Dr Edwige Kasper, a cancer geneticist at Rouen University Hospital, in France, who presented the initial data, told the investigation: “We have many children that have already developed a cancer.
“We have some children that have developed already two different cancers and some of them have already died at a very early age.”
Céline, not her real name, is a single-mother in France whose child was conceived with the donor’s sperm 14 years ago and has the mutation.
She got a call from the fertility clinic she used in Belgium urging her to get her daughter screened.
She says she has “absolutely no hard feelings” towards the donor but says it was unacceptable she was given sperm that “wasn’t clean, that wasn’t safe, that carried a risk”.
And she knows cancer will be looming over them for the rest of their lives.
“We don’t know when, we don’t know which one, and we don’t know how many,” she says.
“I understand that there’s a high chance it’s going to happen and when it does, we’ll fight and if there are several, we’ll fight several times.”