Children from another world

They are called 'donor children', the approximately 40,000 Dutch children who were born until it was banned in 2004 thanks to anonymous sperm donation. The great secret that is still jealously covered up in many families has almost been overtaken by time. The DNA tests that are accessible to everyone are the big game changer .

Her mother asked her whether she could come to Amsterdam at the end of July 2020. Something had to be discussed. Something that was not suitable for over the telephone. And they had to be four of them: Marilien, her brother, her mother and her father.

That was something that had not happened for thirty years, with 'the whole family' - as it is called - in one room. Whatever had to be told could never be as bad as that, I thought. The four of us in one room, we hadn't done that for a long time. ' Marilien (52) has always been funny, her brother Steven (50) too.

She had a valid excuse: corona, especially if, like Marilien, you work and live with the family in Ireland. A trip to Amsterdam had meant quarantine on her return for two weeks. Could it really not be over the phone? No, it really couldn't be over the phone, said her 83-year-old and very spry mother, but she didn't have to worry either. It was not a disease, no one was going to die for the time being. It had to do with family history. What could this be, Marilien and Steven wondered.

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He was just sitting with the family and a group of friends in Palafrugell on the Costa Brava, a compensation for the trip to Cambodia and Vietnam canceled due to covid. Heavy telephone traffic between Ireland's south coast and the Costa Brava followed. The most obvious scenarios, according to Marilien and Steven, were:

Yet a half-sister turned up in Africa, as a reminder of the African study trip of their flamboyant father of 35 years ago. Especially Marilien had always taken this into account and was actually looking forward to it a bit.

Something dark from maternal German family history, Hamburg, World War II, you never know. Or, whatever was possible, 'just' a murder from the past somewhere in the family. Exciting.

One of the two, Marilien or Steven, was from different parents. Or maybe both. That was also a thought that Marilien had always had a bit in the background. Exactly why was hard to say, it had something to do with the emotional nonchalance she had felt during her childhood. But then again, Marilien's likeness to their mother was so obvious, so was Steven's likeness to their father. Not to mention Steven's son, just a copy of his grandfather, if you included the childhood photos.

While her brother on the Costa Brava parked the whole story for later, when we get back to the Netherlands, Marilien felt by telephone from Ireland to her mother's breaking point. It was close by, she sensed it. Suddenly Marilien said: "Maybe Daddy isn't my father?"

Yes that was it.

The great secret that her mother had been dragging around like a basalt block for fifty-five years was out. Marilien and Steven were donor children. So from a different man than their important father with his important family name. From an unknown sperm donor. Never, never should it be told to the children, and certainly never to the outside world. That was the mantra of her life.

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Artificial Insemination with Donor Seed, the KID practice, has existed in the Netherlands since 1948, with which the Netherlands was certainly not at the forefront. In America and other countries it had been around for much longer. In those years, seed could not be frozen and had to be injected manually into the uterus as fresh as possible with a syringe, which made it a logistically very complicated procedure.

Few in the Netherlands knew about it in those pioneering years. Only those directly concerned, that is to say couples whose husbands were sterile, and who were pointed out by the NVSH of this possibility, which took place in practices at home, in residential areas with garage doors and garden doors at the back. The donor came to deliver his seed jar to the back door half an hour before the mother-to-be stepped in through the front door. And he had to get out of the garden quickly, because they were definitely not allowed to meet. A Theater of the Laugh-like direction in which the gynecologist acted as the director who had to keep the parties separate at the front and back, because a meeting would be 'dangerous'.

There was a chance that such a mother would still fantasize about the man who impregnated her remotely, the man who could, while the intention was that she would forget the transaction as soon as possible and that the child was completely like the child. of his 'prospective parents' would grow up. That was better for everyone: child, parents and donor. Just immediately forget how it went and be grateful for what you received for the rest of your life.

A discreet birth announcement to the gynecologist was proof that it had been successful and further contact was unnecessary for life. Unless there was another child to come, of course, but then the procedure was the same. It was an ideological, revolutionary act of gynecologists who dared to stick their necks out and risk doing so, especially in the early years.

Having your wife impregnated with the seed of another man was regarded as marital infidelity in the post-war, still largely church-determined morality of the Netherlands. Infertility was a non-negotiable topic, especially when it was the man. It was a very bad thing, a great shame. If you wanted to do something about it, it had to be in the deepest secrecy and no one was ever to find out.

