In the Netherlands, fertility clinics guarantee that a sperm donor will donate to a maximum of twelve women. Yet a handful of men manage to produce hundreds of children worldwide with their semen. For these 'super spreaders', sperm donation is a lifestyle. Although clinics unofficially maintain a blacklist, they do not hinder these mass donors. "They were thrilled with every healthy donor."

In 2017 Anneke will receive an unexpected phone call: the doctor who had helped her conceive through a donor eight years earlier is on the line. The doctor tells her that her donor is Jonathan, who is in the news at the time because he had produced as many as 102 children through sperm donations to Dutch clinics.

At the time, her practitioners assured Anneke that a maximum of 25 children would be born with the sperm from her donor. But Jonathan's claim that he didn't donate anywhere else turned out to be false. Jonathan had visited almost all Dutch clinics.

Jonathan is now on an unofficial blacklist of fertility clinics. He is one of a handful of men who deliberately cross legal boundaries and have produced (much) more children than the law allows. The blacklist is unofficial, because under applicable privacy laws, clinics are not allowed to exchange information about their donors, but it was born out of necessity.

A preventive system to thwart 'serial sperm donors' has still not been set up. To this day, Dutch clinics only ask a sperm donor to sign a statement stating that he has not previously donated to another clinic and will not do so. Jonathan has signed at all clinics.

SURVEY "The channels of international adoption" (1/3). Over the past sixty years, hundreds of thousands of children from Latin America, Asia and Africa have been adopted by European or North American couples, sometimes in violation of the law. As adults, some seek the truth about their story. First part of our investigation: between Guatemala and France.

On the walls of the office, dozens of photos tarnished by time. People smile at each other, kiss each other. “This is the first reunion that we have organized, a dad with his daughter… In 2001.” Marco Garavito is still moved by these images, the fruit of more than two decades of labor. The 70-year-old man is responsible for Todos por el reencuentro (“All for the reunion”), one of the programs of the Guatemalan League of Mental Health, a psychological support organization specializing in the search for 5,000 children missing during the long armed conflict between the military and the Marxist guerrillas (200,000 dead between 1960 and 1996).

Marco Garavito shows us around the little house, built around a patio filled with plants, in the center of the capital, Guatemala. Four people work with self-sacrifice within this program, without any help from the State, paying out of their own pockets for translators of the twenty-two Mayan languages, covering kilometers of bumpy tracks to reach remote villages. “We currently have 1,300 cases,” explains our host. At the beginning, we were looking for the children in Guatemala; then it was necessary to expand abroad. Two hundred of them would be in Europe, especially in France, Belgium and Italy. "

Around 71

children, mostly malnourished and

suffering from skin infections, were

recovered last month from the shelter

home of Dr Ketan Soni, the alleged

Family and friends are ecstatic, the reactions on social media are sometimes frightening. Ryan Ramharak (29), trans and non-binary, is pregnant with his partner David (31). “I hope the people after us are treated better.”

David initially had no desire to have children. "When I came out, I thought that having children would be complicated." He himself was adopted from Brazil. “I am very happy with my adoption and my parents, but I don't want to be a father that way. It can be very complicated not to know who your biological parents are. I had written off becoming a father for myself. I'll be a nice uncle, I always thought.”

Ryan went on testosterone for a long time, which gave him beard growth, a lower voice and an angular face, but kept the uterus

Everything changed when he met Ryan over three years ago, through Tinder. He had transitioned at the age of 23. Ryan: ,,My sister had her first child at a time when I had to think about my own fertility. In the hospital I held her baby – super special, of course. Then I found out that I did want children. I wanted to grow up, not a mother.”

Ryan went on testosterone for a long time, which gave him beard growth, a lower voice and an angular face, but kept the uterus. Which for David meant that he might still be able to become a father through a biological route. And Ryan also saw it, he temporarily stopped with hormones.

Viele Jahre war Gunther Krichbaum Vorsitzender des EU-Ausschusses im Bundestag. Diese einflussreiche Funktion muss der CDU-Abgeordnete aus Pforzheim nun an Anton Hofreiter von den Grünen abgeben. Um einen weiteren europapolitischen Posten wird in der Union noch gerungen.

There are still an estimated 40,000 children in 830 children’s homes across Kenya

In Summary

• Placement of the child is normally arranged through the government or a social service agency.

• As a result, Kenyans are focusing on is putting children in children homes, as it appears to be the preferred option

All children deserve and have the right to grow up in loving and secure families.

