Donor 7069
By members of the EBU Investigative Journalism Network
Published on 10 December 2025
For 17 years, a Danish man's sperm was sold to fertility clinics across Europe, resulting in at least 197 children being born, despite legal limits on number of births per donor in some countries.
In 2023 a new and potentially deadly gene mutation was discovered in a portion of his sperm cells, triggering an international alert to health authorities and fertility clinics. Two years later, as doctors race to offer early screening and potentially life-saving advice, some of the children still haven't been reached.
One donor, 67 clinics, 14 countries, at least 197 children
Donor 7069, alias ‘Kjeld’, started donating at the Copenhagen branch of the European Sperm Bank (ESB) as a student in 2005, after passing all medical tests. The TP53 genetic mutation, which dramatically raises the risk of cancer, could not be detected at the time, given that it was present in a very small percentage of his sperm cells.
His gametes were used to conceive 49 children in at least 33 Danish families until 2013. At the time, a non-binding recommendation from national authorities capped at 25 the number of families using sperm from one donor in Denmark. According to Danish health authorities, his sperm was also used to conceive 50 children with non-resident women treated at Danish clinics.
‘Kjeld's’ sperm was shipped to 14 clinics in Belgium and used in fertility treatments for 38 women in 11 clinics. It resulted in 53 children, exceeding the country’s legal limit of six families per donor. Many of these women traveled from France, Germany or the Netherlands for the treatments.
The case of the Danish donor triggered a Ministry of Health inquiry into Belgium’s fertility industry, revealing that a further 28 Danish donors were blocked between 2022 and 2025, due to risk of hereditary disease. Of the blocked donors, 27 came from ESB and one from its competitor, Danish Cryos International, the self-styled ‘world’s biggest sperm bank’.
In Spain, where the sperm was sold to four clinics, health authorities have confirmed that it was used to conceive 35 children, including 10 Spanish families and 25 women who traveled for treatment, in addition to six pregnancies that didn’t reach term. Three of the 25 children tested are positive for the mutation, and one of them is sick, while the status of the remaining 10 children is unknown.
In Greece seven clinics received the Danish donor's sperm. The authorities have not replied to our freedom of information requests, citing legal confidentiality issues. In November 2020, a Greek doctor specializing in child cancer, whom we spoke to but who prefers to be anonymous, encountered the TP53 mutation in three children of the same family, all conceived via IVF in Greek clinics from this donor. One of the children is sick with cancer. In 2023 he met a fourth child from the same donor who is also carrying the mutation.
In Germany, the donor’s sperm was shipped to three clinics and resulted in the birth of two children, according to national health authorities. One of them is sick. Other German women underwent treatment in Belgium clinics with sperm from the same donor.
At least eight women from Sweden received fertility treatment outside the country with this donor’s sperm, but the total number of children born is unknown. We have been able to confirm that some of these children are battling cancer, though families prefer we do not disclose the numbers.
According to the latest information provided by Danish health authorities, Donor 7069's sperm was also sold to Ireland, Poland, Albania and Kosovo, where no children were born from it according to official sources. Authorities in Cyprus, Georgia, Hungary and North Macedonia, where it was also made available, have not replied to our requests.
There is no law limiting the number of children that can be born to a single sperm donor worldwide.
The call arrived on a Friday morning, when she was at work. “My cell phone shows the name of a Belgian city when it rings. I recognize the name of this city because the only time I ever went there was to be inseminated 14 years ago. I immediately recoil in surprise as I look at my phone, thinking, 'Why are they calling me?'
Céline (not her real name), the single mother of a teenage girl, recalls from her apartment in Paris the shock she felt when she found out in June of this year that the child she conceived in a Belgian fertility clinic in 2011 might have inherited a potentially deadly gene mutation from her biological father. The donor of the sperm that was used in Celine’s treatment had passed all the medical checks, but hidden in up to 20% of his sperm cells, and unknown to him, was a mutated version of the TP53 gene, which is the body’s natural defense against tumors. If a child is made with the affected sperm cells, they will carry this mutation. “If you have a mutation (pathogenic variant) in this key gene in the body, then all your cells start at a disadvantage”, said Clare Turnbull, professor of cancer genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. “It is a minority of individuals, in particular women, who remain cancer free to the end of their lives.”
