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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. Click on image to read more.

By Kara Rubinstein Deyerin Without having your whole story, you cannot have autonomy. Autonomy and decision-making go hand-in-hand. Autonomy, the ability to act independently and make choices based on one’s own judgment, relies on having a comprehensive understanding of the context and factors at play. If you do not know your true origin story, your ability to exercise true autonomy becomes limited or compromised. A fragmented or partial view of who you are may lead to misinterpretations, ill-informed decisions, and potential consequences that could have been avoided if you’d had the truth. Barbie is a perfect example of how lack of information about the fundamental building blocks of your life and who you are can lead to an identity crisis when you discover the truth. Note to the reader: if you haven’t seen the movie, know that there are spoilers here. I highly recommend you see the movie and then read this article. Even if you don’t come back to read this, go see the movie. Barbie lives in a world based on a fundamental lie—the belief that the Barbies have solved women’s equality problems in the real world. Because Barbie is a female president, doctor, physicist, and more, she believes women in the real world have this level of power too. How Barbie sees her world and herself and how she interacts with her friends and Ken is based on this being true. When she learns the real world is very different, it throws her relationships and her sense of identity into disarray. People often have a difficult time understanding what the big deal is when someone has a DNA surprise and they discover that one or both of their parents aren’t genetically related to them. “What’s the big deal? You’re still you?” they’re often asked. The Barbie movie is a perfect example of “what’s the big deal.” Once Barbie’s fundamental truth about who she is toppled, she has an existential crisis. She’s forced to confront the fundamental purpose, meaning, and essence of her life and her own existence. Perhaps through Barbie you can understand the aftershocks caused by a DNA surprise: how one sees oneself and their place in the world is no longer the same. Five years ago, after spitting in a tube, I learned I wasn’t genetically related to the man I thought was my father. I’d wanted to learn where in Africa his family came from. What I discovered was I had zero African DNA and was half Jewish instead. Everything about my life and who I was had been based on a lie. Enter an existential crisis that at times I still revisit. Click on image to read more.

By Michèle Dawson Haber I’m a step adoptee. I was raised by my mother and a stepfather who legally adopted me. For a long time, I didn’t identify as a step adoptee, but now I talk about it a lot. Why? It’s probably easiest to explain by telling my full story. After all, stories are the connective tissue that bind so much of our fragmentary experience in the world. In my experience, there were things I didn’t understand or accept about myself until I reached my fifties, when I started to explore how my step adoption impacted my identity. My father died when I was a baby, and my mother subsequently remarried. Two years after they married, my stepfather legally adopted me. An adoption decree ordered that my last name be changed, my birth certificate be altered, and that I henceforth be considered “born as the issue of the marriage between” my mother and my adoptive stepfather. I was five, about to start school, and had a new half-brother. I never asked my parents why I needed to be adopted, but I can guess now at some of their motivations: my stepfather had known me my whole life, we had as secure a connection as anyone could hope for, they wanted to be a complete family unit that wasn’t divided along last names and past history, and they wanted to spare me the awkwardness of answering questions about my different last name once I started school. All reasonable motivations. But when they decided not to give me anything more than the most rudimentary information about the father I was genetically tied to, when they urged me to forget about the past and be grateful that my stepfather loved me enough to adopt me, when curiosity about my father was met with tears, tension, and refusal—they created an environment that encouraged me to deny the existence of any longing I might have. Would anything have been different for me if my stepfather had not adopted me? Is my mid-life search for details about my father simply a delayed mourning for the loss of a parent that I never knew? Yes and no. There are lots of similarities between my experience and those who have lost a parent very young. But what step adoption does is legally switch one parent for another, thereby facilitating the erasure from history of that former parent through name change and document amendments. I can’t know for sure, and I can’t ask them now, but it seems that this was my parents’ objective, and it was buttressed by their refusal to provide me with any narrative history of my father. I learned not to ask; I got the message that it didn’t matter.

