Donor Conception

Imagine yourself in this scenario. You tell your 92-year-old father that you want to take a DNA test to learn more about your heritage. Your father says, “I don’t want you to take that test until after I’m dead!” You ask why, and he can’t or won’t tell you. What do you do? Naturally, you take the test, and your father says, “Fine, piss on my wish,” and you spend weeks waiting for the results and wondering what’s the big mystery.

That’s what happened to Jon Baime when he was 54-years old. You might think he shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the man he believed to be his father wasn’t related in any way, that he was in fact donor conceived, that his parents had been keeping a secret from him, about him. But even if you were raised in a family that keeps secrets, as he was, where children were often told that certain matters were none of their business—and even if you’ve always known that something in your family wasn’t quite adding up—it’s always a shock to find out your identity is not what you’ve always believed it to be, that your relationships changed in the moment you received your test results, that your whole world flipped upside down and there’s suddenly so much you don’t know that your head spins.

Throughout his “charmed childhood” in South Orange, New Jersey, with a moody accountant father and an outgoing mother, Baime, along with his two brothers, Eric and David, was told not to ask too many questions. After getting the results of his 23andMe test, however, he does nothing but ask questions. Who was his biological father, and was he alive? Were his brothers also donor-conceived? Did they have the same father? Why did no one tell them? Who else knew? What else didn’t they know? Should he tell his dad?

What do you do? How do you make sense of it? If you’re Baime, you call a therapist immediately and then you pick up your video camera.

He did what comes naturally to him. He documented his search for answers to an unspooling list of questions. His entire professional life had prepared him for the task. An Atlanta-based producer with a specialty in non-fiction projects, he began his career in television, producing a children’s show for CNN and producing and editing a documentary series for TBS about climate change and population issues, narrated by Jane Fonda. Later, as an independent producer, he worked on training videos for the CDC, web videos for the National Science Foundation, and segments of a PBS program about environmental issues.

During the four years after his DNA surprise, he used his professional skills to unravel the family’s secrets and lies—researching and scrambling through a trove of family history in the form of photos and home movies, and traveling the country to interview his brothers, his new siblings who appeared as DNA matches, a psychologist who studies new family ties, and, ultimately, his biological father. Along the way, Baime, who is charming, guileless, and immensely likable, has seemingly effortless and amiable conversations with his welcoming and enthusiastically cooperative new family members. The result is an engaging and enormously moving documentary that’s both surprisingly humorous and at the same time darkly unsettling. Baime doesn’t pretend to offer a generalized view of the experience of discovering that one was donor conceived. Certainly, many who make such a discovery may never be able to determine who their biological fathers were, let alone be embraced by them in the way Baime was. His brothers, in fact, weren’t. Baime offers only his singular experience, which is deeply affecting. He shares hard-won insight into what it’s like to have had the family rug pulled out from under him, to struggle with unknowns, and to journey from chaos and anger to peace and forgiveness.

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Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation, by Daniel Groll, is a fascinating exploration of attitudes about whether donor offspring are entitled to knowledge of their donors, but the issues and questions it raises are pertinent to adoptees and NPEs/MPEs as well. Comprehensive and academic in approach, it may be challenging to readers not well-versed in philosophical discourse, but it’s key reading for anyone with a stake in the debate over access to genetic knowledge. And although Groll ultimately stands against anonymity in donor conception, some NPEs and MPEs may take exception to some of the arguments that lead him there. Therefore, we asked him to address some of those arguments, and he readily agreed.
Severance was the target of a critical article last year in a publication called Real Life that accused it of numerous transgressions, including promoting bionormativity. It insisted that the magazine’s content poses genetic family as measured by DNA as “the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.” It further states that if we view the genetic family as something from which one can be severed, non-genetic family “will inevitably be understood as secondary, extraneous, and even pathological.” Additionally, it charges that those of us looking for genetic information are indicating that “biogenetic kinship is the most true, essential, and valid form of family” and that such a belief places queer families in “legally precarious positions but undermines the larger value of ‘love makes a family’ for all families.” The argument rejects the idea that there can be a desire to know one’s genetic history that is apolitical. Clearly, I don’t believe Severance makes any such assertions, and based on having heard hundreds of stories and experiences, it’s obvious that most of us grew up with non-genetic families. I, for example, was raised by a man who was not my father. He was my family. I didn’t wish to have another father, but I did wish to know who my by biological father was. I didn’t imagine my biological family would be a better family, or a more real family. I simply wished, as I believe most people who lack this information do, to know from whom I got my genes. My question is, how does simply wanting that information valorize traditional families or diminish nontraditional families?

