Mother compensated for “fertility doctor as father” scandal

The Isala hospital in Zwolle has to pay a yet to be determined sum in compensation to a mother whose triplets were illegally fathered by the fertility doctor who treated her, the Arnhem-Leeuwarden court has decided.

Jan Wildschut, who has since died, worked at the Sophia hospital’s artificial insemination unit and was unmasked in 2019 following a number of matches between apparently unrelated children in several commercial DNA banks.

In 1988 the woman agreed to be artificially inseminated with her then husband’s semen but Wildschut used his own instead.

The hospital argued the case was subject to the statute of limitations but the judge disagreed, saying the “the seriousness and unacceptability of the invasion of the physical and mental integrity of the mother precluded the rejection of her claim based on the statute of limitations”.

Wildschut fathered dozens of donor children without the knowledge of the women involved, including those who wanted to use their partner’s sperm.

The case is similar to that of fertility specialist Jan Karbaat who is known to have fathered at least 49 children.

Karbaat ran a fertility clinic in the Rotterdam suburb of Barendrecht for nearly 30 years until it was shut down in 2009 for failing to meet storage standards, and administrative irregularities.

Dutch law limits the number of people who can be conceived from one sperm donor to 25, and since 2004, children have the right to find out their donor’s identity when they are 16.

At least 10 doctors in the Netherlands are known to have used their own sperm illegally.