Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children? – BBC News 13th December 2025
Donor Conceived UK is deeply concerned that this BBC article discusses the impact of sperm donation practices without including the voices of Donor Conceived People (DCP) themselves. Reporting on issues of identity, kinship and lifelong consequences without first-hand testimony from those most affected risks minimising very real harms.
We very strongly disagree with the suggestion that Donor Conceived People (DCP) may be “happy” to discover they are one of hundreds of genetically related siblings. In our extensive experience supporting Donor Conceived adults, we are not aware of anyone who considers this outcome benign or positive. On the contrary, large sibling groups are repeatedly associated with distress, loss of identity, feelings of commodification, and anxiety about inadvertent incest and/or consanguinity and disrupted family boundaries.
Framing this issue as a matter of “competing” or “conflicting” needs is misleading. Donor Conceived People (DCP) do not choose to be created through these practices, yet they live with the consequences for a lifetime. Our rights to identity, dignity, informed consent, and family life should not be treated as interests to be balanced against commercial convenience or reproductive demand. They must be centred.
The ethical issues raised: identity, privacy, consent and dignity are not abstract. They are lived realities for Donor Conceived People (DCP) navigating late discovery, unexpected genetic connections through DNA testing, and the shock of learning their biological parentage has been replicated on an industrial scale. These outcomes are foreseeable and preventable through responsible regulation.
Donor Conceived UK calls on the BBC to ensure future coverage meaningfully includes donor conceived voices and reflects the growing body of evidence from our lived experience. Ethical reporting in this area must start from the perspective of those created through donation, not from industry reassurance or speculative claims about satisfaction.
***ENDS***
Notes
- More than 85,000 people have been born from donor treatment, through UK licensed clinics, since 1991.
- In some cases, clinics or donor banks will have closed since the donation or treatment took place. Often another clinic will have taken on a clinic’s records when they close. In these cases, HFEA contact the clinic which holds the closed clinic’s records, and the open clinic verifies the information they hold in those records on behalf of the closed clinic. For some other closed clinics there are other arrangements that allow the HFEA to request individual patient records and to verify the donor used by the patients by looking at these records.
- Between 2021 and 2025, more than 4,000 requests for information to the HFEA, relating to donation, have been responded to.
- By law parents do not have to disclose to their children that donor gametes were used in their conception therefore it is widely understood that the vast majority of donor conceived people don’t know they are donor conceived.
- Unless applicants to the HFEA records have also used DTCGT they will be unaware that the information given to them by the HFEA is incorrect.
- Donor Conceived UK is the only national organisation led by, and for, donor conceived people. We fill a huge and growing gap, addressing unmet life-span needs that are usually overlooked by fertility-focused organisations and minimised by Government.
- For more information visit our website, Home – A new peer-led charitable organisation to represent donor conceived people, donors and others affected by donor conception practises in the UK
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