Move over, Elon, another billionaire baby daddy is in town
Pavel Durov is a Russian-born billionaire whose interests include doing half-naked photoshoots with baby goats and having lots and lots of (human) kids. The 40-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram revealed last year– in a post on his own app – that while he isn’t married and prefers to live alone, he has over 100 biological children in 12 countries via sperm donation.
Durov’s reproductive choices made headlines again this week after the tech tycoon told the French political magazine Le Point that he is going to leave his fortune, estimated at almost $14bn, to all of his children. Durov has six children he fathered naturally with three different partners as well as the children he has via sperm donation.
“They are all my children and will all have the same rights. I don’t want them to tear each other apart after my death,” he told Le Point.
What possessed Durov, who was charged last year in France over allegations that Telegram is being used for illicit activity, to populate the world with so many mini-mes? (He has denied failing to cooperate with authorities and Telegram has denied having poor moderation.) Well, like Elon Musk and a number of other tech types, Durov is a pronatalist who is worried about global fertility rates declining. He’s chosen to take a hands-on approach to tackling the issue, funding free IVF treatments for women at AltraVita IVF Clinic in Moscow for anyone who uses his sperm. If you’re interested, and I’m sure that a lot of people will be now that Durov has laid out the terms of his will, he’s still got sperm on ice at the clinic.
Durov first donated his sperm over 15 years ago, in order to help a friend. Then, he said in his Telegram post last year, he realised he ought to donate more widely. “The boss of the clinic told me that ‘high quality donor material’ was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples,” Durov said in the post. Durov added that he wants to “help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it.”
Having used a sperm donor to conceive my own child, I’m all for destigmatizing sperm donation. Particularly as there is a major lack of sperm donors among certain demographics: at one point last year, for example, there were only a dozen Black sperm donors at the four main cryobanks in the US.
But, and this is a very big but, there is an enormous difference between destigmatizing artificial insemination and one person thinking it is their “civic duty” to conceive 100-plus children. Allowing a single individual to procreate so prolifically raises complex ethical issues. There’s the possibility of accidental incest in the future, as well as the potential psychological impact that stems from someone discovering they have 100 siblings. There are also potential medical problems: earlier this year it was reported that the sperm of a man with a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children.
Is Durov even allowed to donate to so many different couples? The short answer is yes. The law regarding how many children can be conceived from one donor is complicated and varies from country to country. In places like France there are strict national limits while in the US (and Russia) there is no national law limiting the number of donations one person can make. Reputable cryobanks, however, do claim to have their own self-imposed limits. The European Sperm Bank applies a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor. California Cryobank, one of the largest providers in the US, has said it tries to limit donations to about 25-30 families.
However these cryobanks are also extremely expensive, particularly after the pandemic, when shortages meant spermflation kicked in, and there is a completely unregulated market for sperm via Facebook groups and private websites where people can match with potential donors. This has allowed unscrupulous people like Jonathan Jacob Meijer of the Netherlands to father hundreds of children.
As artificial insemination becomes more common, there is a desperate need to better regulate the industry and limit the number of children conceived from a single sperm donor. Indeed, Sweden, along with seven other countries including Belgium, raised the topic with EU ministers this week. “This issue has been left unresolved for too long,” an official from Belgium told POLITICO, adding that an “international limit is a first step in the right direction.”
Let’s hope that these limits get put in place sooner rather than later. Because I have an inkling that Elon Musk, who seems to be going a little off the rails, might take all the chatter about Durov’s progeny as a personal challenge.
New Rio law requires public hospitals to display anti-abortion signs
These include messages like: “Did you know that the unborn child is discarded as hospital waste?” The Guardian reports that this is the “latest example of a growing trend across Brazil to further restrict access to abortion in a country that already has some of the world’s most restrictive laws”.
Melanoma cases rise in women under 50
The caveat here is that overdiagnosis could be contributing to this increasing. Per Axios, one study “found that routine skin exams have increased and pathologists now more often classify ambiguous lesions as melanoma”. (You should still get yourself checked and avoid tanning beds!)
US judge invalidates Biden rule protecting privacy for abortions
The judge who did this is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who previously worked for a conservative Christian legal activist group and has made his anti-abortion views very clear.
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Charlie Kirk encourages 14-year-old girl to get ‘MRS degree’
Hundreds of ambitious conservative women gathered at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit this week, an annual conference organized by the rightwing Turning Point USA. They wore buttons that said things like “My Favorite Season Is the Fall of Feminism” and “I Don’t Need a Degree to Succeed” while listening to inspiring lectures about how their real calling in life is to stay in the kitchen. At one point Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder, encouraged a high school freshman to focus on husband-hunting rather than higher education. “I think there’s an argument to bring back the ‘MRS degree’,” Kirk said.
Netanyahu is using Muslim women’s ‘rights’ to justify his Iran war
We’ve got to bomb the oppressed brown women in order to liberate them, don’t you understand? Mona Eltahawy looks at the weaponization of women’s rights to justify war from Afghanistan to Iran.
More and more women are doing strength training
In 2024, weightlifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Vox looks at changing body ideals and the way in which strength training ushers in “a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller”.
Kai Trump had a go at being a regular old pleb
The president’s granddaughter, clearly inspired by Trump’s fake shift at McDonald’s last year, posted a video of herself “working” at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The week in pawtriarchy
A wild monkey in Hong Kong recently went viral after getting filmed tearing up a sign telling people not to feed the animals. While no monkeys were available for comment, I suspect this may be a case of gorilla warfare.
