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I was so desperate to be a mum that I paid a stranger £50 for his sperm on Facebook. Now I dread the day I have to tell my children the awful truth about their 'father'
Alison Ready's seven-year-old daughter, Isobel, is outdoorsy and fearless; her son Robert, four, a Lego fanatic. The love she feels for both knows no bounds – but it is marred by a mounting sense of guilt.
Because they were conceived with donor sperm Alison sourced – not from a licensed clinic – but from the febrile fertility marketplace of social media and a serial donor who has boasted of fathering 800 children. 'I was so excited that my dream to have children could come true, I didn't think about the implications,' she admits.
Yet now the early fog of motherhood has lifted, the magnitude of her decision is beginning to sink in.
The donor, Simon Watson, 50, charges £50 per pot in expenses for what he describes as his 'magic potion' on Facebook. Outwardly an affable divorced man from Luton, in 2016 he said he hoped to 'crack 1,000' children in four years.
Simon Watson, 50, charges £50 per pot in expenses for what he describes as his 'magic potion' on Facebook
And given his most recent post in June announced the arrival of five more babies in a month, it's safe to say he has probably met his target. You would think the prospect of your children having hundreds of half-siblings might deter you but, incredibly, Alison was encouraged by Watson's success rate. Then 33, single and unable to afford a fertility clinic, she was blinded by her desire for motherhood. 'It was so exciting that it was this easy,' she reflects. 'In retrospect, I was so naive.'
Watson might flaunt screenshots of clean bills of health online, but he's not subject to the stringent health checks that donors to fertility clinics require, putting Alison's children at greater risk of hereditary disorders. And because he wasn't donating through a regulated clinic, he is, in the eyes of the law, her children's legal father.
What's more, thanks to the growing popularity of home DNA testing kits, which reveal biological relatives, it may be only a matter of time before Alison's children find out they have several hundred half-siblings, the psychological ramifications of which could potentially be catastrophic.
When it comes to telling her children about their biological father, Alison, now 40, whose name the Mail has changed to protect her family's anonymity, is feeling reticent.
'Obviously, it's my children's right to know, but I don't want to tell them I 'made' them from Facebook for £50,' she admits. 'Becoming a mother was something I needed on a very basic level and I've got the two most amazing children. But the way I went about having them is not something I intend to tell people. There's a lot of guilt. It's very much my dirty secret.'
So why speak out at all? 'I hope that by telling my story I'll help other women desperate for children to think twice before using an unlicensed donor.'
Now the early fog of motherhood has lifted, the magnitude of Alison Ready's decision is beginning to sink in (file image)
Watson appears an altruistic saviour, posting pictures of newborns and positive pregnancy tests he says grateful women have sent him. But Alison has her doubts. 'He says he wants to help people become parents but I now think it might have something to do with power and ego, and how many times he can spread his seed.
'Now I've thought through the potential consequences for my children, I believe he should be stopped. What he's doing ought to be against the law.'
So where does the law stand on sperm donors? It would be fair to say it feels somewhat toothless. A Netflix documentary, The Man With 1,000 Kids, recently highlighted the growing problem. It documented the horror of parents discovering their Dutch donor Jonathan Meijer may have fathered up to 1,000 children around the world after offering his sperm through Facebook.
Meijer, 42, who admitted having between 550 and 600 children in a Dutch court, was eventually banned from donating sperm and told by the judge he would be fined £85,000 if he flouted the ban.
But Watson, who has said he wants to get the 'world record' in producing offspring, is allowed to continue unchecked. Indeed, he is not breaking any law.
In UK fertility clinics each donor is allowed to donate to a maximum of just ten families. But when a donor has reached this limit, there is nothing to stop them donating again at a clinic abroad or through other means, such as social media. And like Meijer, Watson has donated in licensed clinics as well as via his Facebook account. According to the HFEA (Human Fertilisation And Embryology Authority), which regulates fertility clinics, more than half of new sperm donors registered in the UK in 2020 were from donor imports – sperm brought to the UK from abroad.
The rule limiting donations to UK clinics does not apply overseas, so there is a chance many more children could be (or have been) created worldwide by such donors, says Clare Ettinghausen, Director Of Strategy And Corporate Affairs at the HFEA. She says that, outside its jurisdiction, the HFEA has 'no way of monitoring how many times a donor is used'.
