A court in the Netherlands ruled Friday that a group of Dutch families can conduct DNA tests to determine whether their children were fathered by the deceased director of a fertility clinic who’s suspected of substituting his own sperm for that of listed donors. Midway through the BBC’s write-up of this strange case is this doozy of a sentence:

Eventually, if the DNA profile matches, the children, most of them born in the 1980s, hope to sue the doctor, possibly on the grounds that they should not exist.

As the father of a child and a resident of the perverse plane of existence in which we all find ourselves, I must object to the potentially dangerous precedent that could be set here…