Sperm donor who fathered 550 children ordered to stop
bbc.com
bbc.com
Either way, he's successfully became a Gengis Khan without killing anyone and there's nothing that can be done except to check every sample.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/755052/population-of-the... tells us there are roughly 1 million childred aged 5 or less. Let's say 500 of these are this man's children.
If all of those 1 million kids form couples within the same age group we have 500000 couples.
Assume even split between the sexes, and assume heterosexuality.
Then each of the 500 kids will have a 250/500000=1/2000 chance of coupling with a half-sibling, or 1-1/2000 probability of not. Repeat this for all 500 kids we get a probability of 1-(1-1/2000)^500 = 22% of at least one half-sibling couple.
Much higher than in cases with no endogamy, but not that hight.
It's no coincidence that virtually all sperm banks deny donors shorter than heights that are much taller than average.
Add to that income and education restrictions and the potential pool is very, very small.
That presents a sizable use case for a married couples. And aren't really issues that can be readily addressed.
The Netherlands also has different attitudes towards child rearing. About 40% of children are born to unmarried women and 15% are raised by single parents.
The single parent stuff is due to a variety of factors - women wanting to raise children all by themselves being an incredibly small percent. Almost no one wants to be a single parent - it just happens due to a series of events that are a mix of in your control and out of your control.
They might prefer to be coparent or other options, but they still want to have child even if it means doing it alone.
Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical.
Has the Netherlands tried to address its housing crisis first?
In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids.
Everyone spends their fertile years trying to get that well paying job that can get you up the housing ladder or just taps out of the race completely and chooses to not have any kids.
You can't complain people aren't having kids when you're collectively treating them like cash cows, monetizing them so that you can make a bigger return on your housing investment.
It is similar to how little Tim lives with his family in “Willy wonka and the chocolate factory”. Joint family systems are the norm.
Poor people already live in squalor and are packed in like sardines, especially since housing costs keep rising.
How about the rich pay their fair share, or stop stealing money from the poor via wage theft, or stop conspiring to keep wages lower than ever, or how about stop people deciding about housing stopping NIMBYism, or how about putting a ceiling on CEO comp and stock buybacks, or how about dealing with the ever-widening wage gap.
Also, you've obviously never been to at least latin america, as their poverty is so bad they literally risk their lives getting anywhere else.
The mental gymnastics to blame the poor in your comments on this thread are Olympic level.
What is also shown in the case of Charlie’s home is a family that cannot feed themselves and have poor health and have the fewest breadwinners. This is not an example of lean living. This is being needy.
What you need to understand is they are simply shameless, like they feel no shame to be dependent on others to provide for them. Historically people actually had shame, they would feel it hurts their dignity to accept even charity (voluntary donation of money)! But now, people in the West are even happy to take money even forcefully through the tax system. No more dignity, no more shame.
And this behavior is incentivized by our political system and tax system.
More details on this perspective, in my response to him, here:
Meanwhile, in reality land in 2022:
>> The bottom 43% of US income tax filers pay -4.8% of federal income taxes (negative b/c they get a tax refund credit on average because of tax law).
>> The top 10% of taxpayers pay 80% of federal taxes.
But muh “rIcH nEeD tO pAy ThEiR fAiR sHaRe”!!!11
How about the bottom 43% of America actually sacrifices (studies during childhood to actually learn in and out of school + and actually works hard in first job to make good impression and get better job and actually learns on the job + maybe even starts their own company from learnings, all the while being frugal to maximize savings and then invest in a diversified stock index fund to grow savings over time with compound interest, and so on…) to build useful skills and become competitive in the global economy, the way people all around the world take responsibility to do?
Nahhh, way too much hard work!
Better to just waste childhood not valuing education, and then be a goodfornothing at your low-wage job so no one values you (IF indeed you are even capable of getting and holding the low-wage job), and then take your entitled personality that you carefully developed over all those years onto hackernews! (to complain about the small 10% minority who actually lived responsibly and made something of their lives and now pays 80% of federal taxes!)
This system is literally already socialist/communist in philosophy, in the distribution of percent of people paying taxes that sustains the system, but no, even this isn’t good enough. Why? Because of course it’s never good enough for the spoiled brat who is incentivized by the system to always be a spoiled brat, while 10% of the country literally carries them on their back.
