In the Vox podcast In a Nutshell, hosts Jara Majerus and Antonia Leise take a deep dive into the university's most interesting, strange, and exciting research. Every two weeks, they invite Radboud researchers to talk about their favourite topics – explained in bite-sized episodes. In today's episode, Antonia learns about the systematic abuses in donor conception.

Thousands of children in the Netherlands have been conceived as donor children over the past few decades – and some of them through fraudulent practices. One of them is the Radboud historian Adriejan van Veen.

In today’s episode, the first of a two-part-series, Antonia talks with Adriejan about why some doctors used fraudulent practices – for example by using their own sperm – to conceive children. And which historical frameworks made those practices possible in the first place.

Adriejan van Veen is a political historian at the Faculty of Arts. In 2025, he received a NWO XS grant to study the history of insemination fraud and other abuses by fertility doctors between the 1970s and 2004.

Would you like to learn more about the topic of insemination fraud? Then follow Adriejan’s recommendations and watch the documentaries “Het zaad van Karbaat” (VPRO, in Dutch) and “The Man with 1000 Kids” (Netflix, in English). You can also listen to the podcast “De Kwak Kwaakt”, in which Adriejan talks about his research and own experience being a donor child that was conceived through a fraudulent practice in Dutch.

This episode is part of a two-part series. The second part will be released on the 19th of May.