As for payment, donors in Britain are not legally allowed to charge but can claim expenses. In March the HFEA increased sperm donors' permitted expenses from £35 to £45 per clinic visit. Even though the HFEA warns against using unregulated Facebook groups, many women feel compelled to do so. Watson helps run the 9,000-strong group Sperm Donors UK, and also has his own Facebook page, where he posts updates on the babies he's fathered.
There is a growing community of donor-conceived adults seeking better recognition, including British organisation Donor Conceived UK.
But the emphasis is still on the rights of the recipients and donor, with little thought given to the child created. The law was changed in 2005 to grant them access to their donor's identity when they are 18 – but most of those conceived using social media donors are still children and unable to advocate for themselves.
There is nothing to prevent serial donors providing their sperm to women such as Alison, a softly-spoken accounting assistant who lives in the north of England. She says she had wanted to be a mother 'forever – there's never been anything else I've really wanted to do'.
Dutch donor Jonathan Meijer may have fathered up to 1,000 children around the world after offering his sperm through Facebook
When she reached her 30s but had still not found the right partner, she says she 'got to the point where I was ready and thought I'd go it alone'. Her father died of cancer when she was three, 'so a single parent family was normal for me'.
However, donor sperm costs around £1,000 at a fertility clinic and it's an additional £1,000 for one cycle of IUI (intrauterine insemination), the procedure that places sperm inside a woman's uterus.
Not eligible for NHS support – IUI is not routinely offered on the NHS – she 'knew I'd have to find another route'. In late 2016 she confided in a friend, who told her about Watson's Facebook page. 'I would never have thought to look on Facebook,' she says. 'I was just relieved there was another option.'
It seems extraordinary she didn't give the decision more thought, but she is far from alone. Watson, who has three children from two marriages, had recently featured in a BBC documentary in which he claimed: 'I've had way more than 800 children over the years and they're just the ones I know of.'
He said business had 'snowballed' because of the 'ease of Facebook' and insisted he met no hostility to his work. 'When people find out what I do, most people just find it really funny.'
Alison found his 'success' rate encouraging and messaged him. Watson replied within hours. 'He said he could be wherever I needed,' says Alison.
Watson donates fresh sperm, which is not illegal for private donors.
The HFEA, however, requires licensed clinics to test sperm, then freeze it for 180 days before testing again. Only then can it be used. (This is because some diseases may only be detectable after the six-month waiting period.)
Fertility clinics are also legally obliged to offer counselling to both donor and recipient. Alison, of course, received none, and she admits she gave no thought to the fact her child would have hundreds of half-siblings: 'It sounds silly now, but I didn't.'
Watson offered to deliver the sperm to Alison, 100 miles away, in return for his petrol mileage being reimbursed, or said she could come to him in exchange for £50 cash in hand – which he says covers his expenses. Alison drove to meet Watson in 'a random layby' in May 2017. He passed his plastic pot of semen and the syringe he provides to would-be mothers through the window of her car. She did not consider Watson attractive – nor did she give much thought to how he could be reflected in her child's character or appearance. 'I suppose I hoped my child would look like me.'
Watson wished her luck and drove off. Alison found a quiet country lane, put blankets over her car windows, then inseminated herself before driving home. 'I did think, 'What have I just done, could this be real?' she recalls, but adds that even so, it all felt 'so casual for a life-changing event'.
Three weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant. Aside from the friend who suggested Watson, nobody knew the father's identity – she told her family she'd used a 'private donor' and insists even her mother has never asked about the donor: 'Perhaps people were speculating among themselves, but they respected my privacy.'
The early months of motherhood were consumed by love and exhaustion, her own mother too far away to babysit. 'I was very much on my own without anyone to share the load.'
Yet baby Isobel's first smile and first steps eclipsed the sacrifices she'd made and when Alison started yearning for a second child two years later she approached Watson 'because it worked last time'.
Alison, who had a brief relationship that ended when her daughter was a few months old and has been single since, had had no contact with Watson in the interim. When they met in the same layby near his home, there was no flicker of recognition: 'I don't think he remembered me. It was a basic transaction.'
Alison isn't sure when to tell her daughter and son that they were conceived using a donor (File image)
That attempt failed and, more restricted with a toddler in tow, she requested Watson visit her for a second donation. This time he 'produced' his specimen in her bathroom one evening while her daughter was asleep upstairs, because, he said, 'it would be fresher' – a tawdry and risky scenario that Alison says she 'tried not to think about'. Again, he wished her good luck, thanked her for the £50 cash and money to cover his petrol and left.
