Courts Order Fertility Doctor’s DNA Tested After Patients Accuse Him of Using His Own Sperm to Father Babies
Several families in Denmark have been harboring deep, uncomfortable suspicions about the fertility doctor who helped them conceive children at his fertility clinic. At least 22 parents and children suspect that renowned Dutch fertility doctor Jan Karbaat was secretly and illegally using his own sperm to impregnate his patients, just like an Indiana doctor who did the same thing and was unmasked by DNA evidence. Now the courts have ruled that the families can test the doctor’s DNA to find out for sure if he was the “sperm donor.”
Unfortunately, the doctor is no longer around to face consequences for his actions. He died last month at the age of 89. During his lifetime he refused requests for DNA testing, and his will reportedly orders that his DNA not be given up for testing.
According to The BBC, the doctor’s family has been fighting the plaintiffs and demanding that the doctor’s will be honored and that his DNA not be tested. Now, however, the court has said that the doctor’s DNA can be tested from objects from his home, ie: toothbrushes, but that the information will be sealed unless the children can prove they have a reasonable excuse for believing themselves to be the doctor’s biological children. It’s not clear what the court will consider “reasonable” reasons.
In some cases, the children’s suspicions are based on things like a perceived physical resemblance to the doctor, or having brown eyes when the mother and the alleged donor both had blue eyes. Those would be thin reasons for suspicion in most cases, but this doctor’s practice was shut down in 2009 for misconduct, including having falsified data, lied about donor descriptions, and exceeded the maximum legal number of six children per donor.
According to The Telegraph, one of the plaintiffs alleges that the doctor actually admitted to her that he could be her biological father, and that he told her he may have fathered as many as 60 children through his practice. She alleges that he said he was doing everyone a favor because he saw himself as having good genes and being intelligent, so he thought that he was nobly “sharing his genes with the world.”
On top of that, the BBC reports that last month the doctor’s son donated his own DNA for tests, and the results indicated that he could be related to at least 19 children born through his father’s IVF practice. It’s not clear if those 19 children are among the plaintiffs of this court case, but these results certainly indicate that a man who looked like the doctor and whose parents used his fertility practice is not being unreasonable to feel suspicious about his parentage.
Many of the plaintiffs are looking to sue. The BBC says “the children, most of them born in the 1980s, hope to sue the doctor, possibly on the grounds that they should not exist.”
That’s an odd way of phrasing it, but the people who have discovered they were conceived through the narcissistic machinations of a weird old man who wanted to fill the world with his superior genes have undergone pain and suffering that it’s difficult to comprehend. Some were furious when the doctor died without having been made to answer for his crimes and are seeking to sue for answers, closure, and restitution from the doctor’s estate.
If you are a doctor who has been hired to impregnate women with donor sperm, and you surreptitiously use your own instead to further your creepy, narcissistic dreams, then you deserve to have the ever-living shit sued out of you by the patients and their children. It just sucks that this didn’t happen while the doctor was alive.
(Image: StockPhoto / abezikus)