A Dutch gynecologist who worked for 25 years in a regional hospital in the Netherlands used his own semen in fertility treatments and is thus the father of at least 21 people. This was confirmed this Tuesday by the Alrijne Hospital medical center, located about 40 minutes from Amsterdam. The doctor’s name was Jos Beek, and the events occurred between 1973 and 1986. It is the third case of this nature uncovered in the country since, in 2017, the courts authorized the DNA tests that confirmed the multiple paternity of another gynecologist, Jan Karbaat. This turned out to be the biological father of at least 49 people, although he may have fathered as many as 80 offspring. In 2021, it became known that another specialist, Jan Wildschut, had no less than 34 children in the same way. All three are deceased and assured their patients that they worked with anonymous donors.
The management of the Alrijne hospital has described the actions of the gynecologist Jos Beek as “unacceptable”. On a web page opened to explain what happened, it is indicated that in June 2021 the Fiom organization -specialized in issues of unwanted pregnancies and paternity- discovered the DNA match in 21 children born to patients of the gynecologist and one of their recognized children . The mothers and their descendants always believed that the treatment had been done with anonymous semen donations, “as far as we know at the moment, and we are concerned about their emotional state given the shock that all this entails,” they explain at the center. Its managers do not know how many women were treated in total because the files have already been destroyed. However, they do not rule out “the discovery of dozens of descendants of the gynecologist Beek.” To find out, an independent investigation is underway with results expected in the summer of 2022.
Fertility treatments were a novelty in the Netherlands in the 1970s and did not have a national protocol until two decades later. “There were few rules and less visibility than today, since we have audits, and this could have contributed to what happened,” Peter Jue, a member of the board of directors of the Alrijne hospital, explained to the Dutch media. Hence, the three gynecologists involved in this type of deception, who, predictably, did not know each other, were able to hide their actions.
On the other hand, since 2004, the figure of the anonymous sperm donor no longer exists. The clinics are obliged to give this information to a foundation that has a national database open for this purpose. Children thus conceived can look for their biological parents from the age of 16. Although semen donations cannot exceed 25 per person, there have been cases in which the donor exceeded this figure for having gone to several clinics, thus violating the regulations. In 2017 it was learned that a single donor visited 11 centers and was the confirmed father of at least 102 children.
In 2017, the case of gynecologist Jan Karbaat, who died in 2017, was uncovered in the Netherlands. He had a fertility clinic in Rotterdam, and he not only fraudulently used his own semen to deceive mothers. He also used samples from various anonymous donors with the same patient, even when they asked that her children be from one in case of several pregnancies. On other occasions, he did not analyze the semen for possible inherited disorders, which later turned up. The third doctor in the same situation was named Jan Wildschut, who worked in the municipality of Zwolle, in the northeast of the Netherlands. Between 1981 and 1993 he did the same thing as his colleagues: he hid the fact that his semen was his and his sons discovered it by looking for the data of the person they believed to be an anonymous donor. In both cases, several descendants have met and maintain contact.
#Uncovered #Netherlands #case #gynecologist #semen #fertility #treatments