fertility fraud

Fertility fraud is an international term for fraud committed in connection with fertility treatment, where a doctor, clinic or donor knowingly uses genetic material without the patient's informed consent or under a false representation of the material's origin, identity or health characteristics. The concept is not anchored in any single national legal system, but is used across jurisdictions as a collective label for this category of reproductive abuse.

The most widespread form is the one in which a fertility doctor substitutes his own sperm for the agreed donor sperm — as in the Donald Cline case, where an American gynaecologist inseminated patients with his own sperm over decades while telling them that anonymous donation from an approved donor was being used. The patients consented to a specific procedure with specific genetic material; that consent was violated without their knowledge.

Another variant is where a donor or intermediary misrepresents the identity behind genetic material — including the number of donations, existing children, health history or genetic risk factors. The Jonathan Meijer case illustrates this: a Dutch sperm donor donated to far more clinics and families than he disclosed, thereby disregarding the limits the clinics and recipients believed they had agreed to.

Legally, fertility fraud is at its core a violation of the informed consent that forms the basis of all legitimate medical treatment. Depending on the jurisdiction, the acts may be prosecuted as fraud, forgery of documents, unlawful medical practice or specific statutory offences. Some US states have introduced targeted legislation — so-called fertility fraud laws — criminalising these acts separately, precisely because existing legislation on sexual assault or fraud did not always cover the conduct adequately.

A central aspect of the concept is the long-term consequences for the children conceived through the treatment. Through DNA testing, these individuals may discover that they are genetically related to a large number of half-siblings, and that their biological origin is fundamentally different from what they and their parents were told. This identity dimension distinguishes fertility fraud from many other forms of fraud and has contributed to the political pressure for specific legislation in several countries.