“What is it about Dutch men and their sperm?” I thought while watching The Man with 1000 Kids (Netflix). Last year I reviewed Seeds of Deceit, a documentary about the Dutch fertility doctor Jan Karbaat, who secretly and disgustingly used his own sperm to inseminate his patients, fathering up to 200 children. Now we have another chap from the Netherlands, Jonathan Jacob Meijer, who makes Karbaat look like a part-timer.
Unusually the title understates matters. It is estimated that through sperm donation Meijer has fathered up to 3,000 children, while lying about his prolificness. For years the world seemed to be awash with this tousle-haired narcissist’s little swimmers.
Last year a court in the Hague ordered him to stop donating and imposed a €100,000 fine for each future infraction. He was told to request the destruction of his sperm stock held by clinics. This came after a lengthy campaign by furious mothers around the world who had been lied to by Meijer and now fear the risk of consanguinity and accidental incest, given that these children have hundreds and hundreds of donor siblings.
• What I know about sperm donors
But of course it isn’t only Dutch men who seem to have a penchant for the mass spreading of their seed. Look at Donald Cline, an American gynaecologist who in the Seventies and Eighties used his sperm to impregnate patients, creating more than 90 babies.
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Perhaps the most sinister part of this documentary is when it homes in on other mass donors from Europe in Kenya, where European sperm seems to be in demand. “I want to bleach Africa,” one boasted. A man named in the film as Anthony Greenfield (although it may be an alias) says he had already donated in the Netherlands, Belgium, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Kenya and Uganda. More countries would soon be “colonised by my glorious and mighty white seed”, he said.
It seems to be about more than simple narcissism. Was it also about genetic colonisation, believing that you are such a special and perfect specimen that the world deserves more and more and more of you? Meijer described himself, among other things, as a “blond Viking”. But prospective mothers did pick him precisely because of his blue eyes, tumbling locks and gleaming white teeth.
When you are desperate for a baby you can overlook the warning signs in a person, one admitted. Some of them faced a backlash when they began pressing for legal action. They should have accepted “God’s will” and not had babies, people said.
The problem is that Meijer assured all of them that he had fathered only a few children — between three and five — when really he was travelling the world spreading his seed. While also making strangely boring YouTube videos saying things such as “I don’t believe in science” and “There is no such thing as inequality’’. Hmm. We don’t hear much more on this but I get the sense he wouldn’t be averse to a few conspiracy theories either.
Some of the women attempt to analyse him psychologically. It had become an addiction. He craves the attention he missed out on growing up in a family of eight siblings. He had a god complex: “He could give, or not give, life.” The more children he had the more powerful his legacy. But what this documentary is missing is analysis from a real psychologist. It is crying out for experts to explain the “Superman” syndrome. Meijer himself declines to appear.
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I think we all could do without the reconstruction scenes of a long-haired actor playing Meijer simulating masturbation into a small cup. Some things really don’t need spelling out. But it is a strange and fascinating story of a man who was apparently so blinded by self-love he thought he was doing the world a favour.
★★★☆☆
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