By Kara Rubinstein Deyerin People with misattributed parentage, DNA surprises, and unknown origins have a lot in common. Many of us learn about being misattributed because we are byproducts of the direct-to-consumer DNA testing phenomenon. We bought into the commercial enticing us to learn more about our roots, or perhaps we were gifted a test, and then we received the shock of our lives—we are not genetically related to one or both of our parents. Some of us grow up knowing we have a different genetic parent(s) out there, somewhere, but aren’t interested in knowing them. However we get there, when we start the process of reunion, we all end up in a very similar emotional space. One thing I continue to hear as I speak with people experiencing these new discoveries is “I felt all alone.” I can completely identify with this sentiment. While each of our stories is unique,  many common themes flow through them. We are not alone. United we can help each other heal. We can educate others about how deeply we are impacted. And we can elevate each other’s voices to change societal perceptions and laws to reflect our most basic right to know who we are. Untangling Our Roots is the first-ever summit to promote these principles and bring together adoptees, the donor-conceived, people with an NPE, their significant others, raising and genetic family, and the professionals who assist our communities–an event sponsored by Right to Know and the National Association of Adoptees and Parents. Click image to read more.

Q&A with Rebecca Autumn Sansom Nancy Verrier, LMFT, became so deeply intrigued by her adoptive daughter’s response to having been relinquished that she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and wrote her thesis about what she called the primal wound—the trauma of separating a child from its mother. Her book, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, published in 1993, is in its 15th printing and has been translated into seven languages. Its message resonated with filmmaker and adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom who, along with her biological mother, Jill Hawkins, PhD, have produced a powerful documentary starring its author and exploring the theory that the trauma of relinquishment must be acknowledged before healing can occur and examining the cultural shift the book kickstarted. Reckoning with the Primal Wound is the first feature-length documentary about relinquishment trauma that explores the perspective of both adoptee and biological mother and features, in addition to Verrier, psychologists David Brodzinsky, PhD, and Amanda Baden, PhD.  In September 2022, the film premiered at The Catalina Film Festival in Long Beach, California. It’s since been seen in dozens of screenings to enthusiastic audiences of adoptees and others, has been accepted into 20 film festivals. Here, we talk with the filmmaker about the genesis of the film, it’s creation, and its reception. Click image to read more.

Lisa “LC” Coppola, a domestic adoptee through the department of children and family, is a mental health counselor who has years of expertise counseling adult adoptees and others touched in any way by adoption. A heartfelt advocate for those relinquished, she’s also a therapist and, in collaboration with Boston Post Adoption Resources, is the creator of the Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories speaker and writing workshop series. A writer from the Boston area, she often explores themes concerning relinquishment and addiction. Now, she’s created a resource to guide therapists and peers who work with adoptees. Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is a 52-week journal with prompts based on core themes that emerge in therapy and a script to help group facilitators. The journal can be used by adult adoptees on their own or under the care of a therapist, by therapists as a tool in their practice, and by peer-led support group moderators. How would you describe this journal and what makes it unique? The book is a guided journal, yes, but it is so much more than this. It offers 52 guided writing prompts based on common themes in adoption that we see clinically at Boston Post Adoption Resources, a nonprofit mental health agency. But the prompts are framed with resources including a post adoption vocabulary section and suggested reading, so the individual writer has access to knowledge if they want to do a deeper dive of study. The combination of prompts and resources also assists mental health professionals who might not be well versed in adoption-related challenges or therapies. Most graduate-level programs only spend eight minutes on the topic of adoption, believe it or not. So therapists can use this journal to become more informed about adoption loss and then as an aid to guide adoptees out of the fog—meaning out of the denial of the complex trauma of their adoptee experience. Probably the part I am most excited about is where I include detailed instructions for adoptee volunteers—peers who might want to coordinate peer-led support groups. The instructions cover how to establish a group and how to organize weekly meetings using the journal prompts as themes and assignments, and even include a script to make the idea of running a meeting less daunting and more do-able.