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'You were so dependent on the doctor because if he didn't want to help you, you wouldn't have children. So you did everything, everything, whatever the doctor said. God, when I still think about the humiliation at Dr. Levie…. ' She is actually still angry about it, the mother of Marilien and Steven.

In the early 1950s and 1960s, the Dutch pioneer of artificial insemination doctor Leo Henri Levie, along with his colleagues Swaab and Kremer, was the only refuge for desperate parents who were unable to have children. Marilien and Steven's parents initially ended up with Levie, but he sent them away.

The mother: 'It was awful, really awful. We had told our parents, because it was a big blow to us that we could not have children together. But we shouldn't have done that by Dr. Levie. He looked at us from behind his desk, shaking his head, like a punishing schoolteacher: "How could you have done that?" On top of that, he didn't think we were suitable as parents either. He had quickly reached that conclusion. The fact that my husband got up at one point during the consultation and looked at his backs in his bookcase with his head tilted, the fact that I hadn't bathed my much younger brother in the past because my mother took that pleasure for nothing. had taken away: pats. Rejected as parents. “And now you can go to a colleague of mine, but then you must first ask yourself whether you are suitable parents. ” I could only cry. And my husband was furious. '

The duty of confidentiality was also the number one rule at the practice of doctor Leo Swaab. Of course they kept their hearts pounding silent that they had told their parents, because Swaab was their last chance. The first child was a long time coming, eleven attempts - eleven months, before it finally worked. 'He did that so well, Dr. Swaab. I was there for the eleventh time, and I was afraid I wouldn't get the chance for more than a year. I was very nervous: oh God, if it doesn't work now, it will stop, then we will never have children. But Swaab said so very calmly and nicely “and if it doesn't work now, we will continue for a while” - and promptly we succeeded. I always thought it was because then I finally relaxed. '

The first child, a boy, died of meningitis within a year. Horrible. And two months later she reported back to the home practice of doctor Swaab, something which for Marilien - who was in the stomach three months later - is one of the proofs of the aforementioned emotional nonchalance that she had so strong during her childhood. felt. "Then you're still in mourning, you've just lost a baby, then you're not ready for a new baby at all!" That is why, Marilien thinks, she was received quite absently by her parents. She was a stopgap for other suffering, but of course never that one child that is no longer there.

Nonsense, her mother says. Of course there was also mourning. The reason that she immediately went back to the practice at Velasquezstraat in Amsterdam-Zuid was simple because she was already 31 and knew from the previous pregnancy that it could take a long time. 'We wanted it so badly, two children of our own, and going to Swaab was now as if I was going to do the shopping. I no longer had any emotions, I was used to the ritual. '

Perhaps that is why it went so beautifully fast this time, a year later Marilien was already there, and again two years later Steven. The royal couple, a girl and a boy, both very healthy, sporty, intelligent, social and witty. 'By the way, I have always been very happy with you, because you were very nice children, active, intelligent and just very pleasant in character and very pleasant to be around you', writes the 'social father', the man from whom they took their life thought he was their father (87), in the letter he had to fabricate heavily against his will last summer. For his ex-wife, the mother of both their children, had decided to cancel the omertà that had been imposed on her for more than half a century. And he had only one choice: to participate or not. The spell she had felt trapped in all those years had been broken.

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It was because of an episode of Andere Tijden from April 2019 called 'Hidden fathers'. 'When after all these years I heard the name of Dr. Swaab again… I thought: that's not possible! says Marilien's mother. 'My deepest secret made public! And that it is true that there were donor children who already knew! I sat there with my mouth open in front of the screen: this is impossible! That broadcast broke everything open for me. Only then did I realize how indoctrinated I have been all these years. I even went to therapy for it. '

It may come as a surprise that a mother of two donor children can fall off the couch after all that has been done in recent years on this subject because her 'deepest secret' turns out to no longer belong to her at all. Yet the vast majority of the estimated 40,000 donor children in the Netherlands still know nothing about it. Only a small part is looking, an even smaller part has found their biological father - whether or not after his death. This means that most families still live under the spell of the great secret and may intend to continue to do so.

