The great sperm heist: ‘They were playing with people’s lives’

Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any

by Jenny Kleeman

Sat 25 Sep 2021 06.00 BST

For 40 years, Catherine Simpson thought she knew who she was: a nurse, a mother of three, a daughter and a sister. She looked like her mother, Sarah, but had the same temperament as her father, George: calm, unflustered, kind.

Then her father died. There was a dispute over his will, and that led her mother to call and tell her something that made the ground dissolve beneath her feet. George had had a vasectomy long before Catherine was born. She and her brother had been donor conceived in Harley Street using the sperm of two different anonymous men. George was not her biological father.

“In that moment, my brother turned into my half-brother. My grandma wasn’t my grandma. None of my dad’s relatives – people I’d been brought up with – were biological relatives.” It had to be a mistake, Catherine thought. But Sarah assured her that George couldn’t be her father. (The family’s names have been changed.)

Catherine didn’t know it yet, but this was the first revelation in what would become a decade-long search to find out who she was. At the end of it, she would uncover a scandal involving ruthless doctors, stolen sperm, exploited patients, and a community of donor-conceived people in a race against time for truth and justice.

First, she had questions for her mother. “The worst bit is not knowing where half of you comes from,” Catherine says. “The more I wanted to know, the more my mum would tell me about her family, as if that compensated. And I would say, ‘That’s not enough.’”

Her mother’s memories of her fertility treatment were patchy. She remembered that George had tried unsuccessfully to have his vasectomy reversed; that they had been trying for six years before deciding to use a donor; that she had had to go back two or three times before conceiving; that it had been expensive. They were told the sperm donors were medical students from St Bartholomew’s hospital in London. “That made her feel better: it came of good stock. I think that’s how they sold it to my dad.”

Catherine’s older brother was conceived at a clinic run by the obstetrician Dr Mary Barton, one of the first to offer donor insemination in the UK. Barton was later revealed to have used the sperm of her husband, the biologist Bertold Wiesner, in many procedures; he is estimated to have fathered up to 600 people conceived at her practice (Catherine’s brother isn’t one of them, although he still doesn’t know who his father is). But Barton was retiring in 1969 when Catherine’s parents wanted to try for another baby. Barton referred them to the fertility clinic a few doors down in Harley Street. Sarah said the doctor who helped her to conceive Catherine was “friendly and charming”, but she couldn’t remember his name.

For 10 years, it gnawed at Catherine. “First of all, you’ve got the death of your parent to get over, and then you think: how could they have not told me? You look in the mirror and think: I can see my mum’s side, but which parts of my face look like someone else? You start scrutinising everything your parents ever said to you.”

In September 2020, now 50, she became determined to find answers. She turned detective, scouring the internet for information about Harley Street fertility clinics in the late 60s. One name kept coming up: Dr Reynold H Boyd. His practice had been a few doors down from Barton’s, at 52 Harley Street, in a grand limestone Victorian building with wrought-iron railings. Catherine found an image of Boyd in his clinic, standing next to an imposing desk, in a consulting room with tall ceilings, bay windows, net curtains and framed photographs of babies all over the walls. “When I showed that photo to Mum, she said, ‘Yes, that’s it – I remember the room.’”

She found Boyd’s obituary on the British Medical Journal website. He had written it himself: the BMJ used to encourage doctors to do so. Born in New Zealand, he had travelled to England with his wife in the 1930s, first specialising in genitourinary surgery and then infertility treatment. He founded clinics in Chelmsford and the east London suburb of Wanstead, as well as Harley Street. “I began working in infertility … when a semen analysis was an insult to the husband,” he had written. “I pioneered artificial insemination.” He died, aged 90, in 1991.

While Catherine was researching Boyd, news broke about Fiona Darroch, a donor-conceived South African who found out that her biological father was her mother’s fertility doctor: he had used his own sperm without her knowledge or consent. It came to light when Darroch realised her daughter looked just like her mother’s doctor. Catherine had spent years looking in the mirror for clues, but now she turned to her children. There was something in her youngest daughter’s face – “eye shape, nose, cheekbones, everything” – that resembled the doctor by the desk in the photograph. “I thought, what easier business to have than to supply your own sperm and take people’s money? Why wouldn’t he?”

