Johnson spent much of the last year in New Zealand helping with earthquake recovery. Report: Ala. pol's secret life abroad

An anti-gay marriage former Alabama official who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year has been donating sperm to many lesbian couples in New Zealand so he could have children, according to a New Zealand newspaper.

Bill Johnson, who also had served as a top state economic official for six years, has donated sperm to at least nine women, three of whom have become pregnant, the New Zealand Herald reported.


Johnson spent much of the last year in New Zealand helping with earthquake recovery and made the sperm donations without telling his family back in the United States, according to the newspaper.

Fertility experts warn that individuals should not donate sperm more than four times to prevent conceived children meeting one another or the possibility of accidental incest, the paper said.

The New Zealand newspaper found the Alabama politician last week as he was having a meal with one of the women he had impregnated. “I am married to the most beautiful woman in the world. When I married her I knew we couldn’t have any more children. She had a hysterectomy 10 years ago,” Johnson explained. “There is nothing my wife would want to give me more in the world than a child of my own.”

But his wife did not greet the news with the equanimity that Johnson predicted.

“This is a really, really difficult time for our family,” Kathy Johnson, a former Mrs. Alabama, said in an email to the Alabama Press-Register newspaper Sunday. “I’m still in disbelief and very hurt, and our family has a lot of healing to do.”

Johnson served as the director for Alabama’s Department of Economic and Community Affairs from 2003 to 2009. Johnson’s long-shot gubernatorial campaign – in which he ran as a conservative Christian who opposed gay marriage – finished the Republican primary with just 2 percent of the vote, according to the Alabama newspaper.

The politician used the online screen name “chchbill” to search sites seeking to connect sperm donors with couples seeking to conceive, and ended up providing sperm with numerous women in lesbian relationships, reports the NZ Herald, the country’s largest circulation paper.

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