This week, Leiden hospital in the Netherlands revealed the latest chapter in an ever-expanding corpus of scandal surrounding the historical operation of fertility clinics.The paternity of at least 21 children conceived through the clinic has been traced to a single doctor, Dr Jos Beek (d. 2019), who worked there between 1973 and 1998. Dr Beek inseminated his patients in the clinic using his own sperm while telling these women it came from anonymous donors.
In addition to the 21 individuals Dr Beek is known to have fathered, there may be “dozens more” yet to find.
It is now known that at least two other doctors from the Netherlands – Dr Jan Karbaat and Dr Jan Wildschut (d. 2009) – cheated in the evolutionary stakes by fathering multiple children (at least 49, in the case of Karbaat and at least 17 in the case of Wildschut) through their unsuspecting patients.
The Donor Child Foundation, a voluntary group that assists donor-conceived children, avers knowledge of two further Dutch doctors implicated in similar “doctor conception”. Dr Donald Cline, in Indiana, fathered more than 50 children; Dr Norman Barwin in Ottawa, Canada, at least 11; Dr Cecil Jacobson, perhaps as many as 75.
The case of Jacobson involves multiple types of fraud: he injected his patients with the hormone hCG (a hormone normally released in pregnancy) which produced false positive results to fertility tests. These allowed Jacobson to claim his fertility treatment had been successful and to invoice his patients accordingly. The pretence could be maintained through the early stages of pregnancy while Jacobson identified a “foetus” in granular ultrasound images, pointing to shapes later found by a court to have been nothing more than nearby organs or faecal matter. At some point, these women who had never in fact been pregnant, would be told by Jacobson that their babies had died.
Others of Jacobson’s patients were successful in becoming pregnant using sperm ostensibly sourced from anonymous, screened donors, whose identity was known only to Jacobson. The courts later heard that no such donor program had ever been established; Jacobson supplied the sperm himself.
Source: Fertility clinics’ past breaches exposed – Women’s Forum Australia