In case you’ve forgotten your basic junior high biology, those assigned male at birth (and without complications) are constantly producing new sperm — millions of little swimmers every day. It only takes one sperm to fertilize an egg, which are in far less supply as those assigned female at birth produce a finite amount and typically release one egg with every menstrual cycle. Considering it takes nine months to bring a baby to fruition, that means for every one fertilized egg inside of a uterus, sperm has the potential to make hundreds of new lives without impacting the donor’s life in any way whatsoever. The Dutch Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology banned Meijer from donating sperm in the Netherlands back in 2017 after learning of his behavior, but he found his workaround with Cryos and donated internationally. The man was obsessed with spreading his seed, and thousands of people have been impacted by his decisions.
Comedian and activist Laura High, aka “Your Donor Conceived Person of TikTok,” has hailed the docuseries for amplifying how wildly unethical the donor conception industry truly is — something that she and her fellow donor-conceived community members have been desperately trying to draw attention to for years. Meijer took to YouTube to speak out against the doc, claiming that he’s actually only fathered 550 children, and wants to sue. Given the fact Netflix uses words like “possibly” and “potentially,” it doesn’t seem like he has much of a case, and Netflix can add this lawsuit to the pile on top of its current “Baby Reindeer” legal battle.
Meijer’s actions are, to put it kindly, deplorable. Unfortunately, he’s the result of a broken system that fails donor-conceived children (and adults who learn they were donor-conceived later in life). He currently lives in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and declined to participate in the Netflix docuseries.