Plenty of other fertility doctors have done that. Dr Jan Karbaat in the Netherlands fathered at least 75 children with oblivious patients; Dr Donald Cline, in Indiana, fathered more than 50; Dr Cecil Jacobson in Virginia; Dr Jan Wildschut in the Netherlands; and Dr Norman Barwin in Ottawa, Canada, whose patients and children were recently offered a £7m settlement – the first time any victim of “doctor conception” has won compensation.

Convinced Boyd must be her father, Catherine was determined to track down his DNA. His obituary mentioned two sons and a daughter. Perhaps one of them would do a DNA test? She managed to find Boyd’s daughter’s phone number, and dialled with her heart in her mouth. But Boyd’s daughter couldn’t help. “She said no, she had to decline, because at the time donors were supposed to be anonymous. It was the law and she wanted to keep to that, even if the donor was the doctor.”

My parents have been cheated. Anyone who went to the clinic could have children they have no idea about’

Catherine took a DNA test with Ancestry.com in the hope of finding distant cousins that could link her to Boyd, or anyone else. She had an agonising 10-week wait for her results. Then, at 6am one January morning this year, they arrived. She clicked the link in the email. “I almost fell off my chair.”

She had a direct parent-child DNA match. Her biological father’s name was there – it wasn’t Reynold H Boyd. He was not a medical student, either. Her father was Paul Watts, a former removals man from Essex, who had never donated sperm in his life.

“What do you mean, you’re my daughter?” Paul asked, when Catherine called him.

“My mum went to a fertility clinic and was given donor sperm, and it’s yours,” Catherine said.

“Oh. Yes,” Paul said, bewildered. “I did go to a clinic with my wife. We had infertility problems. We went to Wanstead clinic.”

Suddenly, Catherine understood. Her biological father had been another of Boyd’s patients. Paul and his wife Jane (whose names have been changed for this article) had had private fertility treatment at his east London clinic in 1969. Paul’s sperm had been checked. Somehow, the sample he gave was used to create Catherine.

Donor conception has been routinely practised in the UK since Dr Mary Barton published details of her methods in the British Medical Journal in 1945. Her work was met with horror by the press and the Catholic church, but couples struggling with infertility quietly flocked to the handful of practitioners who offered the service.

It was a grey area of medicine for decades, neither illegal nor officially regulated: a wild west for doctors who made grand promises to people who were desperate, secretive and ashamed. The clinics were under no obligation to keep records. Due to the stigma attached to both fertility problems and this solution to them – or maybe because it was convenient for the doctors who practised in the field – patients were advised never to tell anyone how their children came to be conceived, least of all the children themselves.

It was only in 1990, after the passing of the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Act and the foundation of the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) as a regulator, that donor-conceived people won the right to know anything about their biological heritage: basic, non-identifying information about their donors, such as height and eye colour. In 2002, Joanna Rose won a human rights test case against the department of health and the HFEA. It led to legislation banning anonymous donation in 2005, and the creation of the donor-conceived register, the DNA database run by the HFEA that helps donor-conceived people find information about half-siblings and donors.

Now, as more of us have become curious enough about our genealogy to take home DNA tests and upload the results to commercial databases, a significant number of fertility fraud cases have come to light. They are likely to be the tip of the iceberg: tens of thousands of people were conceived using donor sperm before there were any regulations to stop doctors using their own sperm, or sperm from men who had never consented. If those people want to find out where they come from, there is almost no official help. They depend on their biological relatives joining the donor-conceived register or being given genealogy kits for Christmas, leaving a digital trace so they can be tracked down, and living long enough to be finally found. They depend on luck.

Paul Watts always wanted to be a father. When the sibling he longed for never arrived, he began to daydream about having children of his own. He married Jane in 1962, and they started trying for a family without success. “It was traumatic,” Paul, 83, says. “We saw our friends having children and we were the odd ones out.”

