Meijer’s mass donations first came to light in 2017 and he was banned from donating to Dutch fertility clinics, where he had already fathered more than 100 children.
However, he continued to donate abroad, including to the Danish sperm bank Cryos which operates internationally. Meijer also continued to offer himself as a donor on sites matching prospective parents with sperm donors, sometimes using a different name, according to the Algemeen Dagblad daily.
“The donor deliberately misinformed prospective parents about the number of children he had already fathered in the past,” the Hague District Court said in a separate statement.
“All these parents are now confronted with the fact that the children in their family are part of a huge kinship network, with hundreds of half-siblings, which they did not choose,” it said.
The court considered it “sufficiently plausible” that this has or could have negative psychosocial consequences for the children.
The case is the latest in a series of fertility scandals to hit the Netherlands.
In 2020 a deceased gynaecologist was accused of fathering at least 17 children with women thinking they were receiving sperm from anonymous donors.
The year before, in 2019, it emerged that a Rotterdam doctor fathered at least 49 children while inseminating women seeking treatment.
Source: CNA
