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Sperm donor who fathered 550 children ordered to stop

54 points by flykespice 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago
With so few people having children in the Netherlands, it’s kind of crazy to think of a situation where the next generation are substantially siblings. Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >With so few people having children in the Netherlands 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.
  - nashashmi 4y ago
    Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing).
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      People living humble are reluctant to have more children. But the ability to start your adult life humbly is definitely very important. I am talking about access to cheap rent small apartments to move off your parents' and then perhaps acquire one instead of renting.
      - nashashmi 4y ago
        I think in response to needs like these, we might want to take a look at how lower income class people live in Asian and Latin American countries. It is similar to how little Tim lives with his family in “Willy wonka and the chocolate factory”. Joint family systems are the norm.
        thriftwy 4y ago
        People don't owe you children in exchange for your desire to treat them like exploited illegal immigrants. With that attitide, go and have all these children yourself.
        effingwewt 4y ago
        You did not just use the destitution Charlie lived in as a example of how poor people should live. 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.
        nashashmi 4y ago
        And did you just demean the lifestyle of poor people? I have known modest looking habitats that the rich western world would frown upon. I have seen this kind of lean living. And thought it was quite sufficient. 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.
        _x2o9 4y ago
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      > Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing). 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.
      - beebeepka 4y ago
        Maybe I am too quick to judge but this strikes me as a completely uncalled for US-centric know it all take.
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        This is a standard critique of capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, state communism, and whatever your -ism of choice is. It's been done the world over for millennia. Every time someone in power or privilege has said "we must all sacrifice for the greater good" - the sacrifice is disproportionate, and those disproportionately affected have grumbled about it. Every time someone has said "we must preserve this particular thing", the preservation has been at the disproportionate expense of others, and those so affected have grumbled about it.
        ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Of course, "sacrifice for thee, not for mee". 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.
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Just give a blanket license to PIK or LSR and watch the market flooded with line after line of 25-storey cheap studio apartments until you beg for forgiveness.
  - meeuwer 4y ago
    Bingo. Housing in the Netherlands has become a cult demanding increasingly more human sacrifice. Sometimes I wonder if “demographic transition” in the developed world is nothing more than a side effect of the neoliberal housing policies.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      A friend emigrated to the rural US Midwest because making a life and supporting a family in the Netherlands was financially untenable. As always, n=1.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. 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.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      The poorest do because they have little education in terms of contraception and safe sex, they have low standards for QoL for their kids and just hump away like mammals without thinking about the future and the conditions their kids will have to live in, and sometimes hold conservative religious views which usually shun contraception and abortions and promote endless breeding, but the educated middle class, or what's left of it anyway, practice safe sex and want good living conditions and a bright future for their kids, both of which are vanishing.
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’ Yeah, society probably will, because those are the people putting energy into preserving and propagating their ideas.
        ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Society doesn't care about helping to procreate the educated. For society, you're just a number in an balance sheet, you're just a consumer and a tax payer, cannon fodder for the economy basically. 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.
  - kypro 4y ago
    Time and families are also a problem today. 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.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >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. 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.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        Anyone opining on pre-historic nature and evolution is spinning a just-so story, unless they're literally data-mining paleontologic or genomic evidence, and if they're doing the later they're talking about the results and conclusions in a much different manner. > 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.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. 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.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      When you have a high income - you have more to lose by having children. When you have a low to no income - you don’t lose as much. It’s why poor people always seem to have more kids. There are other factors but it’s one of the large ones.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      High income doesn't mean rich parents with McMansions. In Europe high income is basically middle class where half you money goes in taxes, and half of what's left goes on rent, then good luck buying a house. 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.
- chiph 4y ago
  Or Iceland. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12914564/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12914564/
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Yes, male fertility.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  > Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical. I find it hilarious when humans pretend to not understand the reasons for something...
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Yeah… didn’t want to state the obvious since it might be controversial, let people come to the conclusion themselves.
    - 77pt77 3y ago
      Yep. Contrary to most expressed beliefs human affairs are usually very simple and basic things. We are not nearly as complex and intricate as we think we are. At least in bulk.
diebeforei485 4y ago
If only the people who want sperm donations can stop being so selective about what sort of kid they want, we would have so much more genetic variation among donors. Instead of a small number of donors, maybe every male should donate sperm like it's jury duty or something...
- foldr 4y ago
  Indeed. This whole thing is just eugenics through the back door. The court should be aware that there are quite a number of historical examples of men having hundreds and even possibly thousands of children. This isn't any kind of threat to human genetic diversity worth worrying about (however objectionable the actions of the men in question might have been). If there is a reason to ban sperm donors from donating more than n samples, it's not this. 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.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    It may not be a threat to the genetic diversity of humans at large but when there are so many siblings in a local area who don't know they are siblings then the chance of recessive genetic disorders greatly increases
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      Seems like the sibling network they discuss where people can become aware of who's related to them would solve that problem. What are the odds that 500 out of 5 million people would match with each other?
