Adam Hooper hosts regular meet-ups for the families he has helped and has a Facebook group where they can communicate.
Australian Adam Hooper, 39, first came across the idea of donation more than a decade ago, just after the birth of his second daughter.
This week, a man who claims to have fathered more than 180 children was named by a family court judge to warn of the dangers of unregulated sperm donation.
Robert Charles Albon – who goes by the name “Joe Donor” – applied for parental rights to a child he had, according to the court, met once for 10 minutes. While Albon had advertised his services on social media and promised to leave the parenting to the child’s mother, the judge ruled that “women and children appear to be almost a commodity to him as he sets about increasing the number of his children around the globe – China, USA, Argentina, Australia and the UK to name just some… The public and vulnerable women seeking to get pregnant should know that is the case and they risk a similar horror story”.
Albon has become the latest poster boy for spurious mass sperm donation – where risks not only include legal threats (in the UK, the donor is considered the child’s father), but consanguinity, where donor-conceived offspring who do not know they are related develop an attraction to one another. There is also the potential emotional fallout of finding out they have dozens of half-siblings dotted around the globe; and that bad actors can capitalise on the absence of regulation for private donations (which can be advertised as easily as a Facebook post), pushing desperate women for funds, or insisting they conceive the “natural” way, rather than via insemination. In Britain the law stipulates that donors to clinics can only help 10 families – but once men go off-grid, there is no telling how far their seed might spread.
While cases like Albon’s highlight the pitfalls of private donation, Adam Hooper, 39, says that not all serial donors are made equal. Over the past decade, he has helped more than 20 families to have over 30 children, in Australia, where he lives, providing samples to women who find him online, which are then administered via insemination. He hosts mass meet-ups for the families he has helped every three to six months, and has a Facebook group in which they can all communicate.
In the past he has spoken to Albon, who was living in the north-east of England, as another prominent serial donor. He describes him as “not the most physical specimen out there; he’s no Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth”. Albon’s donor numbers are so staggering, Hooper says, because “there’s very little screening”. Albon himself has previously claimed that his motive for donating is to help create life and said he did not make any money from his donations.
Hooper says of his own approach: “I would like to get to know someone, know that the child’s going to be in a good home, raised with good values and good morals,” he explains. “I need an understanding that when I’m handing my DNA over to someone, that the child’s going to be left in good care.”
In the UK, donors to clinics are given a £45 ($99) stipend for their time (though private arrangements can earn men far more); Hooper says he has never taken a penny. What drives him? “This is not a money-making exercise,” he says. “This is completely altruistic.”
Hooper first came across the idea of donation more than a decade ago, just after the birth of his second daughter. At a function, he met a lesbian couple who shared their struggles to start a family, and something clicked. “Being a father is an amazing thing, and if you give that gift to someone who’s really wanting it and is going to make a good parent, that could only be a good thing in the world.”
He decided to become a spokesman for the benefits of sperm donation, setting up an online community, Sperm Donation World, in his native Australia (it now has offshoots in the UK and US, New Zealand, the Philippines, and more). In 2015 his first donor child was born. At the time, Hooper was married. He says his then-wife was supportive and that they later split for unrelated reasons.
While Hooper sees his efforts as vital in the age of older first-time mothers and more families relying on alternative conception routes, his criticisms of regulated clinics have aligned him with a growing cohort of “sperm bros”, who sometimes use outlandish methods to spread the word. (For Hooper, this included a two-month tour of New Zealand in 2021 to promote his donation philosophy.) To him and other acolytes, being aware of all the children they have fathered (rather than the anonymity afforded to recipients in clinics) is better for all involved.
That includes when donor children reach three or four, the stage at which he receives a raft of messages from mothers asking if they can meet for coffee, as “the child keeps asking about you or wanting to know about you, and is curious”. He happily obliges; burning questions tend to be around his favourite colour (green) or his favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Donatello).
His feelings towards his own two girls, 14 and 10, are entirely different from the biological children he has helped to create, he adds, but they are “on board” with his pursuit, attending his meet-ups and pushing their younger half-siblings on the swings. Of the younger children, “I would never tell them to call me ‘Dad’” (some of the parents have since dubbed him “DD” or “Donor Daddy”), and he is relaxed about the future relationships they might go on to have. “Each child is going to come up with different feelings and different ways of how they see me as a person… some will probably want to talk to me more than others. Some will maybe want to go to a football game when they’re older, or [have me] stay in contact as a family friend or an uncle figure.”
The words “God complex” are often attached to men like Hooper, with the most recent prolific case being that of Jonathan Meijer, the Dutch donor alleged to have fathered more than 1000 children. (He denies this, stating he has sired a mere 550.) In 2023 Meijer, a wannabe YouTube personality with flowing Viking locks whose videos feature topics such as eating raw meat and cryptocurrency, was banned by a Dutch court from making any further donations, and warned he could be fined £83,000 per infraction.
Last year, a Netflix documentary highlighted both his globe-spanning genealogical web and the spurious behaviour some mass donors appear to make sport, such as lying about how many donations they have made (Meijer assured families that he had given only a few samples, rather than hundreds within a small geographical radius. He describes claims made in the film as “disgusting” and “deceptive”, and is suing Netflix.)
It is true that sperm donors are often bringing a lifetime of joy to those who would otherwise never have been able to have a child. Yet there is something disquieting about those who tally their vast progeny, which Hooper says can leave donor-conceived children feeling like “numbers and trophies; a notch in the belt”. “God complex” is a term that is wrongly applied to serial donors, he says. But he believes that mass donation can be a form of addiction. “Some people get addicted to gambling, some people get addicted to alcohol and drugs. Some people do get addicted to that feeling of making other people happy.”
Still, for the donor, it comes at a cost. Hooper was banned from two dating apps for mentioning his donor status on his profile; he has had to leave barbecues when a woman he has agreed to help has messaged to say she is ovulating. “It takes a lot out of your everyday life to be a donor, and a lot of discipline” – being on-call at all times, abstaining from sex so as to be ready to spring into action, and undergoing regular sexual health testing to check nothing could be passed on to a donor family – a situation he acknowledges is “not normal” among ordinary daters.
Hooper hasn’t donated in the last year or two; stored samples he has already given could lead to the births of yet more children. He is content with those he has already brought into the world, and has mostly drawn a line under the past decade, he says. But “I’ll never say never to helping anyone new.”
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