Shameless!
You feel no shame to be dependent on others to provide for you. Historically people actually had shame, they would feel it hurts their dignity to accept even charity (voluntary donation of money)! But now, people in the West like you are even happy to take money even forcefully through the tax system. No more dignity, no more shame.
There are a couple of bad answers to this, ranging from making all white collar jobs way more competitive and still forcing now-educated people take menial jobs and be poor; to bringing illegal immigrants in to exploit.
The good answer is to pay good money to less educated people doing somple jobs. Bonus point, they will contribute taxes.
This applies to all people, not just those at the bottom. Yet those at the top keep charging high rates, or NIMBY against building more housing because of the effect of that housing on their quality of life and net worth. When you NIMBY, or charge high rates, you are asking other entities (those at the bottom) to provide you with so much more.
See the Bank of England chief telling everyone they need to accept we're now all poorer otherwise inflation will never stop. Of course, by "us all being poorer" he most likely didn't include the wealthy elites and asset owning class that have made bank these past years and are in no way poorer than before, quite the contrary.
It was the same during covid. "We all need to scarifice to ...." meant something else entirely.
Sometimes I wonder if “demographic transition” in the developed world is nothing more than a side effect of the neoliberal housing policies.
This is not correct. The poorest households are having the most kids. It has clearly little to do with income or housing affordability, even if you found a survey which indicated this. I say this as someone who delayed having a family until I could afford a home, so I have a dog in this fight.
Yeah, society probably will, because those are the people putting energy into preserving and propagating their ideas.
Your country needs more and more numbers in that balance sheet, to funnel into the economic meat grinder, and whether those extra numbers come from your offspring or from someone else's, it's irelevant to them.
People have less relatives to help raise children and grandparents tend to be older. Both parents are also more likely to want and need to work full-time jobs.
I don't know why but here in the UK there seems to be a kind of culture war on parenthood too. Young women who want kids and don't want to work tend to be shamed for this decision, while women who remain single and focus on their careers are celebrated. If people want careers over children, that's fine, but that shouldn't be seen and pushed as the only respectable path by society.
That's only toxic feminism pushing for this narrative but pretty sure it's just a loud minority in certain echo chambers and not a national narrative.
Toxic feminism promotes this idea that having kids and being a caring mother means being a slave of the patriarchy and that freedom and salvation comes at spending their lives trying to compete and beat men at their traditional role as the breadwinner.
The problem is, nature and evolution hasn't built females and males to compete against each other, but to complement each other, for procreation of the species. Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart.
> Once you push the sex responsible for birth to do a lot of the breadwinning, procreation of the species starts to fall apart.
There's no reason to assume that single-mothers weren't common in the past, absent direct paleontological evidence. There's no reason to assume that a supported mother isn't being supported by her blood relatives, while the father of her child(ren) is off doing his own thing (there are actually societies which function this way). And absent very short period of time in the few months immediately around actual childbirth, hunter-gatherer women were probably quite capable of supporting themselves.
Nobody was talking about hunter gatherer societies but you.
Evolution of humans doesn't happen so fast that it doesn't encompass hunter-gatherer cultures (or pre-historic cultures in general, the latest of which were agricultural).
No need to bring up evolution for that.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1345/women-in-the-middl...
> women worked alongside men in the fields and in the medieval guilds as equals or near-equals.
> Throughout the Middle Ages, lower-class women were bakers, brewers, milkmaids, barmaids, artisans, weavers and, primarily, tenant farmers who worked alongside their husbands and children in the fields.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1136/women-in-ancient-c...
> Women of lower status, such as farmer's wives, were expected to work in the fields - especially in regions where rice was cultivated.
> Many women were forced into prostitution in times of drought or crop failure. Women worked in the home weaving silk and caring for the silkworms that produced it. Some were called upon, like men, to perform the labour service which acted as a form of taxation in many periods of ancient China, but this was only in exceptional circumstances. By the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) women had more freedom and were running inns and acting as midwives amongst other professions.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/623/women-in-ancient-eg...