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        It happens[1]. In part because people tend to find those who look similar to themselves most attractive[2]. There is a countering instinct to be repulsed by the idea of sex with people one was raised with[2], but this countering instinct doesn't happen if one wasn't raised with a family member. 1 - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311238/Brother-sister-didnt-know-related-marry--despite-knowing-union-illegal.html 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/201505/are-we-attracted-people-who-look-us https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mysteries-love/2...
epicureanideal 4y ago
This is very strange. Why not just require a warning to anyone using his donated material to have kids that there are hundreds of siblings? It seems tyrannical to tell someone that they CANNOT help others have more kids.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  If it was spread out over a large geographical area, maybe… else people are gonna start falling in love with their siblings not even realizing it.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  It seems irresponsible to have an ability to father kids without actually supporting them. And using the support of others for them. This guy does not even know their names.
globalreset 4y ago
I don't see a problem. A man having hundreds of kids happened before in the history, and at the scale of modern global population is very insignificant. If the guy has good genes, might be net positive for everyone.
- mikestew 4y ago
  Might want to re-read TFA, "the problem" is clearly spelled out: 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.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  And what determines good genes? Before it used to be ability to fight in wars and lead armies.
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    You already have people here saying shorter is a big no no!
    - nashashmi 4y ago
      That’s the thing. These are personal choices and preferences make. Taller trait is an appearance prefered. Might as well also select blond hair green eyes.
      - 77pt77 4y ago
        And these preferences are incredibly innate and not modulated by culture like many people have thought through the ages.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Low predisposition to genetic diseases, good immune system / don't get sick often, not having many/any allergies, being rather smart is at least a decent signal to having any genetic portion of intelligence. The things that basically everyone would want to have if they could choose.
lumb63 4y ago
It strikes me as strange that this many people are enlisting the help of a sperm bank to have children. What are the use cases here? Simply “sterile would-be father” and “single woman wants child”? Am I missing something? That can’t possibly be a sizable portion of the population? If they are, those feel like issues to address.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Those are some use cases and that is a way to address those issues.
- seszett 4y ago
  Couples that want a child and can't because of fertility problems on the side of the man are more common than you apparently think.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  Single (many times older) women that have very restrictive deal breakers. 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.
- hn_user82179 4y ago
  off the top of my head, I can think of gay couples, people with genetic/health issues they don't want to pass on to their child. There are probably other demographics, but fwiw male sperm counts seem to be going down at a large scale. It absolutely is an issue to address, but if you are someone who can't conceive or are unlikely to conceive, a sperm bank is an effective option. The man in the article also has been doing this since 2007 so it's been over a long period of time.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  This is some outrage bait by so-called journalists using weasel words. Unless this is in a tiny village, the risk of accidental incest is FUD. Genetic sexual attraction is pseudoscience, and assortative mating has very little to do with related persons. It was a practical problem of feudal empires and small villages globally before the automobile and the airplane, but today, it's not a meaningful concern. So-called consanguinity as absolute fractions base on formal relationships rather than genes is an illusion because it is unique to all pairs of individuals due to the recursive nature of heritable genetics.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
We need affirmative action for sperm donations so men under 5'9" can donate.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  i hope this is a joke lol why would anyone want to have a short kid given the choice? its objectively worse for the kid
  - fatfingerd 4y ago
    Odds of cancer for something that's mostly about vanity..
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      no, its not about vanity 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?
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    This is a tragedy of the commons. 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.
  - atleastoptimal 4y ago
    Height benefits are a strictly zero sum game. Every benefit for a taller person is an equivalent detriment for a shorter person in their peer group. I can't support cultural tropes that require certain people be put down for the benefit of others. However as long as human beings retain their ancestral instincts we'll never learn any better.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Aren't half the world, descendants of Gengis Khan?
- timbit42 4y ago
  They are no where near being half-siblings.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
This seems like a pretty huge infringement on civil liberties. Choice in procreation with consenting partners is a fundamental aspect of individual autonomy. 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.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > It doesn't sound like the individual was deceitful, given they are able to track his donations. > 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.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I obviously miss that line in the article despite reading through it. I was thinking more about the legal thresholds for sperm donation. I completely agree that individuals should fully disclose relevant information.
mungoman2 4y ago
What is interesting is of course the risk of unknowing half-sibling couples. https://www.statista.com/statistics/755052/population-of-the-netherlands-by-age-and-gender/ 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.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  The probability of potential problems with those kinds of offspring are also not that hight. Much higher than in cases with no endogamy, but not that hight.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Regardless of heterosexuality or desire to have children, I imagine many people would go on an emotional roller-coaster if they discovered their sexual partner is actually their half-sibling.
1letterunixname 4y ago
There's no meaningful way to stop him, except by infamy, and so this "order" is weak. The fault is with the sperm banks. They're taking money from people based on lies and failures to check if someone has donated elsewhere. I have my doubts that all of them uniformly screen genetics of the sperm themselves, but instead rely mostly on the truthfulness of donors' screening questionnaires. They must have a global donation database to prevent this from occurring, which itself raises privacy questions of its own. This is a moral panic and a hack that cannot be undone. If he allegedly lied on contracts, then perhaps he maybe guilty of a type of fraud. 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.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
I wish I could be him. I want a family tree that suddenly goes horizontal at my level
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
Funny and sad to see a lot of old solved problems getting rediscovered because of novel technology and "generational amnesia." It's like how every crypto guy basically just rediscovered modern finance and the reason for its rules and regulations. 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.
- reanimus 4y ago
  Pretty sure there are no fornicators or adulterers mentioned even obliquely in this article. What on earth are you on about?
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > Solution (discovered thousands of years ago): monogamy 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.