Céline says the clinic, whose name she does not want revealed, didn't offer her counseling or explain that there were other families affected by the same risk, as they had used the same sperm donor. When she researched the case she was horrified to find that her daughter had scores of half-siblings across Europe. “I never thought about the question of my child's brothers or sisters, half-brothers, half-sisters”, she said. “I didn't receive any information about the number of families who could potentially have the same donor, or about any regulations.”
There are dozens of other families around Europe who are in the same situation as Céline. Sperm from the Danish Donor 7069 alias ‘Kjeld’, was made available by the European Sperm Bank (ESB) to 67 clinics in 14 countries between 2006 and 2023, when it was blocked from the market.
Using data from freedom of information requests to national health authorities and interviews with doctors, parents and clinics our journalists can now confirm this donor’s sperm was used to conceive at least 197 children. In Denmark alone, 'Kjeld's' sperm was used in fertility clinics to conceive 99 children born to 50 mothers living in Denmark and 49 abroad. In Belgium 53 children were born in 38 families, including Belgian and foreign women, and in Spain 35 children where conceived, of which 10 were born in Spain despite a national legal limit of six children born per donor. "One of the main reasons is the mass distribution by the Danish bank, who did not consider the outcome of the use of these donations", said the Spanish Ministry of Health, "this is essential for the management of a gamete bank". The ESB admitted that “the limits for how many families a donor can be used for have been exceeded in some countries both in the specific case regarding TP53 and in other cases. This is partly due to inadequate reporting from the clinics, non-robust systems and fertility tourism. We are in dialogue with the authorities in Denmark and Belgium about this." ESB also said that those families affected had their "deepest sympathy".
There is no international legal limit for children born from the same donor, and sperm banks can set voluntary worldwide caps for the use of their sperm samples. The ESB states on its website that “The majority of our donors have a limit of 75 families, but in selected markets (the UK, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands) we also offer donors with a worldwide limit of 25 families”. Cryos International, (the other major player in commercial European sperm banks) told reporters in June that they have no worldwide family limit.
Sperm from donors with lower family limits costs more; donor sperm for only one family lists at a starting price of 39,000 Euros for ten sperm straws in the ESB website and costs around 50,000 euros at Cryos. For the equivalent amount of sperm with no family limits, ESB prices start at just over 6000 euros. Last November, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) recommended "the immediate introduction of an EU-wide limit of 50 families per donor”.
"Céline" (not her real name), a French single mother who had a child with sperm from Donor 7069. Her daughter carries the TP53 mutation. Photo by RTBF
Sperm from Donor 7069 has been blocked for use since November 2023, when the ESB performed further tests on his samples after doctors reported seeing children of this donor who carried the TP53 mutation. Some of these children already had cancer. The DNA alteration is known as Li Fraumeni Syndrome, an inherited genetic disorder, which can also be passed on by these children to their own future children. “It's a very, very severe and rare hereditary predisposition to cancer, and it's characterized by a wide tumor spectrum,” said Edewige Kasper, an oncogenetics biologist at Rouen University who leads scientific research on this case. “We have many children that have already developed cancer, we have some children that have developed two different cancers and some of them have already died at a very early age.”
Kasper and her colleagues from the European GENTURIS network, which studies genetic tumor risks, are appealing for help to locate all the children, to offer testing and potentially life-saving clinical monitoring. They say that regular MRIs, ultrasounds and special attention to the children’s symptoms and lifestyle would increase these patients’ chances of survival.
In response to journalists' questions, ESB confirmed that the “new, previously undescribed TP53 mutation” revealed in the 2023 tests is present "only in a small part of the donor's sperm cells and not in the rest of the body”, according to their statement. “A mutation of this type is not detected preventively by genetic screening. When we suspected and later confirmed a gonadal mosaicism in 2023, the donor was immediately blocked and we notified authorities and clinics in accordance with the law. The clinics are responsible for informing the patients”, said ESB.
