Online Reporter
LONDON. — Hanging up my husband’s newly ironed shirts in his wardrobe, I spotted something strange hidden behind the rail of clothes.
It was a plastic sample pot, the sort you usually only see at a doctor’s surgery when someone has to give a specimen. Inside was sperm.
Next to it sat a folder stuffed with paperwork. One of the forms had a woman’s name on it, and in that moment, the penny dropped.
As I put two and two together, my stomach turned.
Eyes stinging with fury, I flew down the stairs and confronted David, 45, with the vial.
“Why do you need to give a sperm sample?” I demanded.
His answer left me stunned and sickened; it was so unthinkable.
He confessed that, for the last six years, he had been a secret sperm donor, making hundreds of donations to multiple women — and fathering ten children.
My blood ran cold as he admitted something even worse: “Some donations have been done ‘the old-fashioned way’ . . . through intercourse.”
Although repugnant, what he was doing is, horrifyingly, not as rare as you might think.
As the UK grapples with the cost-of-living crisis, a basic private IVF package can cost between £3,500 and £4,500, leaving many desperate people unable to start a family.
Increasingly, women are turning to Facebook groups for help.
One I found, called Sperm Donors UK, has more than 16,000 members, and there are dozens of similar online communities where men like my husband offer donations.
The revelation that he’d had sex with strangers left me questioning everything I thought I knew about the man I’d met 20 years earlier while working in a supermarket together.
I was 39, and he was 24. What began as a friendship slowly turned into something more, and within a year, we were together.
I already had five children, while he had a son aged ten, but he insisted he was happy with the family we already had.
So in summer 2007, 14 months after meeting, we moved into our own place with my five children, who were aged from 13 to 24, marrying quietly the following year.
David had given up his retail job just before we got married due to anxiety and, as my retail management role was well-paid, he became a stay-at-home dad and husband.
While I worked 12-hour shifts, he held the fort at home doing all the chores like cooking and cleaning.
His son lived primarily with his mum, visiting often, and my children’s father had died, so he was a loving father figure to them.
Life was good. We enjoyed a healthy sex life and friends would say we were the perfect couple. I was so happy — and he told me all the time that he was too.
But now everything had changed.
‘‘Hundreds of women received his sperm . . . he never insisted on money’’
As David walked into the lounge after our confrontation, he collapsed on the sofa, admitting he had a pregnancy fetish and wanted to feel like a “hero” for bringing kids into the world.
David had been a member of seedy Facebook groups where he had been offering — and then sending — his sperm to “clients” for six years when I went out to work.
He admitted it began when he saw a TV show about sperm donors and became curious, finding the Facebook groups while Googling.
He even had secret names and aliases on Facebook — it was all so sordid.
He would collect a sample and then take buses, but never very far, to deliver his semen to women desperately hoping to expand their families but without the means to pay for sperm from a proper clinic.
I was none the wiser as this would all happen while I was at work.
He’d even kept a paper trail. The folder I’d found contained his donation records.
And there had been hundreds of women who had received his sperm, with ten children born, to his knowledge, from these.
But he hadn’t done it for money. He insisted he had never received any.
It was just for his own gratification.
I was stunned as he explained about meeting customers on street corners and in hotel rooms while I was out grafting for us.
He didn’t seem to care that many donors were married, he was sure they weren’t vulnerable.
The sex act itself seemed to hold no interest for him, he was just happy it meant he was providing his sperm.
He admitted recipients were young women in their 20s and 30s — either in heterosexual couples or same-sex partnerships — and desperate for babies.
He travelled as far as 25 miles away, so the mothers all lived pretty close.
I balked when he admitted he even advertised for “natural insemination”, which meant having unprotected sex with other women, and he did this on five occasions.
I felt sick. We had an active sex life.
‘‘I could easily have an STD’’
“I could have a sexually transmitted disease,” I thought out loud.
He told me he had been tested and was clean, but I couldn’t believe he would put me at risk in that way.
“Have you met your children?” I asked. But he said no, and that the mothers never got in touch after donation unless to state that they had a baby.
He didn’t seem bothered that he could be financially responsible for these kids because the insemination had not been done through a clinic.
It was all too much and I needed to be as far away from him as possible.
I took my handbag, jumped in my car and drove from our home in Edinburgh to my eldest daughter’s house in Southampton. The long journey was a blur.
Maxine, 44, could not believe what her kindly stepdad had been doing in secret either. It was so difficult to comprehend.
I stayed with her and my three granddaughters — Lily, four, Sara, three, and Jane, two — for four weeks, calling in sick to work, barely eating or sleeping.
My life had become some horrible nightmare I could not wake up from.
David called incessantly, I answered the calls but simply listened to his begging for forgiveness before hanging up.
I only returned home because our dog was having behavioural issues and needed care. — Sun Club
