1/3/2024 0 Comments Known donorA third was conceived using an anonymous donor. A second had a biological parent abscond before they were born. One had a biological parent die before they were born. In a recent newsletter, the journalist Alison Motluk, who covers assisted reproduction, highlighted a discussion comparing three scenarios in which people were cut off from a biological parent: As donor-conceived people advocate for new rights today, they are also forcing society to confront a more fundamental question, one left perhaps inadequately answered all those years ago: How much do biological ties really matter? The issues raised might apply to both sperm and egg donation alike, though historically, the focus has been on sperm donation because it’s much more common. Fast-forward a few decades and the children-now adults-are trying to change a fertility industry that sees them as neither its customers nor its patients, even though it is directly responsible for their existence. Indeed, the agreements around sperm donations were originally forged among donors, parents, and doctors. “Can you point to any federal law,” Boni asked me rhetorically, “that protects the rights of the donor-conceived child?” In a forthcoming book called Uprooted, Peter Boni, who learned he was donor-conceived at age 49, lays out a “Donor-Conceived Bill of Rights” that demands, first and foremost, the end of anonymous donations and includes access to a donor’s medical records, limits on the number of offspring per donor, and consequences for outright fertility fraud. Now donor-conceived people like Adams are questioning the need for any secrecy at all. They have been disturbed to find, in some cases, that they have dozens of half siblings from the same donor, that doctors have secretly impregnated patients with their own sperm, or that donors have lied about themselves to sperm banks-all at least partially because donation was anonymous. In learning more about their own conception, some donor-conceived people have been shocked by the lack of transparency in the industry that created them. The fertility industry doesn’t have to keep records, so the true number is unknown. every year, though that statistic may well be an underestimate. An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 children conceived with donor sperm are born in the U.S. The shared identity that connects this online community is small by proportion but large in raw numbers. There are also several podcasts, at least two magazines, and even training courses for therapists who work with people in this situation. As more people find out they are donor-conceived, they are in turn finding one another: They are gathering in online communities such as “We Are Donor Conceived” and other Facebook support groups catering to a mix of donors, parents, donor-conceived people, and others who have learned that their parents are not who they thought they were. Today, parents are strongly encouraged to tell the truth moreover, DNA tests mean they couldn’t hide it even if they wanted to. Doctors used to routinely advise parents to keep the use of a sperm donor secret-even from their own children-and this silence reinforced a sense of shame about the practice. In the United States, where anonymous donation is still technically offered, some donor-conceived people are asserting a right to know their genetic origins and even to contact their biological parents, who may or may not welcome the surprise.Īll of this was unimaginable a few decades ago. (A previous law had already banned it from 1998 onward.) Donor-conceived people in the United Kingdom have also successfully campaigned to ban anonymous sperm donation. In 2016, he and fellow activists pushed the state of Victoria to retroactively abolish anonymity for all sperm donors. Meanwhile, he also began campaigning to end donor anonymity for others like him. “What I’d had there with my daughter,” he says, “was one thing I had been missing in my life.” He felt the need to know where he came from.Īdams, a biologist in Australia, would spend years searching for his biological father, running into one dead end after another. He felt a biological connection so powerful that it made him reconsider his entire life up until then. When his daughter was born 18 years ago, he cradled her in his arms, and he instantly saw himself in her and her in himself. Becoming a father himself, however, changed everything. He considered donating to help other families have children. Damian Adams grew up knowing that his parents had used an anonymous sperm donor to conceive him, and as a teen, he was even proud of this identity.
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