Don Anderson is the creator and host of Missing Pieces – NPE Life, one of the newest in the ever-increasing number of podcasts for NPEs (not parent expected.) Here, he shares his own NPE journey and talks about the importance of support, community, and storytelling. Please tell us a little about yourself—what was your life like before your DNA surprise? I was born in 1965 in a state where I’ve never lived—Iowa. Our home was across the river in Illinois, but our doctor and hospital were in Iowa. I have lived in Los Angeles for over half my life, since I was 27. My wife and I are small business owners in the entertainment industry, and we are almost empty nesters. Our youngest will be starting his senior year of college in the fall. Can you summarize as much as you’re comfortable sharing of your personal story of when and how your DNA surprise came about? Rumors have swirled around my family in regard to my older sister for decades. She and I grew up thinking we were full siblings. Every ten years or so, someone would get drunk and angry and bring up that she wasn’t my father’s child. Then a few years ago, she found out it was true. My parents finally came clean. My mom was already pregnant when she met my dad. He was fully aware and agreed to raise her as his own. Two years later I was born. That sister spent over a year and a half looking for her bio father but to no avail. I asked her if she needed help. I also did a 23andMe test so we we’d have something to compare. But when I received my results, I discovered I had two half-sisters I never even knew existed. And in fact there weren’t just two, there were four. It turns out my mother had a one-night stand with their father in 1965. My new siblings welcomed me into their family with open arms. My bio dad drank himself to death in 2010, which in a way has actually made the bond with my new siblings stronger. In telling me stories about him so I could know who he was, they realized there was a lot of good about their father that they hadn’t been focusing on. And I fit in with them way more than I ever did my in original family. How are you absorbing or exploring this knowledge? As my wife says, I am “all NPE all the time.” I dove in deep and read a lot about NPEs. In the beginning, I devoured all the NPE podcasts and in doing so found a way to place my feelings into perspective. Someone once told me there are two types of people in this world, those who want to find out what’s behind that closed door and those who don’t. I especially think this is true in our NPE world. I am definitely one who wants—actually who needs—to know what’s behind that door. So eventually I started my own podcast.

In 2016, I was living a great life, newly retired after a 35-year career in the corporate world and enjoying the extra time to indulge in travel with my beloved husband. That spring, on a whim, we decided to submit DNA tests to Ancestry.com. Privately I hoped for a miracle. I had a secret. In 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight. In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me. After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie. *** For decades I privately grieved my son but never spoke of him. Many times, I furtively searched for Jamie but always hit a brick wall. Adoption records were still sealed in Louisiana, continuing the archaic shadow of secrecy. In October 2016, while out walking my dogs one evening, a message ‘Parent/Child Match’ popped up on my iPhone causing me to stop me in my tracts as my knees gave out from under me. After 49 long years, Jamie had found me. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family?

Please tell us a little about yourself — what was your life like before you DNA surprise? I grew up a military brat, mostly in Arizona. I lived in Tucson with my husband and two children and still do. I love the desert. Before my DNA surprise I would say I was part of a close-knit family—my parents live a few minutes away and my sisters are here too. My dad is Mexican and my mom is of European descent, so I grew up ambiguously biracial. My days were filled as a working mom, wife, friend, sister, and daughter. Can you summarize as much of your personal story of how your DNA surprise came about? I bought an AncestryDNA test in June 2021 as part of a Prime Day deal. I had zero suspicions about my dad—I was always told my parents were married after I was born. I look like my sisters. About a month later I got my results. I was first struck by my ethnicity breakdown—I was not Mexican at all, but African American. There was zero latinx in my results. Then I clicked on my matches and to my utter shock/horror I matched with a man I’d never seen before, my biological father. When you tested, you had a parent child match. What was that experience like and what resulted? It was really confusing because my bio dad didn’t have his name in his account – it was a username, so I had no idea who he really was (not that I knew him, anyway). I was way too afraid to contact him, so I called my mom and asked if she knew. She didn’t based on the username. I spent the next few days putting all of my internet sleuthing skills to work until I was able to identify him. I found him on Facebook and lurked everything I could find. I found an old podcast he appeared on just to listen to his voice. It was all very surreal. A few days into my journey my newfound sister contacted me and that really got the ball rolling in terms of building a relationship with my family. You said at one point your mother apologized. That’s often not the case. How did this affect your relationship? My situation, like so many of ours, is very nuanced. Both of my parents knew the truth about my paternity—or so they thought. They believed they were protecting me from someone, but that person is not my biological father. So, while I disagree with their choice to keep a secret from me, I do understand the initial decision. That empathy made it easier for my mother to apologize and for me to be open to receiving it. I do appreciate the apology but I am still processing everything. It’s not an overnight process but I hope our relationship can normalize. You said growing up you didn’t relate to your Mexican heritage. Were you raised in that culture and still didn’t feel connected to it? Yes and no. My parents didn’t deeply immerse me in Mexican culture, but I live in the southwest so it’s everywhere. Whenever we visited family in Texas I saw much of that Mexican side as well. I went to schools in predominantly Mexican areas, at times. I just never felt a real connection despite how hard I tried. I always felt like an imposter but I attributed it to being mixed race. You talk about discovering you were Black. You said in the episode about your own story “It was like I knew but I didn’t know.” Can you talk about that and what you meant?  I’ve always loved, respected, and admired black culture. From music to television to movies to fashion, what’s not to love? As an adult, I became deeply invested in anti racism. So much of who I am aligns with being black, but it never occurred to me that I was. So it’s like I always knew on some level, while never considering that it might actually be true.

Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton. Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to ice cream to posting a popular podcast. Can you each summarize your adoption journeys? Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters. Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, and she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

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.

First, if you feel called to read this essay, then you belong here. Welcome. Do you belong in the Jewish community? Are you a part of this religion, culture, and peoplehood? Are you actually technically Jewish at all? To give a very Jewish answer: yes, no, maybe. It depends. But this journey of exploration and curiosity—of questioning and wrestling—is absolutely yours for the taking. So welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Not everyone along the way will greet you with such open arms, so I want to make sure that mine are stretched extra wide. An NPE* discovery is complicated enough, but when compounded by an ethnicity discovery—a Jewish ethnicity discovery especially—the complications are magnified. And Jewish identity is complicated enough, even for people who were raised Jewish. DNA testing may be new, but the question of “who counts as a Jew” is as old as Judaism itself. Judaism is an ethnicity, as you may have just learned unexpectedly, but it’s also a culture, a spiritual practice, a community, a set of laws, a set of holy days, and unendingly more. How many of those boxes must a person tick in order to be counted among the tribe? The answer remains: it depends. There’s a beloved aphorism: for every two Jews, you get three opinions. Judaism is far more concerned with asking questions than it is with answering them. So if you came to this article asking “Am I Jewish?” be forewarned: you won’t get a clear answer. But you will, I hope, get a solid footing for the start of your journey, should you choose to embark. The Rabbinic Answer Let’s start with the answer you’d be most likely to get if you googled “Am I Jewish?” Or, let’s say you told a rabbi: “I just found out that I’m biologically half Jewish because the dad that I thought was my dad isn’t my dad and my DNA isn’t what I thought it was—what does that mean?” First, the rabbi would probably respond the same way most people do: a polite “please slow down because I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” or something of that ilk. Then, the rabbi would likely say that, according to halakha (Jewish law), you must be born to a Jewish mother or have entered the faith through conversion. For an NPE, then, this sounds like a resounding no: you are not, by law, a Jew. A reform or reconstructionist rabbi (these are the more socially progressive and halakhically creative of the four main Jewish denominations: learn more here) would tell you that patrilineal Jews count, but only if they’re raised Jewish—so you’re still out of luck.

It’s what those of us with misattributed parentage like to call “sibling season”—the time when people who received an over-the-counter DNA test for Christmas are getting the results. When you have a DNA surprise and learn the person who raised you is not your genetic parent, you are plummeted into a world of confusion, doubt, and shock. You feel all alone in your experience. You are likely thinking it is impossible that anyone else could possibly have such a crazy thing happened to them. And so when you turn to a professional—a licensed therapist—for help, the last thing you want to hear after explaining your situation during your first session is “Wow. That’s incredible. I’ve never heard of that before!” We estimate that 1 in 20 people have misattributed parentage—that’s 16.6 million Americans who may innocently spit into a tube and discover they’re not who they thought they were. People have a misattributed parentage experience (MPE) from a variety of reasons: they discover they’re adopted, conceived through assisted reproduction or as a result of an extra-marital affair, rape, or other sexual encounter. Regardless of why someone has an MPE, the news is traumatic. “After I told my therapist about my MPE, she said she had no idea how a person should respond to being told such a story.” Lisa In Right to Know’s 2021 Survey of MPEs[1], 39% of those surveyed responded they’d sought help from a licensed therapist. Of those who saw a therapist, only 18% felt their therapists had sufficient training in misattributed parentage issues to assist them. This needs to change. “Today I had a therapy session with yet another new therapist. Every time I have to educate my therapist on what an MPE is, how we feel, how our situation is life altering, how we have an identity crisis, and how we search for family…..” Michelle Right to Know is a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for people with a DNA surprise and misattributed parentage and promoting understanding of the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics. To promote this goal, we now offer the first misattributed parentage education platform providing educational information on MPEs and the impacts of DNA surprises to professionals and the public. With this initiative, we aim to tackle one of the most important aspects of the MPE discovery—the need for training for licensed therapists and information for those affected by an MPE and the public at large. “During my first visit to a therapist, she admitted this was all so new to everyone and she had no experience with this specific trauma, that there was no handbook on how to handle my feelings. She told me my mother had every right to lie to me, that it was her body.” Dan

