Previously, a Dutch hospital confirmed that one of its gynecologists, Jan Karbaat, had been inseminating fertility patients with his own sperm, fathering 49 children. Over one year later, that number has skyrocketed to an alarming amount.
Martijn van Halen is one of Karbaat’s children, and he originally had no knowledge of his conception. But as he told The Sun, his father — the man who raised him — admitted he had been conceived using a sperm donor.
“My parents always planned to tell me and my brother when I turned 18, but when I was 16, my mother died in a traffic accident,” he recalled. “We’d just lost a parent and so he didn’t tell us and life went on.” But then one of his nephews was diagnosed with a genetic disability.
“The doctors were asking, ‘Are there any problems in your family?’ Dad changed his mind. It was very difficult for him,” he said. “For us it was like a puzzle came together. I had always noticed something but didn’t know what. I don’t look anything like him and we have very different viewpoints.”
Eventually, the family discovered that van Halen and his brother, who were supposed to have been conceived using the same donor, were half-brothers. DNA testing revealed that van Halen’s biological father was Karbaat, a pioneer in artificial insemination. His family fought to keep his DNA from being released, as over 100,000 children were said to be conceived at his clinic. That means van Halen could have thousands of siblings. Van Halen himself found out after being contacted by a 16-year-old girl whose DNA matched his.
“She couldn’t understand how she had so many uncles and aunts,” he said. “Her mum didn’t know anything about it. She found out she was a donor child through her daughter doing a DNA test. That was quite a shock.”
So far, van Halen has discovered he has 102 known siblings.
“We can only know for sure if they test their DNA. There are still a lot of people who don’t even know they were donor conceived. There’s a new DNA match every month. In another few years, it will be 250, that’s what I expect,” he said, adding that they keep in contact through a WhatsApp chat group. “It’s just a bit of chat but also serious things like supporting someone if they are going through something like a divorce.”
He has already had to explain the news to his own children, so they could be aware of the risk of entering a relationship with a potential family member. “The chances of this are really great. My children still have to be really careful,” he said. “It’s been an interesting story to share.”
Martijn van Halen still sees the man who raised him as his father, and the group of siblings has their own theories as to why Karbaat did what he did.
“We can’t ask him, of course, because he’s dead,” he said, explaining, “At the time the product had to be fresh because the technique of using frozen sperm was not available. If a donor didn’t turn up and he had a woman at the clinic desperately wanting a child, at first it was out of necessity, because he could not help his patients. But then perhaps it was a little bit of an ego thing and the financial part. It was big business.”
