A laboratory technician at a former Leiden fertility clinic used his own sperm for donor treatments between 1979 and 1984. The Children’s Wish Medical Center (MCK), which manages the clinic’s archives, confirmed this on Wednesday after reporting Broadcasting West. The man fathered at least eleven children while registering his sperm in the name of an existing donor.
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The man worked at the Medical Center for Birth Control Foundation (SMCG), which became MCK in 2006. The case came to light last year when two donor children who should be related on paper discovered that they did not have the same DNA. Through the international DNA database MyHeritage, one of the two turned out to be related to two other children. These two had already found out in 2017 that the laboratory employee was their biological father.
The laboratory technician admitted to the donor children that he had used his own sperm for fertility treatments for years. The MCK has been investigating the man’s actions since the spring of 2023 and is trying to get in touch with women who were treated at the clinic, possible descendants of the man and former employees of SMCG. The man, who is still alive, does not want to cooperate in the investigation, according to director Arne van Heusden.
For privacy reasons, the MCK will not make any statements about the identity of the man. It is known that he was diagnosed with a hereditary disease in 2015, which is passed on to the next generation in 50 percent of cases. Van Heusden does not want to tell Omroep West which disease it is. However, he emphasizes that it is not a life-threatening disease.