The pressure was immense, which both the gynecologists then god and the barren husbands as death managed to exert for their reputation. The woman could have been happy for a long time that she could still bear her own children in this way, but then also not moan and shut up. She 'got' the child, as it were, from all those men: from the gynecologist, from the sperm donor, and from her own husband, who behaved like a real father to the child, or at least gave it his name. And if all those men thought it was better "for everyone" that the great secret should never be revealed, then you kept it, as a woman.

There was one point of view that did not appear throughout the story: that of the child. Marilien and Steven's mother: 'I only realized that through that broadcast of Andere Tijden . That we parents, and the gynecologist, and the anonymous sperm donor, usurp an enormous power to which we have no right at all. We may decide whether the child ever finds out or not, still. And that is no good. '

Dutch society has already taken many steps towards the rights of the child. On June 1, 2004, the Artificial Fertilization Donor Data Act was introduced, placing the Netherlands in the leading group of countries that prohibit anonymous sperm donation, such as Sweden, Australia and Switzerland. After 2004 many more countries were added, such as New Zealand, Norway, England, Ireland and Germany. Dutch law is retroactive and gives everyone a legal right to information about their biological descent. It is the most complete law in the world in this area. Since 2004, every child born under the strict confidentiality obligation of the fertility pioneers can still request the details of his biological pathogen.

And if they no longer exist, for example because the entire donor archive was burned - as Dr. Swaab did when his practice was closed in 1980 - then the commercial or non-commercial DNA banks have been accessible to just about everyone in recent years. For a few bucks you can submit your DNA and chances are that sooner or later you will encounter a DNA match that will eventually lead to the main prize: who is my biological father?

Not that that's a nice way to find out, because of course the point is that no one has the right to let their children grow up on their own Truman Show. Knowing who your mother and father are is a human right, perhaps the first and the most important. It is the right that no one can be taken away, see all those programs in which adopted, neglected, smuggled children from abroad still claim it.

Many of the sperm donors from those pioneering years have passed away, and those who are still around are approaching 80 or older. So hurry up, but being a donor child from the pioneer 1950s and 1960s also seems to have a very big advantage. Because it was not all that commercialized at the time, because the donors were personally chosen by the doctors from their own circle or practice, they were often men who already had their own lives and family on track and did so out of ideological conviction with the consent of their wife. The duty of confidentiality may have served everyone, but with advancing insights into nurture and nature , these men and their families seem to get along well.

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Marilien is inmiddels juichend onthaald door de uitgewalste donorfamilie van Sietse, haar biologische vader, die helaas in 2007 is overleden. Vijftien halfbroers en -zussen bleken haar met open armen op te wachten, inclusief de twee zoons van Sietse en zijn weduwe Ank. Die zoons konden geboren worden dankzij de hulp van dokter Swaab, want bij haar ging het niet helemaal vanzelf. Uit dankbaarheid, zou je kunnen zeggen, hebben ze toen volmondig ‘ja’ gezegd op Swaabs verzoek of Sietse donor wilde zijn. Natuurlijk. Wat je zelf hebt gekregen, gun je ook een ander.

The widow, who passed away last week, was thrilled that now, ten years after his death, she had all these 'new children'. Of course she never expected it, but the continuing developments in the field of DNA testing are making all previously made agreements and confidentiality obligations obsolete. All the more fun, his 85-year-old widow thought: "A great pity for Sietse, because he had found this an adventure," she says on the audio recording of the first meeting with the 'half-boys' and his 'real' family. A cheerful spring day in a beach bar in Castricum from two years ago, when no one had heard of corona.

And Steven turned out to be just as welcome in September last year with his biological father Pim, who is still alive. At the insistence of his three daughters, Pim (84) had some years ago sent his DNA profile to the database of the Fiom-KID, which was set up in 2010 by the Dutch state to collect donor children and fathers (sperm) or mothers (egg cell). ) to connect with each other. Perhaps a child was looking for him, Pim and his daughters thought.

He had to wait a few years for it, but suddenly there was Steven, to Pim's astonishment a son, and my god he looks! The photos of the Pim from then at the age of Steven today make all the impossible resemblances that for five decades have been pointed out by ignorant family members enthusiastically to old childhood photos on his father's side.

It is even a bit overwhelming for Steven, the warmth with which he is brought in by Pim as the prodigal son, but that is a luxury problem. Being welcome to whoever you come from is the most important thing for a person there is. For every person.