Before I answer this, I just want to explain my connection to the issue of donor conception since people inevitably wonder about it. I am a known donor to close friends who have two children. The children know both who and what I am in relation to them. Our families are in regular contact. From the get-go, everyone agreed there would be no secrets and that we all need to be open to how their children understand their experience and let that guide us. Maybe the fact that I’m a donor will cause some of your readers to stop reading, but I hope not.

In 1995, when Peter J. Boni’s mother experienced a stroke after open heart surgery, the walls she’d built to hold back a secret for nearly half a century crumbled. In rehab, she began to tell visitors what she never told him—that his father wasn’t his father, that he’d been donor conceived. And so began a quest to learn the truth of his origins and the nature of the societal forces that led to the circumstances of his birth—the subject of his new book, Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination.

Roughly halfway through his narrative Boni says, “Never doubt my resolve.” But his dogged determination is evident from the first page. Early on, it’s clear that after serving as a US Army Special Operations Team Leader in Vietnam, he was the go-to guy in his business sphere, where he was a successful high-tech CEO/entrepreneur/venture capitalist and more—and he tore into his personal mystery with the same can-do attitude—a tenacity that fueled him through the 22 years it took to solve the puzzle of his parentage.

Uprooted is comprised of four parts that add up to exceptional storytelling. It’s compelling memoir of a troubled childhood with an unwell father, a determination to succeed, and the challenges of grappling with the emotional fallout of his family’s secrets. It’s also an exhaustive and insightful account of the history of assisted reproductive technology; a cogent indictment of the flaws of the largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar industry; and a rallying cry for advocacy with a prescription for change.

Boni’s scope is ambitious and he succeeds on every level. Donor conceived people will see themselves reflected in his moving testimony about the consequences and repercussions of the inconvenient truth of donor conception. Many will feel seen and heard as he describes genealogical bewilderment and the roiling emotions aroused by the revelation of family secrets, the shattering of comfortable notions of identity, and the lack of knowledge about his genetic information. It’s a must-read not only for donor conceived people but also for donors and recipient parents as well as fertility practitioners, lawmakers, behavioral health providers, and anyone contemplating creating a family through assisted reproduction. While the actors in a deeply flawed industry who are motivated solely by profit aren’t likely to be swayed by Boni’s arguments or embrace his suggested reforms, Uprooted may fuel a wildfire of advocacy that has the potential to give rise to meaningful legislation, transparency and accountability, and a true cultural shift.

As a professional coach* working with donor conceived adults, parents, and donors, I’ve observed a common issue among many donor conceived clients seeking support: feelings of anger or disappointment that their parents kept the truth of their conception secret from them for so many years. Because there may be disruption in the relationship between these adults and their parents, one or both parties seek coaching to help them work out their differences and adjust to the newly challenging reality. My donor conceived clients of all ages typically discover the truth of their conception either from their parents or from having taken a DNA test. Less commonly, they find out from a person other than a parent.

Donor conceived people are often confused as to why their parents didn’t think such information was vital enough to share with them much earlier on. Indeed, many donor conceived people feel that knowing the identity of both biological parents is a basic human right for multiple reasons (psychological, cultural, and medical); they therefore feel violated and betrayed by their own parents for denying them this right to their complete family heritage—information that most others take for granted.

Donor conceived people sometimes point out their parents’ hypocrisy in having chosen gamete donation over adoption for the purpose of establishing a biological connection to at least one parent and later complaining when their adult child shows interest in the typically anonymous biological parent. Should biological relatedness only matter to parents but not to children? The parents may say things like, “It shouldn’t matter. Love is all you need, and you received that.” Yes, but we also need to make sense of our traits and know where we came from so we can form healthy adult identities, not to mention our need for an accurate family medical history. Equally hypocritical, some parents enjoy doing genealogical work on their own family trees but criticize their adult donor conceived children for also valuing and investigating their true and complete heritage.

Parents’ explanations for their failure to disclose the manner of their children’s conception are often confusing. For example, they may say, “We couldn’t find the right time,” or “We thought it would be better for you not to know.” They may state that they didn’t want to layer on additional challenges when their children were going through difficult life events, such as going to college, or when there was trauma, loss, or divorce in the family. These justifications may or may not be excuses to avoid the difficult “telling conversation.” Sometimes, donor conceived people recognize their parents’ good intentions, but the problematic secret, which they consider a major lie, may overshadow those good intentions. Many feel there were numerous opportunities over the years for their parents to tell the truth.

There are several psychological reasons why parents may keep such secrets. Recipients of donor sperm may experience denial, as some may have lied to themselves for years by believing that the donor sperm didn’t “take,” while theirs (or their partners’) did. (Egg donation doesn’t afford the same opportunity for denial, since in vitro fertilization is necessary.) And in the past, fertility professionals encouraged such denial by mixing the sperm of two men—donor and intended father—or by telling heterosexual couples to have sex the night of the artificial insemination. Even today, most fertility professionals aren’t well informed about secrecy’s negative effects on donor conceived people and their family lives, being only concerned with running their businesses and achieving results.