After seven years of trying, they had saved enough to afford a private doctor near their home in Wanstead. They were referred for tests in Harley Street. “It was to check who was at fault, me or my wife. It wasn’t me – I was A1,” Paul says, chuckling. He can’t remember the name of the doctor he was referred to, but knows that he never consented to his sperm being used for anything other than investigating his own fertility issues. “I didn’t sign any forms and I didn’t agree to anything,” he says.

They eventually discovered that Jane had endometriosis. “Back then, it wasn’t well known about, it wasn’t often treated.” But Jane got the treatment she needed, and five years later, when she was 37, gave birth to their daughter. “It was late for us. We didn’t have time to have another child, really. I would have liked to.”

It was Paul’s daughter who bought him the Ancestry test as a present. She thought he might find it fun to trace his family tree. He had no idea his DNA results had been uploaded on to the internet – his daughter took care of it all. So when a stranger rang talking about sperm donation and online DNA matches, he had no idea what she was referring to. “I was a bit wary. It was a shock.” But when Catherine explained what she thought had happened, it made sense. She offered to pay for paternity tests, and the results confirmed it. The second child Paul had longed for existed all along.

His wife is “very accepting” of the situation they find themselves in at 83. And their daughter – Catherine’s half-sister – is happy to no longer be an only child. Is he angry? He takes a deep breath: “I’m too old to be angry now. Not really, no,” he says.

Catherine’s mother never had the chance to be angry. The day after Catherine received her DNA results, she went to Sarah’s house to tell her she had located her donor and found her mother dead. She had died, aged 85, oblivious to how the doctor had betrayed her.

“They were playing with people’s lives at the clinic,” Catherine says. “I have been cheated. My biological father has been cheated. My parents have been cheated. People came from all over the world to see Reynold Boyd in Harley Street. This could affect thousands of people. Anyone who went to his clinic could have children they have no idea about. This went on in Britain in 1969. It’s not so long ago. How dare they have done this? Surely there is somebody who can take responsibility?”

At almost exactly the same time, another woman, conceived a few months after Catherine, was trying to work out who she was. Lisa Turner had also spent most of her life unaware that she had been conceived with donor sperm. There were clues: her older sister was adopted, and her parents had been married for 14 years before she was born. “But I never put two and two together.” She shrugs. “You don’t question.” (Lisa is not her real name.)

The first inkling came 20 years ago, when both her parents died within a year. Her sister was going through papers, and discovered their mother’s maternity notes. There was a typewritten letter on Boyd’s letterhead from 52 Harley Street, dated 13 November 1970, seven months before Lisa was born. “Thank you for letting me know the result of the pregnancy test,” it read. “I too felt there was little doubt about it.”

It made no sense to Lisa, but she had too much going on to think about what it might mean. She forgot about it for 10 years, until she saw a documentary about a prolific sperm donor that made her dig out the letter. She searched online for the details on the letterhead. “The first thing that came up was a page for donor-conceived adults to find half-siblings and donors. I did a bit more research. There was no other fertility treatment back then, really, other than sperm donation. It made sense.”

It also made Lisa angry. “My mother and father were great parents, they did their best for me, absolutely – but now, whenever I think about them, I also think: but you didn’t tell me.” Lisa was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 28. Her doctors always wanted to know her family medical history, but when she asked her parents there was “an awkward silence”.

Lisa began looking at every man who was about 20 years older than her, wondering if they could be related. She joined the donor-conceived register, and when nothing came up there she took commercial DNA tests with 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA. She gained nothing more there than a few distant cousins.

Then, in September 2020, everything changed when her results came back from an Ancestry.com DNA test. She had a 100% parent-child match with a man in his 80s, with his full name and some of his family tree there for her to see. “There’s an assumption that, as he put his DNA on the website, he was happy to be contacted.” She clicked on the private message button. “I said, ‘I’m donor conceived, I would like some medical history, maybe a photo, nothing else.’” But there was no reply.

