Costs 'driving women to use unregulated sperm donors'

The high costs of having a child using a sperm donor are driving poor and marginalised women to use unregulated online services rife with "weirdos" and misogynists in order to have a child, experts have said.

- Robyn Vinter

In a ruling released on Wednesday, a Middlesbrough family court judge said a man who claimed to have fathered more than 180 children across the world as an unregistered sperm donor could not have custody of one of the children, a three-year-old.

The girl, from Durham, is the fourth child in the UK that Robert Albon has used the courts to attempt to have contact with, despite initially telling the women he provided sperm to that he did not need to be involved in the child's life.

Albon, a US national who uses the name Joe Donor, had sex with the woman in 2021, the day she first contacted him on Facebook, after travelling 250 miles to her home.

As part of the same family court case, he also attempted to have contact with a two-year-old girl he fathered with a different mother in north-east England a year later.