It’s not news to donor conceived individuals that they have feelings about the manner in which they were conceived—feelings that may never occur to, or be acknowledged by, others. According to a new study published in the Harvard Medical School Journal of Bioethics and discussed in a recent article in Psychology Today, not do individuals experience significant distress upon learning they were donor conceived, they think about the means of their conception often.

The authors of the new study reviewed existing literature and recognized a dearth of research concerning how donor conceived people feel about learning of their status, about the ethics of assisted reproduction, how their sense of identity is affected, how they’ve coped, and more. Rennie Burke, Yvette Ollada Lavery, Gali Katznelson, Joshua North, and J. Wesley Boyd developed a survey with questions about these issues and Dani Shapiro, author of the Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love about her own discovery donor conception discovery, to help them recruit respondents. The response rate was 96.6, with 143 demographically diverse respondents, most from the United States, and the majority of whom were conceived through anonymous sperm donation.

Among the findings:

86.5% believed they were entitled to non-identifying information about their donors
84.6 experienced a “shift in their ‘sense of self’” after learning they were donor conceived
48.5% sought psychological support
74.8% wished they knew more about their ethnicity
63.6% want to know more about their biological parent’s identity
Highlights of the researchers conclusions are that increased attention to counseling is important, anonymous donation should be discouraged, and donor medical history should be provided to offspring, and the full potential implications of DNA testing should be considered before individuals proceed.

J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD, took time to discuss the research.

Don’ t miss the latest in a series of webinars from Right to Know (RTK), a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of MPEs (misattributed parentage experiences), including NPEs (not parent expected).

On Sunday, October 18, from 4pm-5:30 EST, the webinar will address mental health issues experienced by MPEs. Moderated by DrPh candidate Sebastiana Gianci, the panel will include Jodi Klugman-Rabb, LMFT, therapist, cohost of the podcast Sex, Lies & The Truth, and creator of the innovative training program Parental Identity Discovery; Cotey Bowman, LPC Associate, creator of the NPE Counseling Collective, and Lynne Weiner Spencer, RN, MA,LP, a therapist specializing in donor conception, adoption, and the experiences of NPEs and MPEs.

Among the topics to be explored are trauma, identity, grief, ambiguous loss, anxiety, and rejection.

In November, the series’ presenter will be Libby Copeland, award-winning author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are. (Look for our Q & A with the author here.)

And in December, RTK’s webinar features the DNA Geek Leah Larkin, an adoptee and genetic genealogist. If you’d like to attend the upcoming webinar, request the Zoom link at RSVP2RightToKnow.us, and check out RTK’s event page to stay in the loop about upcoming presentations.

If you missed the last webinar, “Understanding the Medical Ramifications in Your DNA Test,” you can watch the recording.

Right to Know, created by Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, Gregory Loy, and Alesia Cohen Weiss, aims to educate the public and professionals about “the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics.” It works, as well, to change laws with respect to related issues, including fertility fraud. Find it on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram @righttoknowus.

Usually, when we think about people opening a Pandora’s box by taking a direct-to-consumer DNA test, we’re thinking about NPEs (not parent expected)—people who learn through such a test that their parent(s) is not genetically related to them. But now donor-conceived (DC) people are wondering if when they test they’re opening a different sort of Pandora’s box.

The decision in a legal case called Teuscher vs NW Cryobank in January 2020 caused some members of the DC community to pause before spitting into that little vial. If you’re considering a test for you DC child (under the age of 18), it’s important for you to know the ruling should not affect your decision.

First, let’s talk about terms. NPE is used here to broadly to include anyone who learns their parent(s) is not their genetic parent(s). This can be due to donor-conception, adoption, a tryst, or an assault. The term DC is used here because it’s the most widely used, even though the term “donor” conceived is very problematic. Most DC people were not conceived by a donation. Assisted reproduction is an industry. People were paid for their sperm or eggs. A better term hasn’t emerged yet. “Donor” disguises the complex issues that arise from creating a human in this fashion. Maybe “dealer conceived” is better if we try to stick with the DC initials.  But I digress.

A short overview of the facts of the Teuscher case: Danielle Teuscher gave birth to a daughter after conceiving with the use of sperm (Donor #2744) purchased from NW Cryobank. She specifically requested an open ID donor so her child at 18 years old could know who her genetic father was. When her daughter was four, Teuscher purchased a direct-to-consumer DNA test with 23andMe to learn about her daughter’s genetic health factors as well as her ethnicity.