Lisa used the name to search birth and marriage records, cross-referencing the electoral roll and property website Zoopla until she found an address that looked as if it might be his. She put her request in a letter and posted it. Again, nothing. She continued to explore her family tree, and managed to contact a distant cousin who had met the man the site said was her biological father. The cousin couldn’t understand it. “It was completely out of character. He was a quiet, private man.” There was no way he could have been a sperm donor, the cousin said.

“Then I had this horrific, penny-drop moment. I realised everything was wrong.” Lisa had spent months building up a profile of a typical 1970s sperm donor, but realised nothing she had found out about her biological father fitted it. He was 31 when she was conceived, too old to have been a student, and had been married for five years without having children of his own. “I had this horrible thought: maybe they were struggling to conceive. Maybe they had gone to the same clinic as my mum.”

She quickly composed another letter. “It was very hard to word. I said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m donor conceived. You may not have been aware that this has happened.’ I didn’t want to rock any boats. I didn’t want anyone to think he had had an affair.” She included some photographs of herself, and wrote about her two children. “I wanted to make myself a real person.”

This time, he replied, with a brief, polite email asking for more details. He eventually told her he had one daughter, born in 1972, a year after Lisa. “Before she was born, my wife had a miscarriage,” he wrote. “After this happened, I was advised to have a sperm check. My recollection is hazy, but I’m fairly sure I took a sample of sperm to Harley Street to be collected. I have no idea what happened to it. If it was used in any way, it was without my consent or knowledge.” He wasn’t a donor: he had been Boyd’s patient.

On these shaky foundations, they managed to build a relationship. They talked on the phone for an hour and he told her the story of his life as an engineer in the early days of computing, and how he had won medals for serving in Malaysia. His first wife had died and he had married again; his stepson bought him the Ancestry DNA test one Christmas, because he was into genealogy. He sent Lisa a Christmas card, saying he didn’t know whether to sign it “Dad” just yet. She booked a summer holiday close to where he lived, planning to swing by with her children – his only grandchildren. But he caught Covid and died suddenly in June. They never got to meet.

“It’s so frustrating,” she says, eyes welling. “It was a huge shock. He was such an approachable, funny, pleasant guy.” She met her half-sister for the first time at their father’s funeral. “I would love to have known her when I was younger.”

Like Paul, Lisa’s father never seemed to be angry that his sperm had been stolen. “I am angry on his behalf that the clinic had the audacity to do that,” she says. “In my more generous moments, I think the doctor thought it was a win-win situation: he won, because he didn’t have to pay a donor – he got a sample delivered to his door by my biological father – and he got his client pregnant. And my mum won, because she got pregnant. Who could ever lose on this?” She laughs a deep, dark laugh.

“I actually don’t really consider myself as donor conceived any more. My husband calls it ‘donor conthieved’. It just feels as if I’m in a different category. And there must be a lot of other people in this category.”

Not all the sperm used at Boyd’s clinic was taken without patients’ consent: some was exactly what the doctor promised. Twice a week, from 1969 to 1975, medical student Michael Beeney would wake up in his dorm, fill a specimen pot, hop on the tube or cycle to Harley Street and hand over his sperm at reception by 9am. He was paid £3-£5 per donation – the equivalent of £40-70 today. “That was your job done. It was as simple as that,” he says. Beeney is now a retired surgeon, a former ship’s doctor and the author of a lurid novel about a sperm donor who unknowingly has a relationship with his biological daughter.

The clinic he describes at 52 Harley Street was not the kind of place where donor sperm could be misplaced or mislabelled; as he tells it, the sperm from Catherine and Lisa’s biological fathers was unlikely to have been used by accident. Beeney says they checked his sperm count every time. “They wanted to know they were getting decent samples – we were supposed to abstain for three days beforehand, but they knew that some of us might have been with a girlfriend the night before. They could always trace you. That was very important, because they were giving you money for it.” There were no consent forms or contracts. “It was very loose. Cavalier, I think would be the word.”