Fertility clinics were notified in November 2023 through the Rapid Alert System for Human Tissues and Cells (RATC), which reaches all EU and EEA countries. But the French mother Céline says she only received a call more than a year and a half later, in June 2025. “They told me that they had migrated their computer system two years ago and had lost my file, and that they had just found it manually.” In response to our questions, the Belgian clinic concerned said they had contacted and informed Céline “as soon as it was possible”.
In some cases the parents didn't learn the news from the clinics but instead via a network of families with children from the same donor. “When I was informed by another mother and didn't get a letter from the clinic nor the sperm bank, I wrote in the group if there were others who had not been informed”, said Dorte Kellerman, a Danish single mother who is part of a social network group of 16 parents of children from this donor in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. “About half had no notice of this going on.” Her own 16-year old son has tested negative for the mutation.
According to health authorities, some of the more than 100 families who received treatment in Denmark and Belgium are still not aware of the risk. “It is problematic that we currently have families who have not been informed”, said Bente Møller, Chief physician for Supervision and Guidance at the Danish Patient Safety Authority.
Møller said that compliance with donor children limits “is a trust-based system” where “the sperm bank has the duty to comply with the quotas specified both in Denmark and abroad. “We were surprised that the scale is as large as it is here, and it is completely unacceptable. We do not track the specific numbers, but we monitor that the sperm banks have systems in place that allow them to keep track of it.”
The ESB declined to give GENTURIS’ doctor Kasper and our journalists a total number of potentially affected children, citing the donor's data protection rights. “ESB does not inform and does not share patient information and donor information with individual third parties – not even when this involves a researcher from France –”, they said in a statement, “as the overall responsibility for tracing and reporting lies with the national authorities and the treating clinics, cf. the EU Directive’s Rapid Alert system”.
But doctors insist they must find the children. “If we don't have this total number, we will continue to search, and continue to have some worried parents that haven't received letters, but they have (for example) conceived the child in Belgium during this period,” said Dr. Kasper. “If we have the total number, we can say, ‘OK, no, you can relax, your children aren’t affected by the sperm donor, but right now we can't say that when we have a worried parent on the phone”.
The global fertility services market is valued at over 45 billion euros, according to research by Grand Market Research. Comparable estimates have been reported by other financial analysis firms, all projecting an average growth of 7 to 9% over the next decade, with regulation's impact on the sector being described as “low”. With declining fertility rates and changes in family structures, Europe is one of the industry's largest markets. Legal experts argue that current EU legislation does not adequately address critical ethical and medical issues that have arisen as patients seek treatment across borders.
“There are substantive issues such as the maximum number of children born to a donor, or whether compensation for donation is allowed or not”, said Marc-Abraham Puig Hernández, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “All this is left to the discretion of the states, and we may find that Spain says the maximum number of children born to a donor is six, but that in the country of origin (of the donor) it is regulated differently,” he explains.
According to the new EU rules on Substances of Human Origin (SoHO), which are set to take effect in August 2027, sperm banks will have to keep donor registries to monitor compliance with national donor limits. However, it does not impose restrictions on the total number of children per donor across European borders.
Some sperm banks support the establishment of an international registry to track and document the number of donor-conceived children, which would facilitate tracing families when a donor is blocked. “Worldwide, that’s an utopian ideal, but perhaps we can really manage to create an EU-wide database within EU legislation and then synchronise it”, said Ann-Kathrin Klym, Head of Laboratory at the Berliner Samenbank in Germany.
“What one wonders about is the system as a whole. It is entirely foreseeable that something will eventually come up with some donor, that is simply the nature of things, as we all carry something”, says doctor Snorri Einarsson, CEO and owner of Iceland’s biggest fertility clinic Livio. “Unfortunately, there is often a lack of oversight, and the total number of donor-conceived children is not always known”, Einarsson said.
Since 2013, a total of 263 Rapid Alerts have been issued regarding Danish sperm donors, according to annual reports from the European Commission, corroborated by Danish authorities. Denmark is often dubbed the "world's sperm donor capital."