54 points by flykespice 4y ago

With so few people having children in the Netherlands, it’s kind of crazy to think of a situation where the next generation are substantially siblings. Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>With so few people having children in the Netherlands 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.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing).
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    People living humble are reluctant to have more children. But the ability to start your adult life humbly is definitely very important. I am talking about access to cheap rent small apartments to move off your parents' and then perhaps acquire one instead of renting.
    - nashashmi 4y ago
      I think in response to needs like these, we might want to take a look at how lower income class people live in Asian and Latin American countries. It is similar to how little Tim lives with his family in “Willy wonka and the chocolate factory”. Joint family systems are the norm.
      - thriftwy 4y ago
        People don't owe you children in exchange for your desire to treat them like exploited illegal immigrants. With that attitide, go and have all these children yourself.
      - effingwewt 4y ago
        You did not just use the destitution Charlie lived in as a example of how poor people should live. 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.
        nashashmi 4y ago
        And did you just demean the lifestyle of poor people? I have known modest looking habitats that the rich western world would frown upon. I have seen this kind of lean living. And thought it was quite sufficient. 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.
        _x2o9 4y ago
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > Then people should be humble enough to live on the very little. Not ask for some other entity to provide its people with so much more (like full housing). 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.
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      Maybe I am too quick to judge but this strikes me as a completely uncalled for US-centric know it all take.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        This is a standard critique of capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, state communism, and whatever your -ism of choice is. It's been done the world over for millennia. Every time someone in power or privilege has said "we must all sacrifice for the greater good" - the sacrifice is disproportionate, and those disproportionately affected have grumbled about it. Every time someone has said "we must preserve this particular thing", the preservation has been at the disproportionate expense of others, and those so affected have grumbled about it.
        ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Of course, "sacrifice for thee, not for mee". 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.
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Just give a blanket license to PIK or LSR and watch the market flooded with line after line of 25-storey cheap studio apartments until you beg for forgiveness.
- meeuwer 4y ago
  Bingo. Housing in the Netherlands has become a cult demanding increasingly more human sacrifice. Sometimes I wonder if “demographic transition” in the developed world is nothing more than a side effect of the neoliberal housing policies.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    A friend emigrated to the rural US Midwest because making a life and supporting a family in the Netherlands was financially untenable. As always, n=1.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. 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.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    The poorest do because they have little education in terms of contraception and safe sex, they have low standards for QoL for their kids and just hump away like mammals without thinking about the future and the conditions their kids will have to live in, and sometimes hold conservative religious views which usually shun contraception and abortions and promote endless breeding, but the educated middle class, or what's left of it anyway, practice safe sex and want good living conditions and a bright future for their kids, both of which are vanishing.
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > At some point we probably won’t label a dying/negative-growth subset of the population that can’t figure out how to procreate or even create the pertinent conditions to procreate ‘educated’ Yeah, society probably will, because those are the people putting energy into preserving and propagating their ideas.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Society doesn't care about helping to procreate the educated. For society, you're just a number in an balance sheet, you're just a consumer and a tax payer, cannon fodder for the economy basically. 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.
- kypro 4y ago
  Time and families are also a problem today. 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.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >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. 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.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Anyone opining on pre-historic nature and evolution is spinning a just-so story, unless they're literally data-mining paleontologic or genomic evidence, and if they're doing the later they're talking about the results and conclusions in a much different manner. > 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.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > In most of Europe, lack of affordability and quality family friendly housing, is the number one reason for couples not having kids. 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.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    When you have a high income - you have more to lose by having children. When you have a low to no income - you don’t lose as much. It’s why poor people always seem to have more kids. There are other factors but it’s one of the large ones.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    High income doesn't mean rich parents with McMansions. In Europe high income is basically middle class where half you money goes in taxes, and half of what's left goes on rent, then good luck buying a house. 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.
chiph 4y ago
Or Iceland. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12914564/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12914564/
Tagbert 4y ago
Yes, male fertility.
77pt77 4y ago
> Sounds like the fruit of a culture missing something critical. I find it hilarious when humans pretend to not understand the reasons for something...
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Yeah… didn’t want to state the obvious since it might be controversial, let people come to the conclusion themselves.
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    Yep. Contrary to most expressed beliefs human affairs are usually very simple and basic things. We are not nearly as complex and intricate as we think we are. At least in bulk.

