This documentary you want to see: ‘The Man with 1000 Kids’

After the intense football night on Saturday, I really needed some time to recover from all the tension I had felt. Okay, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but I needed an excuse to lounge on the couch on Sunday and do absolutely nothing. I really wanted to see the new Netflix docu ‘The Man with 1000 Kids’.

With a title like that, you can hardly believe it's really a docu. There have been previous docs about doctors who secretly used their own sperm to conceive children with patients, but even those fertility doctors couldn't manage to create a thousand offspring. This is just about a completely normal Dutch man: Jonathan Meijer. And that's what makes it even more exciting: this story didn't take place in America or some far-off country where such crazy things can happen, no, this story simply started in the Netherlands. Through various websites, he came into contact with women and couples who wanted to become pregnant and were looking for a donor to help them with that. This was done outside of sperm banks, so often he would come to these people's homes to ejaculate into a cup, so they could get to work with his ‘material’. With some women, he even offered to do it the natural way, by simply having sex with them.

The case came to light when several women who had used a sperm donor started talking to each other about the donor who had helped them. They quickly discovered that many of them had dealt with the same donor. In some villages, several of his children even lived, who attended school together! This could obviously cause huge problems in the long run, because if these offspring were to end up together, the risk of congenital defects is enormous; it's essentially incest. The parents of the children realized that the problem wasn't just in the Netherlands when they saw that he was posting various videos on YouTube, showing him in different countries: France, Italy, Sweden, and even Australia. Gradually, more and more parents from those countries also reported to the Facebook page that was set up for peers, or rather: for victims of this man.

In the meantime, the man himself has responded to the documentary. According to him, the number thousand is completely made up. He believes he has only fathered 550 children. As if we would say about that number: ‘Oh, that's not so bad.’ Small detail: he told all parents that they would only be having his fourth child. It's so bizarre that I can't even describe all the details. A must-see, available on Netflix.