GENTURIS is also calling for legislative reforms, including stricter limits per donor and enhanced oversight of an industry that, according to the latest data from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, conducted over 1.1 million assisted reproductive treatments across 37 European countries in 2021.
“This case shows that the rules are not being followed”, said Svetlana Bajalica Lagercrantz, an Adjunct Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “It feels very risky and completely wrong that a donor can have so many children. It is far outside normal biology, and it has such large consequences, so we need to look at the legislation and what the sperm banks’ obligation to the healthcare system is”. Making the case for tighter rules doesn't mean Bajalica Lagercrantz is against donation - far from it, she thinks it's vitally necessary - and insists that the individuals concerned are not to blame. “The donor has done nothing wrong. And in general, the donor children are just as healthy as any other children”.
If you think that your family may be affected by any of the events described in this story, please contact your fertility clinic or national health authorities.
A cross-border investigation
In May 2025, Dr Edwige Kasper, an oncogenetic biologist from the French Rouen University Hospital, presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Milan the case of 67 children conceived from the same donor, ten of whom had developed cancer. International news organizations including The Guardian or CNN published stories at the time on the medical study. The investigative team at public broadcaster DR started digging into the story, as they knew the sperm came from the Danish European Sperm Bank. They filed freedom of information requests with the Danish Patient Safety Authority (STPS) and other health authorities in almost 20 European countries, to obtain official data on the clinics that received Donor 7069’s gametes.
Together, we pored over official documents, spoke with parents in different countries, interviewed doctors, fertility clinics, legal experts and national health authorities across Europe, sharing research and recorded interviews among the team. As the information came in, the number of children affected kept increasing. From the initial 67 reported in May, we were now at almost 200, and this without access so far to official figures from key countries like Greece where seven clinics received the sperm.
It soon became clear that there had been issues with compliance and oversight at several steps of the “system of trust”governing sperm donation for assisted reproduction, as described by Danish health authorities on the record. DR handled communication with two key sources - the Danish health authorities and the European Sperm Bank - who were given our findings in advance and offered the right to reply. ESB declined a recorded interview and their replies, sent by email, feature in this coverage.
After two months of joint investigation, reporting and fact-checking, more than 12 news organizations simultaneously published the story.
"Working together in the EBU's Investigative Journalism Network has truly shown that collaboration is so much more than the sum of its parts”, said Erling Groth, documentaries editor at DR. “VRT in Belgium, NOS in the Netherlands, and DR in Denmark contributed with sources and a large amount of research, but from there, the story just kept growing with the help of other reporters. We would never have had the resources to research and contact sources throughout Europe on our own, but in this process it has been possible because we have been working together. And my impression is that we are only just getting started. This story has so many facets that still need to be investigated."
The Team
Project Coordination: Belén López Garrido (EBU)
Reporting team: Hedda Berglund (SVT), Naomi Conrad (DW), Borja Díaz-Merry (RTVE), Kristina Edblom (SVT), Martin Gaarder (NRK), James Gallagher (BBC), Alice Gauvin (France Télévisions), Erling Groth (DR), Fien Macken (VRT), Valéry Mahy (RTBF), Jenny Matikainen (Yle), Iliana Mier (EBU), Asger Mow (DR), Lars Karelius Noer (NRK), Anna Nordbeck (SVT), Judith Pennarts (Nieuwsuur/NOS), Jonatan Placing (DR), Pilar Requena (RTVE), Lili Rutai (EBU), Nikolaj Sig Skov (DR), Birgitta Schülke (DW), Nathalie Truswell (BBC), Amalie Thorlund Jepsen (DR), Martin Thür (ORF), Natalie Truswell (BBC), Urður Örlygsdóttir (RUV), Lauwke Vandendriessche (VRT).
Data journalist: Luc Martinon
Sub-editor: Kate de Pury
Web design: Derek Bowler
A report by the EBU Investigative Journalism Network, available to EBU members for republication. For conditions, please contact ein@eurovision.net
This story was published on 10 December 2025
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