Sperm donation: Inside a deeply emotive world of powerful incentives, polarised views and heated debates
By Kate Hilpern,
The Independent
| 09. 13. 2015
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Imagine discovering that your birth certificate is a lie and that your true biological father was a sperm donor who also fathered hundreds of other children. It’s a reality for more people than you might think.
Barry Stevens, who found out he was donor conceived (DC) when he was 18, discovered through DNA tests that his biological father, Bertold Wiesner, had up to 600 children. Wiesner founded the London Barton clinic in the 1940s, promising to provide sperm donors from “intelligent stock”, and there is evidence to suggest that around two-thirds of the children born to couples using this clinic were his.
In a similarly unsettling discovery, Jo Rose learnt that at the time of her donor conception, in the early 1970s, there was a small number of medical students from Barts NHS Trust – most of them now high-profile doctors – who donated sperm time and time again up and down Harley Street, essentially cornering the market.
“In my search for my own father, I met one of them and he said that this handful of men...
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