I am the daughter of an adoptee. My mother, adopted from an orphanage when she was nine months old, was raised by parents who were loving, protective, and kind people. They raised my mother, a second adopted son, and their third and only biological child in a pastoral, rural setting where the kids rode horses to their one-room schoolhouse, kicked around in the surrounding woods and pasture, and lived a pretty idyllic existence. When my mother was 18 years old, she became pregnant with me. In a whirlwind of impulsive action, she married my birth certificate father, moved 2,000 miles away from home, and six months later gave birth to me. By the end of the year, she had packed me up, returned to her parents, and essentially disappeared the man I believed to be my father. Within the next twelve months, she remarried, gained two more young children, and, four years later, she and my stepfather had a daughter of their own. Amidst this chaos, I immediately began to identify myself as an outsider in the family: a sensitive and insecure child, an interloper among the three children of a man with whom I lived but hardly knew. In just a few years, I was both born of and made into a fatherless child. The psychological construct known as object relations theory has shown us the cruciality of early childhood relationships to identity formation; that is, the origins of the self emerge from exchanges between the infant and others. Originally theorized by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the essential idea is that the infant’s bond to the parents shapes future relationships. What this means is that the mother as a physical object is invested with emotional energy from the child and the psycho-emotional impression of the mother, the internal object, comes to represent what the infant holds in her absence. If the object formation is disrupted early in life—as, I would argue, it is with virtually all adoptees and MPE/ NPE*—the failure to form these early relationships leads to problems later in the child’s life. Object relations theory also points out that situations in adult life are shaped by and mirror familial experiences during infancy. My mother’s own adoption unquestionably caused for her a failure of identity formation leading to problems in late relationships. No doubt and with good reason, the sense of attachment and security that adoptees can, and likely do, feel carries over into adult relationships in all kinds of ways. The question is how this manifests itself. Adoption is not, by any means, the only way that this attachment disruption occurs. In fact, biological children may suffer the same disruption for a variety of reasons. The lack of attachment demonstrated by my mother in her adult relationships is not necessarily a reflection of her relationship with her adoptive parents, and not all adoptees develop in this same way. In our case, whatever the disruption my mother experienced as a child, whether the result of her late-infant adoption or some other barrier to her attachment, it severely affected her identity formation. This affected identity formation is where the intergenerational disruption of object formation can be seen most clearly.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to pose abortion as a problem and adoption as its solution. The adoption argument has become a pillar of the anti-abortion movement’s platform. Each time the words abortion and adoption appear together in headlines, there’s a rapid and robust response from adoptees and others to counter the fallacious proposition. This time, however, Barrett’s comments have roused ire not only for their essential, objectionable content with respect to adoption, but also for the cavalier language she used to dismiss the impact giving birth has upon a woman’s health, her career, and her life. During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments concerning Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Barrett, an adoptive mother, not only posed adoption as a substitute for abortion, she further suggested that if the consequences and obligations of motherhood are deleterious to some women, they can simply sidestep the “problem” by taking advantage of safe-haven laws, as if dropping off a baby to a police or fire station has no repercussions to a mother or her baby. As if there were no career reverberations and no health risks. As if the wellbeing of the child were of no concern. As if it doesn’t matter that adoptees may be weary, enraged, or traumatized by having again and again to field a question that should never be posed: Would you rather have been aborted?