In 2013, Danielle Teuscher, of Portland, Oregon, gave birth to a daughter, Zoe, who’d been conceived with sperm donated by an “Open ID” donor—a donor who’s open to contact when his donor-conceived offspring turn 18 years of age. Teuscher acquired the sperm from NW Cryobank, a Spokane, Washington sperm bank. Like other children conceived through donor sperm, Zoe not only lacked information about her ethnicity and ancestry, but she also lacked complete access to half of her medical history.

In hopes of learning more about Zoe’s heritage and any health risks she might face, Teuscher ordered a direct-to-consumer DNA test from 23andMe for her daughter. She had not attempted or intended to learn the identity of the donor, but when the results came in, there was apparently a close match on 23andMe who was willing to be contacted by matches. Teuscher sent a simple message through the 23andMe website indicating that the match’s son may be her child’s donor and that she, too, was receptive to contact. The match was puzzled, so Teuscher apologized and moved on. But the matter didn’t end there.

Soon she received a cease and desist letter from NW Cryobank threatening her with a $20,000 legal action for two breaches of a clause in an electronic agreement—one, having given her daughter a DNA test, and the other having contacted the donor’s mother. The letter warned her not to contact the donor or make attempts to discover his identity or background. Further, the sperm bank informed Teuscher that it had rescinded her access to four vials (she has five vials) of gametes that she’d paid for so that she might one day have another child who would be a genetic match to Zoe.

Facebook groups and virtual support groups can be lifesavers, but nothing beats face-to-face time with people who know how you feel and have been where you’ve been. That’s why Erin Cosentino and Cindy McQuay have begun organizing retreats for adoptees, late discovery adoptees, donor conceived people, and NPEs (not parent expected) at which participants can get to know each other and share their experiences in a relaxed setting while learning from experts about the issues that challenge them. It’s not therapy, but it may be equally healing, and undoubtedly more fun.

Since the day that Cosentino, 44, discovered at 42 that her father was not the man who raised her, her mantra has been “Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.” McQuay, 56, has known her entire life she had been adopted. Both married with children and busy schedules, each devotes considerable time to advocating for people with concerns related to genetic identity and helping searchers look for biological family. And each runs a private Facebook group, Cosentino’s NPE Only: After the Discovery, and McQuay’s Adoptees Only: Found/Reunion The Next Chapter.

Among her advocacy efforts, McQuay, who describes herself as a jack of all trades, helps adoptees locate the forms necessary to obtain original birth certificates (OBCs). A strong voice for adoptee rights, she strives to enlighten non-adoptees about the often unrecognized harsh realities of adoption, helping them understand that “not all adoptions are rainbows and unicorns.” Countering the dominant narrative, she’s quick to point out that adoptees “were not chosen, we were just next in line.”

As the new network television season begins this week, adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected or non-parental events), and donor conceived individuals are among the casts of characters on primetime programs. But will the series’ writers and producers bring a level of reality and depth to the depictions or simply exploit their experiences for dramatic purposes without accuracy, nuance, and sensitivity?
On October 2, the first show with a high-concept premise about donor conception premieres on Fox. The plot of “Almost Family” unfolds as it becomes known that renowned fertility doctor Leon Bechley boosted his clinic’s success rate by using his own sperm to help clients conceive—a practice that led to the conception of dozens of children.

While it would appear to be a plot line ripped from recent headlines, the show is based on the Australian Network 10 series “Sisters,” which premiered in October 2017 and may have been inspired by an earlier headline concerning an Indiana fertility doctor who in 2016 was sued for using his own sperm more than 50 times to inseminate patients. The show began streaming as a Netflix Original Series in September 2018.
As in “Sisters,” “Almost Family” focuses on the effect this bombshell has on Bechley’s daughter, Julia, and two women who discover that they were conceived from his sperm. One, Edie Palmer, has been a longtime friend of Julia. The other is a former Olympic athlete, Roxy Doyle.

Both shows purport to be about the redefinition of family and the issues that surface as these sisters face the facts of their conception, navigate the challenges, and encounter an ever-increasing number of siblings.

“Sisters,” with 7 episodes, begins promisingly enough. Dialogue suggests that feelings, experiences, and concerns arising from the characters’ discovery that they not only were donor conceived but conceived with the sperm of a fertility doctor will be on point.

Infants and babies taken from their birthmothers tend to perceive that severance as a danger, a threat to their wellbeing. The physical sensations associated with being removed from their mothers and the consequent feelings of being unsafe are stored in the body and the mind as implicit memories — remnants of trauma that remain and can cause distress throughout life. But because individuals don’t understand these as memories — that is, as narratives they can express — they may not identify their experiences as traumatic or link their distress symptoms to these early preverbal experiences.