Lourdes, 43, and her biological mother, Nélida Soria, 82, kiss after their reunion in the province of Entre Ríos. They spent four decades apart and were reunited thanks to a partial opening of the National Genetic Data Database.Courtesy

The practice of “getting a child” has always existed in Argentine society, with the complicity of midwives and notary offices and the silence of the rest of society. The agents of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-83) took advantage of this old gear to set up their system of stealing babies born by political militants who were tortured and murdered in clandestine detention centers. But trafficking, appropriations and illegal adoptions continued to occur in parallel, outside the barracks. This is proved by the overwhelming number of people who were born during the period of state terrorism, have irregular documentation and are looking for their origin, but were discarded as children of disappeared in DNA tests carried out by the National Genetic Data Bank [BNDG] since the return of democracy.

The BNDG was created in 1987. In these 35 years, the collation of biological samples from the families of disappeared by the dictatorship and from people who doubted their identity allowed the identification, without margin of error, to 130 of the 500 grandchildren sought by the organization Avós da Praça de Mayo. But the process accumulated more than 12,500 negative results along the way: people who grew up with a changed identity, but are not the wanted grandchildren. The problem for them is that, after the DNA test is negative, there are no other options for tracking its origin. And the problem for the State is that these cases are growing in the order of 100 per month, while grandchildren —the reason for the BNDG’s existence— have stopped appearing. The last announcement was two and a half years ago.

More information

But something is changing, little by little. Recently, 12 negative BNDG cases received good news: their mothers are alive. Policies are not and have never been missing. This identification was possible because the organization, in addition to its archive of families looking for grandchildren stolen by the military, created another record, of mothers looking for children stolen in a context other than that of state terrorism. The figures were confirmed to EL PAÍS by Mariana Herrera Piñero, director of the BNDG since 2015, who nevertheless warned that they “are dynamic”. The sum of encounters highlights the potential of this partial opening of the BNDG DNA file.

A man who spent the first two weeks of his life in a mother and baby home is planning a legal challenge against the State for excluding people who lived less than six months in an institution from its redress scheme.

The man, who wants to be known by his birth name, Paul, has put Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman on notice of judicial review proceedings.

He lived in a mother and baby home until he was two weeks old, after which he was taken for adoption.

The man was reunited with his birth mother, Maria Arbuckle, a campaigner for survivors of mother and baby homes, for the first time this year.

Ms Arbuckle was among the survivors who protested against the long-awaited redress scheme announced last month by the Government.

Nearly a week after the Kalyan police arrested a doctor for allegedly running an adoption racket and rescued 71 kids, the cops have reunited 14 babies with their parents. The alleged crime came to light after a couple filed a complaint against Dr Ketan Soni accusing him of taking away their baby for Rs 1 lakh. The police are trying to trace the parents of the other rescued children.

As per a complaint filed by one Priya Ahire, she gave birth to a child on November 10 and she and her husband Santosh sold the baby to Dr Soni for Rs 1 lakh. However, after a few days the couple decided to take back their infant. When they approached Dr Soni with the money, he allegedly refused to hand them over the baby.

The Ahire couple alerted child care authorities and filed a complaint against Dr Soni at Ram Nagar police station in Dombivli. While the police then raided the premises of Nandadeep Foundation, Dr Soni could not produce any documents to back the alleged adoptions done through his shelter. The police also said that the foundation did not have the permission to facilitate the adoption of children.

The police sent all the 71 kids at the centre to ‘Balvikas’ facilities at Dombvli and Ulhasnagar.

“The doctor brought kids from poor parents across Maharashtra. He paid them some money promising to take care of the baby at his shelter. It is suspected that he sold the kids to childless couples for lakhs. Whenever the original parents came to meet their kids, he would tell them that the baby had been adopted.”

Adoption in Australia has dropped to its lowest level in three decades as services say pandemic family court delays and border closures have resulted in a backlog of cases amid a general downward trend.

There were 264 adoptions finalised in Australia in 2020–21, the fewest since national reporting began in 1990–91.

Adoptions from overseas in 2019-20 and 2020-21 were the lowest on record, although these have been in decline since the late 2000s.

In its report, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare said COVID-19 travel restrictions and the pandemic’s impact on visa applications likely contributed to the low number of inter-country adoptions finalised in the past two years, and noted they may appear in next year’s data.

Renée Carter, chief executive of Adopt Change, said the drop in numbers was “concerning”.