> Women, therefore, were regularly employed as weavers, bakers, brewers, professional mourners, sandal-makers, launderers, basket weavers, cooks, waitresses, or as a "Mistress of the House," known today as an estate owner or property manager. Female brewers and launderers frequently supervised male workers.
Its the number one reason people cite, but if you look at the stats, fertility (and this is also true in the US) drops pretty consistently with income. So, its not really driven by affordability in the simple, direct sense. So, are people lying? Maybe not: stress and precarious conditions often explain within-species shifts further toward r-strategy (produce more offsprinf with lower investment in each) vs. K-strategy (fewer offspring with higher investment). We may just be witnessing that in humans.
It’s why poor people always seem to have more kids. There are other factors but it’s one of the large ones.
Poor people have nothing to loose from having kids, they already live or are used to poor and difficult conditions, but the middle class has the most to loose from bringing up kids as it means a QoL sacrifice and/or more stress of finding a career that enables them to keep the QoL with kids.
For rich people that's not a problem.
I find it hilarious when humans pretend to not understand the reasons for something...
We are not nearly as complex and intricate as we think we are. At least in bulk.
why would anyone want to have a short kid given the choice? its objectively worse for the kid
taller people are taken more seriously, make more money, are rated more attractive, have more success
fact is, making your kid taller is one of the better things you could do for it to improve odds of success
also every time i hear something like this i have to wonder how well it is controlled... maybe if you correct for body fat percent it becomes lesser. or maybe being tall means u eat more so take in more total bad stuff, but eating a good diet makes this unimportant?
If the average adult height was shifted to about 4 and a half feet (1.37 meters) resource consumption in terms of food, transportation, building sizes, furniture and appliance sizes, clothing and linenry sizes, wash loads, heating and cooling (for smaller places) would all greatly decrease. We could have almost twice the number of people with the same resource expenditures.
This would be a huge boon to the world and humanity. But, as you say, it pays to be taller than average (within limits). Just don't be involved in a roll-over accident in a standard sedan.
If a woman wants to pick a donor father, she should also have to carry a second child selected by the state.
/s of course
It doesn't sound like the individual was deceitful, given they are able to track his donations.
On the facts, the Netherlands has 17.5 million people, so the chances of a child marrying another is roughly 1/35,000.
If anything, This is an argument that sperm recipients should demand some level of transparency about the donors.
Then again, I am somewhat of a libertarian and think consenting cousins and siblings should be able to marry.
> If anything, This is an argument that sperm recipients should demand some level of transparency about the donors.
It's right there in the article: "The donor "deliberately misinformed" prospective parents about the number of children he had already fathered in the past" and "He was taken to court by a foundation protecting donor children's rights, and by the mother of one of the children allegedly fathered from his sperm."
Not all of these children were conceived in the Netherlands. The principle argument appears to not be about half-siblings marrying each other, but about the psychosocial dynamics of a particular person having a half-sibling network of 500+ people, and trying to deal with this fact during the course of their life.
They are asked to limit the number of times they offer their services, to reduce the chance that siblings might unknowingly form a couple and have children together.
The things that basically everyone would want to have if they could choose.
You also did not ask for what genes are the most survival of the fittest / evolution of a nation, so, I did not respond with such an answer. Nothing was "changed" here.
Instead of a small number of donors, maybe every male should donate sperm like it's jury duty or something...
I do find the idea of someone fathering that many children inherently weird and creepy. It appears that this person is also accused of misleading the women who received the donations, which is obviously wrong in itself. There's probably all kinds of reasons to throw the book at this particular individual. I just wish the bullshit eugenic arguments could be left out of it.
1 - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311238/Brother-sis...
> The couple, who hailed from different towns, about 100 miles apart, were both out with friends when they met in a nightclub in a third town several years ago.
> So strong was their mutual attraction that just one week after meeting, they both felt they had known each other for a lifetime.
2 - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mysteries-love/2...
I'll also mention that such a sibling network can actually cause the problem.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/half-siblings-with-two-children-to...
> After tracking down her half-brother on Facebook, Ms Parra eventually met Mr Parra and the pair felt attracted to one another. "We didn't want to realise it, we were angry with ourselves because it was hard to admit and break that taboo: we are siblings even though we didn't feel that way."