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The anonymous or otherwise sperm donors of the seventies, eighties and nineties, when the right-to-a-child-for-everyone was commercialized, seem to realize that much less or not at all. Such as the donor father of Maria (22), the girl who filed the first lawsuit in the Netherlands in January to claim the identity of her biological father from the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem. There they know exactly who he is, donor K34, who was 'active' between 1993 and 2000, and who produced far too many descendants, probably around 57, even then strictly prohibited by law, because it is genetic. playing with fire.

But on closer inspection, donor K34 preferred to be an 'A' donor, 'A' from Anonymous, while at the time, at the insemination of Maria's single mother in 1998, he had opted for the 'B' model, B van ' Known ', so that Maria could have learned his identity at the age of sixteen. It breaks your heart how Maria does her best to reassure her unknown father through the media. K34 'really does not have to be afraid that I want to sit down for dinner', she said in De Volkskrant , and she is also 'willing to agree to a restraining order', she said in Op1 . A restraining order! The poor kid. As if you were a stray dog ??waiting on the mat outside the back door for a bone.

These were also the words of Marilien after the Zoom presentation of the book The Wachtman family , which is about anonymous sperm donorship versus children in search of their identity. "I just feel dirty," she cried on the phone right after the Zoom presentation at the end of January. Marilien is not easily in tears, not to say never. But this way of telling the story that she is just discovering herself in stockinged feet hurt her.

Lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who is also the author of the book and also moderator of Zoom Debate for the promotion of his own book, had indeed made it more of a plea than a conversation. The donor children who were also present on the Zoom screen barely had their say, a Belgian expert who, on the other hand, sees the right to anonymity of the sperm donor as the totem of freedom for all of us for far too long. The tone was grumpy and haughty, like that of the book. How dare they, those donor children, want to know the man who just gave up his 'blob' (it says like this).

"I give life, not a relationship," said the jaunty sperm donor Wachtman, and "I absolutely don't want to have any contact with a child." An exemplary legal problem, that anonymous sperm donor Wachtman, but what a horrible way to tell a story that concerns so many people and has so many nuances. As if they were body snatchers from outer space, those children, cuttings that secretly land on your pillow at night and take your shape.

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The issue of Jan Karbaat, the gynecologist from Barendrecht with the largest sperm donor clinic in the Netherlands, of which he himself turned out to be the largest donor in the eighties and nineties, is such a spectacular story that it stands in itself. The counter so far stands at around seventy Karbaat descendants, all with the same front teeth. The seed of Karbaat - who would have resisted the temptation? - is the title of the award-winning short documentary from 2018, of which the young maker Miriam Guttman has now made a three-part series.

It is certainly very nicely done, those mothers who now, now, 35 years later, are again waiting on those benches in such a stately corridor of an old-fashioned practice-at-home, with only the sound of such a ticking hanging clock. . Like the idea of ??letting all that people, the many descendants of Karbaat, together with the deceived mothers, look indignantly at the camera in that same dim, old-fashioned hall like a kind of silent terracotta army. The silent indictment, all those faces, all those same teeth, it's a beautiful, macabre image.

But that is also the danger at the same time. By styling it like this you make it a kind of Crime Scene Investigation , while, they are people, individuals, who all have to deal with it in their own way. Some are also proud of their biological father, most recognize themselves in his ambition, work ethic and analytical talent. Who would like to be put away as the 'seed of Karbaat'? Children of, possibly.

Children from another world, as Marilien and Steven's mother says so beautifully: 'When I dig deeper into myself, I also felt that they both, Marilien and Steven, came from another world. And that we both actually fell short of what we could offer. I felt that there was more question with them, in their characters and in their development, than the two of us had an answer to. That is what I am so happy about: that dark side, that other world, has now been opened up, light has entered. '

Correction 03/16/2021: Artificial Fertilization Donor Data Act

The Artificial Insemination Donor Data Act (WDKB) gives all donor children the right to request the data of their donor father. But for donor children born before 2004, there is a diabolical clause in the law. Article 12 of the WDKB stipulates that the donor must always be asked for his consent before the clinic or hospital can provide his data to the donor child. In fact, this means that donors who registered themselves as 'B' ('Known') in the years before 2004 can still choose 'A' ('Anonymous'). The current lawsuits of the donor girl Maria (22) and a number of other donor children are about these promise-breakers. The decision in the case of Maria versus the Arnhem Rijnstate Hospital is expected shortly.