Yesterday’s Science Fiction is Today’s Science

When I was 49 years old, my stroke-recovering mother spilled her secret. “Dad” was not biological. He was sterile. I was the product of an anonymous sperm donor in an unrecorded, hush-hush process my parents had intended to take to their graves.

The fabric of my genetic identity was disrupted in 1995. Where could I turn? The internet was in its infancy. Google was then three years away from being a new-age start-up. Consumer DNA testing was 12 years away from its first market introduction. All I could do, I thought, was use gum-shoe techniques and research the daylights out of the very industry whose science helped create me. The whole process ravaged my inner psyche for more than two decades.

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” I made my living as a CEO fixing broken enterprises. This experience awoke my inner Don Quixote to right the wrongs. Yes, in favor of science to enable childless people to have a family, but with consideration for the very people created by the science…people like me.

After 22 years of pounding, aided by the eventuality of 21st Century technology, my puzzle’s pieces finally fit (my genetics, health history, siblings). I was compelled to share my odyssey, with purpose, in a book—a tell-all exposé on the Wild West of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) from the vantage point of a late-discovery donor-conceived person.

Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins, and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination has been fulfilling my mission to make a difference. As the product of an industry whose gamete sourcing and distribution practices need a serious fix, I have been humbled by my story’s award-winning recognition and have been gifting all of its earned proceeds to initiatives aimed at accomplishing three goals.

1. To positively affect the practice of ART
2. To influence the legislative agenda for ART’s oversight—The Donor-Conceived Bill of Rights
3. To represent the emotional needs and well-being of all those who discover that they are misattributed.

Since Uprooted was published in 2022, ART’s science has advanced many-fold. Yesterday’s science fiction has become today’s science. Behold the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), selective breeding, artificial DNA, robot wombs, embryos from human tissue (no egg—no sperm).  In the absence of ethical governance, the next Frankenstein has yet to be nicknamed.

Add the trafficking of frozen eggs from Eastern Europe to the highest bidder, plus USA surrogates for wealthy Chinese to enable their children to be born US citizens.

Allow your Orwellian imagination to take ethical lapses in the use of fertility science a step further: American enemies surrogate-birthing US citizen-children to be trained assailants; child sex traffickers breeding their own victims; or the enabled trafficking of human organs. Laws won’t prevent abuse, but at least there would be legal consequences. Today, a lapse of ethical behavior will generate a mere  “Tisk, tisk.” No Crime = No Penalty!

As DNA firms increase their market penetration, therapists are woefully underprepared for the deluge of identity trauma patients on the horizon. Pew Research estimates that 5% of the nearly 50 million DNA customers worldwide have uncovered that they are directly misattributed to one or both parents (closed adoption, donor-conception, extramarital affair, one night stand, sexual assault, switched at birth or raised by another family member).  Some 25% have experienced surprises that may transcend generations…a new relative, health history; genealogy; even race. Genealogical bewilderment will continue to rage for so many unsuspecting people.

Having found my answers and navigated my own traumas, sharing my methods may help others who are dealing with their own trauma. A five part program worked for me.

• Acknowledge your trauma.
• Seek all the information you can gather.
• Get help (therapy, support groups).
• Forgive, yourself and others.
• Reveal to heal. No more secrets

I have had the benefit of time, knowledge, and support to heal from past traumas. But every now and then, something triggers my healthy soul and challenges that recovery. This past holiday season, after a four-year drought, another sibling popped up on a DNA site—brother just two months younger than I.

He was loaded with questions. I felt like The Ogre of Calamity to be the one to confirm to him that his Dad was not biological. Been there! And I was hugely envious: Within 22 hours of getting his DNA results, he had all the knowledge that took me 22 years to gather—the total identification of our shared paternity (AKA, the anonymous sperm donor), his health history, the fertility clinic, the doctor, other siblings—without the anguish of searching fervently and not knowing for more than two decades. To my surprise, that whole process triggered another round of grief—disenfranchised grief—for my birth certificate dad who raised me. He died prematurely, by his own hand, when I was  just 16 years old.

“Healed people help people heal” has been an ongoing support group theme. Contributing in that fashion to help others benefit from my experiences has also helped enable my own healing. An added kicker to my healing has been progress achieved by the organizations receiving Uprooted’s funding as they advocate for The Donor-Conceived Bill of Rights.