diebeforei485 4y ago

If only the people who want sperm donations can stop being so selective about what sort of kid they want, we would have so much more genetic variation among donors. Instead of a small number of donors, maybe every male should donate sperm like it's jury duty or something...

foldr 4y ago
Indeed. This whole thing is just eugenics through the back door. The court should be aware that there are quite a number of historical examples of men having hundreds and even possibly thousands of children. This isn't any kind of threat to human genetic diversity worth worrying about (however objectionable the actions of the men in question might have been). If there is a reason to ban sperm donors from donating more than n samples, it's not this. 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.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  It may not be a threat to the genetic diversity of humans at large but when there are so many siblings in a local area who don't know they are siblings then the chance of recessive genetic disorders greatly increases
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    Seems like the sibling network they discuss where people can become aware of who's related to them would solve that problem. What are the odds that 500 out of 5 million people would match with each other?
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      It happens[1]. In part because people tend to find those who look similar to themselves most attractive[2]. There is a countering instinct to be repulsed by the idea of sex with people one was raised with[2], but this countering instinct doesn't happen if one wasn't raised with a family member. 1 - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311238/Brother-sister-didnt-know-related-marry--despite-knowing-union-illegal.html 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/201505/are-we-attracted-people-who-look-us https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mysteries-love/2...

epicureanideal 4y ago

This is very strange. Why not just require a warning to anyone using his donated material to have kids that there are hundreds of siblings? It seems tyrannical to tell someone that they CANNOT help others have more kids.

nickthegreek 4y ago
If it was spread out over a large geographical area, maybe… else people are gonna start falling in love with their siblings not even realizing it.
nashashmi 4y ago
It seems irresponsible to have an ability to father kids without actually supporting them. And using the support of others for them. This guy does not even know their names.

globalreset 4y ago

I don't see a problem. A man having hundreds of kids happened before in the history, and at the scale of modern global population is very insignificant. If the guy has good genes, might be net positive for everyone.

mikestew 4y ago
Might want to re-read TFA, "the problem" is clearly spelled out: 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.
nashashmi 4y ago
And what determines good genes? Before it used to be ability to fight in wars and lead armies.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  You already have people here saying shorter is a big no no!
  - nashashmi 4y ago
    That’s the thing. These are personal choices and preferences make. Taller trait is an appearance prefered. Might as well also select blond hair green eyes.
    - 77pt77 4y ago
      And these preferences are incredibly innate and not modulated by culture like many people have thought through the ages.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Low predisposition to genetic diseases, good immune system / don't get sick often, not having many/any allergies, being rather smart is at least a decent signal to having any genetic portion of intelligence. The things that basically everyone would want to have if they could choose.