Finding out she was pregnant 'felt good' says Alison, who gave birth to son Robert alone in hospital during Covid. (She hasn't told Watson she conceived from either donation.)
As Isobel and Robert grew up, she noticed only her own likeness. 'They looked very much like they belonged in my family and motherhood was so all-consuming that when they were small, I didn't think about the fact they were donor-conceived much.'
It is only now their personalities are emerging that their conception troubles her. 'My daughter thrives around my male friends, so I have guilt she doesn't have a father figure,' says Alison, who says neither child has yet asked who their dad is. 'If Isobel is playing she might say 'we don't have a dad', but that's it,' she says.
It is only a matter of time. Although legally, donor-conceived children don't have a right to find out who their donor is until they're 18 (and recipients have no legal obligation to tell their children), research has found they are more likely to happily accept the truth if they're told the basic facts before the age of three.
Alison, however, still isn't sure when to tell her daughter and son. 'I plan to feed them information as they ask for it, not bombard them,' she says. 'I'll start with, 'No, you don't have a dad, but you have a donor,' and see where that goes.'
She doesn't want to reveal Watson's identity until they're in their late teens and 'old enough to try to understand where I was coming from. Hopefully by then they will know I did it with the purest intentions and that it felt like my only option.'
How finding out they are in a 'pod' of 800-plus half-siblings might affect them is unknown. DNA tests have only recently become widespread and most of Watson's offspring – he has been donating since 2000 – are below 18, the minimum age you can take a test without parental consent.
'It's convenient when your 'victims' don't have a voice,' says Eve Wiley, 37, an activist who campaigns for greater regulation.
Eve herself is one of 14 half-siblings, and discovered in adulthood that her donor was her mother's doctor.
He had secretly substituted his own sperm for that of the donor her parents had chosen.
'When you feel you're just a number in a game it's dehumanising,' she says, pointing out that there is a 'grief process' from discovering the deceit surrounding your conception.
There are other risks too, including a well-documented and troubling phenomenon in which siblings, or half-siblings, who meet in adulthood while unaware of their genetic relationship, may confuse their instinctive feelings of familiarity for sexual attraction.
'To be forced into this situation is not fun. It's hard to navigate. When I hear of these sibling pods that are so large, I really feel for them,' Eve says.
There is a broader issue of genetic diversity, she adds, because it will not just be Watson's biological children affected, but their children and grandchildren, meaning tens of thousands of related people perhaps living within a small geographical area.
There is a risk that half-siblings who meet in adulthood while unaware of their genetic relationship may confuse their instinctive feelings of familiarity for sexual attraction
Although Watson says he has children 'all over the world', Alison isn't worried about her children inadvertently starting relationships with half-siblings because she moved from the south to the north of England three years ago. 'We're not 90 minutes away where we could potentially be going to school with a half-sibling and not realise. The chances are a lot less,' she says, admitting, however, that the prospect is 'not nice'.
Her own life, meanwhile, is built on evasion. Alison's brother sometimes does the school pick-up, so, she says, some fellow parents assume he is the father.
She worries about starting a new relationship for fear of telling any new partner the truth.
'I suppose I would eventually, once I was sure they could be trusted, if we were to break up, not to throw it in my children's faces as payback.'
Eve Wiley, the donor-conceived activist, believes mass donation 'absolutely should be illegal' and that it's not just serial donors who are to blame.
She feels licensed clinics must do more to prevent it, too, saying: 'There is no excuse not to have a way to scan each donor's passport, to make sure that clinics are not letting a serial sperm donor in.' If the law cannot stop them, perhaps the threat of financial ruin should.
Given she wants no contact with Watson, Alison doesn't intend to try to take advantage of the fact he is her children's legal father and may under the law have parental responsibility – but she says others might.
'I'm surprised he hasn't been hit for child maintenance. Anyone could knock on his door.
'The world could suddenly crumble on him.'
When the Mail asked Watson if he would like to comment on his ambition to have 1,000 children, his motivation for becoming a sperm donor and what he thought the impact would be on the lives he created, he quickly became threatening. 'I will find you. You won't be able to hide,' he emailed. 'You go after my kids I'll go after your whole family... my hatred for anyone that goes after my descendants will never end.'
His words present quite a contrast to his altruistic social media persona.
And they highlight the importance of increased regulation and support for the women desperate to have a baby by any means possible – and for the many children who will one day have to grapple with the truth about their conception.
Names and some details have been changed.