their genes.
And because sperm can be frozen and stored for years before it is eventually used, the current set-up can result in situations where donor-conceived people discover the identity of a genetic parent only after the person’s death. They might also find that they have siblings of very different ages, all around the world.
Some people are finding hundreds of siblings. Sperm from Jonathan Meijer, a Dutch man who began donating in 2007, was used to conceive between 550 and 600 children. (Stichting Donorkind, a foundation and advocacy group for donor-conceived people that’s chaired by van der Meer, took him to court, and he was ordered to stop donating in 2023.)
Stories like these can be distressing for donor-conceived people. And there are other reasons why limits are considered important. The offspring of a prolific donor might be at risk of unknowingly forming romantic or sexual relationships, for instance. And some people are concerned that a donor with a harmful genetic mutation might pass that down to many children.
This is unlikely, given the level of screening that most donors undergo. But it has happened. A man who donated his sperm to a sperm bank in Denmark was found to have a genetic mutation that significantly increased the risk of multiple cancers. But his sperm had already been used to conceive at least 197 children across Europe. Some of those children developed cancer. Some died.