The Mail on Sunday can today unmask an anonymous sperm donor who boasts that an astonishing 32 women are expecting his babies and another 15 are about to take pregnancy tests after asking him for donations.
Declan Rooney, 42, claims he is ‘Britain’s most successful sperm donor’ and says he has donated sperm to two more women who have already given birth.
He also has six children born naturally with three different mothers – meaning he has the potential to be the father of 55 children.
The former web designer runs his website under the alias Upton North and advertises himself on Facebook to single women, lesbians and couples desperate for a baby.
Last night experts called for an investigation into the unregulated and potentially dangerous service he provides to women he meets online, with one sociologist saying that Mr Rooney was ‘determinedly engineering a one-man eugenics movement’.
Medical experts fear he could create a ‘ticking timebomb’ by flouting official guidelines for sperm donation, which limit the number of families that legitimate sperm donors can help create to a maximum of ten.
As well as growing up without knowing their father, his children will potentially live close to each other, meaning that half-brothers and sisters may meet and unwittingly have children of their own.
The murky world of unregulated sperm donation has come under increasing scrutiny from watchdogs as the internet offers men and women easy opportunities to meet up anonymously and create families – without needing to qualify or pay for expensive private fertility treatment, overseen by doctors. A cycle of artificial insemination costs £850 privately and is only offered to selected patients on the NHS.
Rooney set up his anonymous site last March, offering to visit women in their homes or hotel within a 50-mile radius of his Middlesbrough home and give them a sample of his sperm in a specimen pot for them to inseminate themselves.
His website, which was taken down last night after he was contacted by The Mail on Sunday, stated: ‘I am willing to help either through artificial insemination or naturally with no strings attached.’ Despite that wording, he told this newspaper that he does not have sex with the women.
Sperm donations are not illegal unless a man charges for the service, but the risks of private donations include reports of women being abused, pressured into sex or forced to hand over money when they meet a donor.
Rooney, who insists he acts within the law, says he only charges ‘expenses’ and that his motives are purely ‘altruistic’. He said: ‘I like helping people’. And he added: ‘Have you changed anyone’s lives for the better?’
Since becoming a sperm donor, Rooney says two lesbian women in the North East have given birth to his children. He said: ‘When I was told, I was really happy for the mothers. I like meeting new people, I like hearing their stories, I like problem-solving. I’m quite an altruistic person. I haven’t done anything illegal.
‘I set myself up as a private donor and have been inundated – I have 5,000 emails. If they are too far out of the area I say no to them. If you say you’re a sperm donor, people say it’s really smutty, but if someone said they were an egg donor it’s like “Wow that’s amazing”. There were a few days when I had a success each day. It’s a good feeling.’ (Dailymail)
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