Beeney met Boyd several times, and sometimes his son, Nicholas Boyd, who worked alongside him. “They were typical entrepreneurial Harley Street practitioners who were coining it in. Medically, it was fairly straightforward – it was about getting the patient down there at ovulation time, coinciding it with a half-decent sample, putting the sample in.” This was a matter of administration and logistics, rather than complex medical expertise. “Boyd was a businessman, plain and simple.”

When I tell him about how Catherine and Lisa were conceived, Beeney isn’t surprised. “I think they were fairly ruthless at the clinic. They were very pragmatic. If they had to have a sample, pronto, and they had one, they wouldn’t ask too many questions.” Beeney is likely to have fathered hundreds of children, but has never put his DNA on any database so they can find him. “It could cause all sorts of emotional issues,” he says. “At the time, I don’t think any of us gave it a thought. The prime purpose was getting money. I can convince myself that it brought a lot of women and couples a lot of happiness.”

The Christmas present effect means spring is peak time for DNA detective Freddie Howell: “They say it takes six to eight weeks to process the tests, but not everyone does it straight away. End of March, beginning of April – that’s when you get waves of new matches.”

Now 37, Howell discovered he was donor conceived when he was 25 and happened upon a note in his medical records. It explained a lifelong unease. “Something never felt right. I remember when I was about 15, thinking: maybe I’m adopted? But I looked so much like my mum that it couldn’t be an option.”

He found his biological father in September 2019 after deploying all his investigative nous: DNA matches on commercial genealogy websites led him to distant relatives that yielded clues to a common ancestor, and he sent off for birth and marriage records, and scoured Facebook until he came up with a promising name. He is now in regular contact with his donor.

For a fee, Howell and his team of fellow donor-conceived people will use their experience to help people find their origins. In the first six months of 2021, they successfully solved seven cases – including Catherine’s. She turned to Howell when Paul didn’t respond to her messages on Ancestry; she paid £100, and within a day and a half he came back with his address and phone number. (This is on top of the £150 she spent on paternity tests, and the hundreds of pounds spent on DNA tests and genealogy site memberships. If you are donor conceived and searching for answers, you need money as well as luck.)

Howell already knew of another case, in Devon and unconnected to Boyd, that sounded like Catherine’s. A donor-conceived person had worked out who their donor was after he had died, and contacted his daughter. She said there was no way her father would have been a donor: he had a genetic condition that caused lifelong health problems, and had had fertility treatment himself. They suspected the sample he had given at the clinic had been stolen.

“Clinics would say or do anything to get the business. They thought whatever they said was probably never going to get back to them,” Howell says. Support services for donor-conceived people trying to find their donors are chronically underfunded, he adds; if their genetic relatives aren’t on the donor-conceived register, they are left to investigate by themselves. “We feel like we’re the medical profession’s dirty little secret. The government is complicit, too. They just want us to sit quietly in the corner and accept it.”

As assisted reproduction becomes more commonplace, there is growing acceptance that people should have the right to be biological parents if technology can help them. But, Howell says, the rights of donor-conceived people are still an afterthought. He tells me about sperm bought and sold anonymously on Facebook (unregulated by the HFEA and technically illegal, but it happens regularly); about fertility tourism to countries where few questions will be asked; about parents who explicitly ask for donors that match the social father’s looks because they have no intention of telling their children they are donor conceived. Whatever rights donor-conceived people born today might have, they are still dependent on their parents telling them the truth, or discovering it by accident. “The parents’ need, or desire, to have a child is the primary focus of the fertility industry. Who is thinking about the rights of the adult when they get to 18?”

Joanna Rose, 49, is something of a legend in donor-conceived circles: after her case in 2002 led to the legislation in 2005 that bans anonymous donation, she has continued to campaign for the rights of donor-conceived people. In a speech to the United Nations in 2019, she told the stories of Narelle Grech and Alison Davenport, who both died of cancers they might have survived had they been allowed to know their biological father’s identity. Rose was told she was donor conceived when she was seven or eight, and is yet to discover who her donor is. But she knows where she was conceived: at 52 Harley Street, under the care of Boyd.