lumb63 4y ago

It strikes me as strange that this many people are enlisting the help of a sperm bank to have children. What are the use cases here? Simply “sterile would-be father” and “single woman wants child”? Am I missing something? That can’t possibly be a sizable portion of the population? If they are, those feel like issues to address.

barbazoo 4y ago
Those are some use cases and that is a way to address those issues.
seszett 4y ago
Couples that want a child and can't because of fertility problems on the side of the man are more common than you apparently think.
77pt77 4y ago
Single (many times older) women that have very restrictive deal breakers. 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.
hn_user82179 4y ago
off the top of my head, I can think of gay couples, people with genetic/health issues they don't want to pass on to their child. There are probably other demographics, but fwiw male sperm counts seem to be going down at a large scale. It absolutely is an issue to address, but if you are someone who can't conceive or are unlikely to conceive, a sperm bank is an effective option. The man in the article also has been doing this since 2007 so it's been over a long period of time.
1letterunixname 4y ago
This is some outrage bait by so-called journalists using weasel words. Unless this is in a tiny village, the risk of accidental incest is FUD. Genetic sexual attraction is pseudoscience, and assortative mating has very little to do with related persons. It was a practical problem of feudal empires and small villages globally before the automobile and the airplane, but today, it's not a meaningful concern. So-called consanguinity as absolute fractions base on formal relationships rather than genes is an illusion because it is unique to all pairs of individuals due to the recursive nature of heritable genetics.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

We need affirmative action for sperm donations so men under 5'9" can donate.

collegeburner 4y ago
i hope this is a joke lol why would anyone want to have a short kid given the choice? its objectively worse for the kid
- fatfingerd 4y ago
  Odds of cancer for something that's mostly about vanity..
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    no, its not about vanity 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?
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  This is a tragedy of the commons. 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.
- atleastoptimal 4y ago
  Height benefits are a strictly zero sum game. Every benefit for a taller person is an equivalent detriment for a shorter person in their peer group. I can't support cultural tropes that require certain people be put down for the benefit of others. However as long as human beings retain their ancestral instincts we'll never learn any better.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Aren't half the world, descendants of Gengis Khan?

timbit42 4y ago
They are no where near being half-siblings.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

This seems like a pretty huge infringement on civil liberties. Choice in procreation with consenting partners is a fundamental aspect of individual autonomy. 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.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> It doesn't sound like the individual was deceitful, given they are able to track his donations. > 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.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I obviously miss that line in the article despite reading through it. I was thinking more about the legal thresholds for sperm donation. I completely agree that individuals should fully disclose relevant information.

mungoman2 4y ago

What is interesting is of course the risk of unknowing half-sibling couples. https://www.statista.com/statistics/755052/population-of-the-netherlands-by-age-and-gender/ 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.

77pt77 4y ago
The probability of potential problems with those kinds of offspring are also not that hight. Much higher than in cases with no endogamy, but not that hight.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Regardless of heterosexuality or desire to have children, I imagine many people would go on an emotional roller-coaster if they discovered their sexual partner is actually their half-sibling.

1letterunixname 4y ago

There's no meaningful way to stop him, except by infamy, and so this "order" is weak. The fault is with the sperm banks. They're taking money from people based on lies and failures to check if someone has donated elsewhere. I have my doubts that all of them uniformly screen genetics of the sperm themselves, but instead rely mostly on the truthfulness of donors' screening questionnaires. They must have a global donation database to prevent this from occurring, which itself raises privacy questions of its own. This is a moral panic and a hack that cannot be undone. If he allegedly lied on contracts, then perhaps he maybe guilty of a type of fraud. 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.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

I wish I could be him. I want a family tree that suddenly goes horizontal at my level

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

Funny and sad to see a lot of old solved problems getting rediscovered because of novel technology and "generational amnesia." It's like how every crypto guy basically just rediscovered modern finance and the reason for its rules and regulations. 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.

reanimus 4y ago
Pretty sure there are no fornicators or adulterers mentioned even obliquely in this article. What on earth are you on about?
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> Solution (discovered thousands of years ago): monogamy 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.