Sonia Derory spent the first six months of her life in a hospital in a Parisian suburb while her parents reflected on whether they could raise a child with what they perceived as a disability. She was born in 1983 with dwarfism, a medical or genetic condition characterized by short stature. Ultimately, her parents concluded it would be too great a challenge to raise her and placed her for adoption. After spending another six months in a nursery, Derory was adopted by a couple from a small town in the St. Etienne region in center of France into a family with other children, some also adopted. Derory had always known she’d been adopted—a fact that otherwise would have been evident because her Algerian heritage set her apart in appearance from her French Caucasian adoptive parents. But she always wanted to know who she looked like and where she came from. Early on, she was afraid to discuss with her adoptive parents her desire to know about her origins. “They weren’t particularly open-minded about my search,” she says, and she felt guilty and conflicted. But in 2006, when she was 23, she searched for her birthmother—not a challenge since her birth parents’ names and identities were listed on her birth certificate. After several months, she located her birthmother, who at first seemed pleased by her appearance in her life. They were in contact for more than a year and a half, and Derory welcomed her mother into her home. She even wore an identity bracelet engraved on one side with her original birth name and on the other with her adoption name, to demonstrate the depth of her connection. “I did everything—in fact too much—in order to be acknowledged as her daughter because I had this deep-down need to build a relationship with this mother who could help me discover my cultural origins.” After those months, she says, her mother decided to cut ties and all contact, but by that time, Derory had already become very attached to her, so it was deeply difficult to accept—another devastating rupture. “In her mind she had given me away as a baby many years ago and so felt nothing for me emotionally as an adult woman.” She didn’t want to have any type of relationship, and and they never met again. A few years later, Derory met her birthfather, who told her he’d searched for her when she was very small but was unsuccessful because her name had been changed. He, however, was also unwilling to engage in a relationship with his daughter. Derory had grown up near her birthplace in Saint-Etienne in east-central France, where she went to high school and developed a love of theater. She took acting and circus classes and workshops but, daunted by the difficulty of earning a living as an actress, she turned to another career. For ten years she worked as a communications and media officer in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in Massif Central, a highland region in Southern France. But in 2014, drawn back to her love of theater, she boarded a train to Paris, intent on becoming an actress. She studied in a theater school and won some small roles in a few classical plays, a television show, and many short movies. She also nurtured an interest in directing and taught herself the necessary skills, learning from trial from trial and error and by being inquisitive on set. Soon she’d use those skills to tell her own story.

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.

Adoptees are used to others telling our adoption stories—to us and for us. This makes sense to some degree, considering many of our adoptions took place at a preverbal time in our lives. And it takes time, developmentally, to grasp the concept of adoption—let alone make sense of relinquishment’s effects on us. But at a certain point in our growth process, it becomes essential that we, as adoptees, take the lead with our stories. We’re the survivors of relinquishment. We know adoption from the inside. We alone have experienced the complicated mix of emotions swirling inside—many of which we’ve hidden or pressed down upon out of overwhelm, denial, peacekeeping, shame, fear, or because we prioritize our feelings last. Our voices matter—for our emotional health and for that of the adoption narrative. Sometimes we don’t fully understand our emotions, or their depth, until we put pen to paper and our unconscious feels free to flow. But organizing our thoughts into story form—through journaling, memoir, essay, fiction, or poetry—can help us make sense of the past with an eye toward future growth. What’s more, others in the adoption constellation need our perspectives. Fellow adoptees need to know they’re not alone. Each time we write and share our stories, we’re helping normalize dynamics that others may be struggling with in isolation. Historically, adoptive parents’ voices have taken center stage. But without adoptee voices, adoption-related literature falls flat (and very often gets it wrong). Our words can and do make a difference.

The advent of over-the-counter DNA testing has unlocked the closet where many family secrets were kept. While many learn one (or both) of the parents who raised them are not their genetic parent from a DNA test, sometimes people find out in other ways. A mother with a 104-degree temperature might let it slip that she had a son as a teenager. A family friend may tell someone mourning his dad, possibly at his funeral, that the suffered from infertility and had used a sperm donor. And sometimes having a child of their own prompts individuals to search for their biological family because they grew up with a vague idea of who their fathers were. Regardless of how one learns about misattributed parentage, the process of coping with such an experience is daunting and life-changing. Right to Know is a non-profit founded on the principle that it’s a fundamental human right to know one’s genetic identity. We believe in inclusivity and embrace anyone who facing misattributed parentage. To that end we use the term misattributed parentage experience (MPE) to describe the phenomenon of coping with the fact that you did not grow up knowing your genetic parent. It’s a term used by mental health professionals for decades. We believe the word experience best describes the long-term effects we all have, as opposed to “event,” which is a one-time occurrence. The ramifications of an MPE last a lifetime to some degree.