A nine-month review by the Danish Patient Safety Authority has found systematic failures in warning donor mothers that their children may be at risk of serious genetic disease.
The review of the Danish fertility sector was published by Styrelsen for Patientsikkerhed and reported on September 18 by DR. It concludes that over the past ten years, potentially life-saving messages have not always reached women treated with donor sperm.
The inspection was launched after DR’s reporting on the donor known as “Kjeld” from European Sperm Bank. Without knowing it, he passed on a serious genetic defect to some of the more than 200 children he fathered across several countries.
Four failures identified
When a hidden hereditary disease is found in a donor, the sperm bank blocks him and alerts the fertility clinics. The clinics must then contact the women they treated with that donor’s sperm. According to the report, that has far from always happened.
The authority asked clinics whether they had warned all affected women over the past decade. A number of fertility clinics and gynecologists were not aware that they had any duty to inform the women at all. Those clinics only began contacting women after the authority reached out to them in December 2025.
Records on women treated with donor sperm must be kept for 30 years. When a clinic closes, it must hand the records to another clinic. The report states that the receiving clinic is often unaware that it also takes over the duty to inform affected women.
Private fertility clinics typically have no access to e-Boks. They therefore use phone calls, email or letters, but their contact details for former patients are not always up to date. The clinics are frequently uncertain whether a message reached the right woman, the authority writes.
There is no rule requiring clinics to obtain confirmation from the woman. The clinics’ answers show that a number of women do not react to the notifications, according to the report. In some cases, the authority found that records could not be located at all.
Data has been lost through old paper journals and transitions to new IT systems. As stated in the report, it is not possible in every case to account for which women were treated with sperm from a given donor. In a separate report, DR noted the same failures in the transfer of patient records from closed clinics.
Health Minister Ida Auken commented on the findings on TV Avisen on Wednesday evening. She described the failure to pass on warnings about hereditary disease to mothers and donor children as an ugly case. The case follows earlier findings that a Danish sperm bank broke Danish law in relation to 81 donors.