> After just a few days, the half-siblings felt they couldn't carry on without seeing each other again. "Imagine liking a girl and, for a moral reason, being forbidden to be with her. It's really hard to deal with," Mr Parra declared.
People shouldn't have to go the route of genetic testing, which apparently has serious privacy implications, just to have kids
I don't have children, so my question may come across as callous, but how would you not?
Aside from the genetic relatives issue there are a host of other medical issues and complications that arise from not having the full identity of the other parent. Considering that this particular part of the issue that can only arise in adulthood, I was sort of assuming that you'd almost certainly explain the situation to them by that point.
If this is an un-partnered mother and her children, then sure, much less excuse to not tell the kid, and much less reason to not tell them. But for partnered couples there's an inherent friction built in.
That just doesn’t sound very plausible to me…
> The donor "deliberately misinformed" prospective parents about the number of children he had already fathered in the past, the district court in The Hague said.
It will increase somewhat, but not 'greatly'. At least, I would be interested to see some actual data on this for the case of the children of half siblings. For cousins the additional risk is very small: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/03/health/no-genetic-reason-...
While incest is legal in the Netherlands, unintended inbreeding and genetic disorders are not good outcomes for a sperm donation service and so they have guardrails. He's well over the guardrails.
People often wildly overestimate the actual risks of 'inbreeding' because their real objection is either an ethical one or a simple gross out reaction. That is, they're not making an informed estimate of the actual risks and then concluding that these are unacceptably high; they're just searching for a more objective justification for their gut reaction.
Unfortunately, the objective justification that most people reach for (the risk of birth defects) is a very steep slippery slope to eugenics. Once you admit the principle that a higher than average risk of birth defects is sufficient reason for a couple to be legally prohibited from having children, then you are basically there.
"Dutch clinical guidelines state that a donor should not father more than 25 children in 12 families."
Clinicians have already made the informed estimate for me. 500-600 children with the same parent is a more than the recommended 25.
> a couple to be legally prohibited
There are no couples involved here. There's this donor, a clinic with an ethics board, and their clients. The court are not even looking in the area you're so concerned about, and nobody is thinking of making any laws in that area.
Incest is not illegal in the Netherlands, so have it away with your mother/father/sister/brother if it makes you happy. But if you open a fertility clinic, I would hope that you adhere to clinical best practises, including reducing the risk of inadvertent inbreeding.
I would be interested to know if there is any scientific justification for the limit that isn’t simply eugenics in disguise. It might be an empirically informed estimate guided by morally objectionable principles. Or it might be a round number someone pulled out of their ass. If you just want to trust that the limit has a sound basis, then that’s fair enough on a personal level. You are certainly not obliged to persuade random people on the internet otherwise.
> The court are not even looking in the area you're so concerned about, and nobody is thinking of making any laws in that area.
That’s my point. No-one in general is trying (yet) to stop particular pairs of humans procreating based on estimates of the chances of birth defects in their children. So what’s the justification for doing it in this case? I understand that there are no ‘couples’ involved in a romantic sense, but the sperm and egg don’t know the difference. If the concern is a genetic one, it should apply equally in either situation.
As I said before, there are probably lots of other reasons why what this guy has done is bad. I just don’t think this can be the reason.
I would prefer to not be forced by the government to give up bodily fluids so that people can have children.
This is a bad idea.
1. some traits are objectively better. i dont like forced eugenics but choosing better ones can help
2. u cant force someone to sire children. thats immoral
Here we have a couple problems: (1) how do we know who the father is? (2) how can avoid diluting the gene pool?
Solution (discovered thousands of years ago): monogamy, made publicly explicit through marriage ceremonies and enforced via shaming or persecuting fornicators, adulterers, and exalting as virtues both chastity and temperance
But no, in the modern Religion of Progress, it's sacrilege to deny the individual autonomy to do literally whatever they want.
Just another example of the possible consequences when you start pathologizing age-old Lindy values, tenets, customs, systems, etc.
When and where was monogamy common thousands of years ago? At best serial monogamy was. But among higher status people it was frequently just monoandry.