Catherine and Lisa both contacted Rose for help and, once the truth of their conception was revealed, she put them in touch with each other. It’s a shocking story, but not extraordinary, she says: a Belgian DNA detective she is in touch with knows of a couple of cases where sperm samples given by men who were investigating their own fertility issues were used to impregnate other patients without their knowledge. She also has a friend in Australia who tracked down her biological father and discovered “he’d never donated”.

For Rose, it exemplifies a fundamental problem that has overshadowed donor conception since the first documented case of artificial insemination, in Philadelphia in 1884. Professor William Pancoast drugged a woman with chloroform and used a rubber syringe to inject her with sperm from one of his students. She gave birth nine months later with no idea how her baby was conceived, or that her husband was not its biological father. “It’s the presumption of ‘what they don’t know doesn’t harm them’. You don’t tell the child – even when they are an adult. It’s been insidious.” Despite the incremental rights donor-conceived people have gained, Rose says this mentality persists. “There aren’t appropriate support services. There isn’t responsibility being taken. There are records still being destroyed.”

During Rose’s court case, she was told all the records from Boyd’s clinic had been destroyed in a flood. She has been searching for her donor’s identity for almost 30 years. “The more I’m not coming up on any of these gene family tree DNA sites, the more I wonder whether I’m from stolen sperm, too.” The regular donors, like Beeney, donated many times over a number of years: if one of these men was her father, it’s likely that she would have been matched with at least one half-sibling by now.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but if my genetic father didn’t willingly give me away for money, that would help my heart,” Rose says. “The idea that my genetic father could have been desperate to have that continuity and I was part of that continuity but was stolen … It would perhaps give me comfort.”

Reynold Boyd retired in 1974, aged 73. His Harley Street clinic is now a dental practice. Boyd’s son, Nicholas, is 87 and retired. In a statement to the Guardian, he says: “My only role from 1973 in my father’s practice was to occasionally perform artificial insemination of female patients. I had no part in seeing new patients or selecting donors for them. As far as I know, donors were from all backgrounds and no specific donor was promised. The requirements of the time meant that full anonymity was granted to all donors. Sperm donors would not have been patients of the practice as the patients had fertility problems.” When asked to comment on the specific point that some of the men who had their sperm analysed at the clinic went on to discover they did not have fertility problems, and it was their partner’s infertility that meant they could not conceive, Nicholas Boyd said he was “not practising at the clinic at the time the events are alleged to have taken place” so was unable to add anything further.

“Time is ticking – for Catherine, for myself, and for anybody else out there, of which there are going to be a significant number,” Lisa says. “I just feel cheated that I haven’t had a chance to have any kind of relationship with my biological father. But that’s how things are. I’ve got a half-sister out of this, and I know my medical history. Those are all pluses. I don’t have it bubbling around in my mind any more, that I don’t know where I’m from.”

Catherine and Paul did get to meet: in June, in a pub halfway between his home in Essex and hers in Hertfordshire. He was with Jane, their daughter and granddaughter; Catherine with her partner and their three daughters. Covid restrictions meant they had to fire questions at each other across socially distanced tables.

“It was awkward, to say the least,” Catherine tells me.

“We didn’t know what to expect – how they would treat us or whether they would accept us,” Paul says. “But we got on fairly well.”

Catherine shows me a picture of them together, both clearly dressed up for their meeting. Paul looks very sprightly, with bushy eyebrows and a broad smile. Then she shows me one of her as a toddler, grinning, on a rocking horse. “I think I look like him there. Same eyes and everything. And the same mouth.” She liked his sense of humour and soft voice. “Now I know where I probably got mine from.”

Paul says he expects they will keep in touch over phone and email. “We won’t go overboard, of course. She lives quite far away.”

Catherine’s half-sister has sent her pictures of their grandmother, and Paul when he was young. “That’s almost enough,” Catherine says. “I don’t feel the need to know any more.” She begins to cry. “It makes me miss my parents even more. I’ve got my own dad and mum, I don’t need another one. This biological family” – she sighs – “they are just friends. Strangers, really.”

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