I found out my biological father is a super sperm donor

Daily Telegraph UK

1 Mar, 2023 07:05 PM9 mins to read

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The first law regulating donor conception wasn't passed in the UK until 1991. Photo / Juliane Liebermann, Unsplash

Opinion

OPINION:

When I bought an at-home DNA testing kit, I didn’t expect much to come of it. There was an intriguing family story about how my father might have some Romany heritage so when I saw it – on the website of California company 23andMe – for £59 in the Boxing Day sales I bought it to find out more.

I finally got round to doing the test on an idle lockdown afternoon in March 2020. And the results, at first, looked a bit disappointing. They suggested my genealogy was entirely northern European. Then I clicked on “Find Relatives” on the 23andMe site. There it was on the screen – I had five half-siblings. My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t believe it. I was 38 years old and had grown up thinking I was an only child. Yet here were results saying I shared 25 per cent of my DNA with five strangers.

That test turned out to be just the start of the story that completely changed who I thought I was. Life hasn’t been the same since.

My first thought was that my dad might have had some flings and got some women pregnant – this was the late 1970s, early 1980s. But when I rang my parents and asked, he said it must be a mistake, adding, “Definitely nothing to do with me”. My father isn’t the type of man who is open about emotions but he sounded sincere.

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This left me confused and anxious. However, 23andMe gave me the option to message the people with whom I shared my DNA. I wasn’t expecting an answer when I asked them, “Is this for real?”, but I needed to find out more. Within minutes they all replied with different variations of the same message. They told me they were donor-conceived at the Bridgett Mason Clinic, near Harley Street, in London, and either I was donor-conceived too or my dad was the sperm donor. I was shocked. I had always wanted siblings but knew my parents couldn’t have more children after me. I had such a normal upbringing in the south of England and no reason to suspect anything. Eventually, I rang my parents again. This time, my mother answered. She burst into tears. “We were never going to tell you,” she said. “We’re really sorry. We used a sperm donor but we were told to have intercourse on the day of insemination so there was always a chance you could be your father’s.”

This, I later found out, was common practice across a lot of clinics – parents were encouraged to not know the truth, and so, of course, their children wouldn’t either. There was a culture of secrecy around sperm donation at that time.

The law changed in 2005, so that those born from donor conception after that date would have a legal right to details about their biological father when they reached 18. Children conceived in 2005 turn 18 this year and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has said the law should be updated again so that children don’t have to wait until they are 18 to find out. I started crying as well when my mother told me the news. It felt like grief. Everything had changed – including who I thought I was. But mixed up in my sadness, I felt a flicker of excitement. Who were my siblings? I wanted to know everything about them.

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One London fertility clinic that was taken to court in 2002 claimed its records were destroyed in a flood.

For my partner and friends, who I spoke to at length about this, it proved an absorbing distraction while the world was on hold during the pandemic. For me, it became an obsession. My siblings added me to their WhatsApp group and started sharing photos.

The family resemblance was undeniable. We all had eyes a similar distance apart, oval faces, similar noses, dimples. We arranged a Zoom chat because we were in lockdown but we met up outside a pub in Richmond, Surrey, as soon as we could. We shared a curiosity and a similar energy. It was a special moment.

The group went on a fact-finding mission. One of my sisters is a maths teacher and started digging into research. The Bridgett Mason Clinic no longer exists and, prior to its closure, it kept no records of the donations.

I find it staggering, but the first law regulating donor conception was not passed until 1991 and there was no obligation to keep records prior to this.

This means that anyone born through donor conception before 1991 doesn’t have any legal right to information about their donor. One Harley Street clinic that was taken to court in 2002 claimed its records were destroyed in a flood.

We suspect many clinics destroyed records when the legislation came in – realising their behaviour had been unethical. At the time, there was no limit on how many times sperm donors could donate. It means genetically linked siblings could be living near each other today, growing up together, falling in love, with no idea they are related. And with no concept of how many of them there are. I think it’s a national scandal.

Luckily, my sister had a breakthrough in July 2020. She had been building our family tree and found multiple distant paternal cousins of ours on Ancestry.com, which offers DNA testing kits. After hundreds of hours, she’d gone all the way back to our great-great-grandparents.

She followed this down to grandparents and to their children who were boys – and then, based on age, she guessed who might have been our father, found him on the internet, and sent a letter to his workplace. It was a long shot.

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He wrote back. It was him! We’ve been so lucky – he’s kind and responsive and has been happy to answer any questions we have. But we’ve all been very careful not to overstep the mark. I’d like to meet him one day if he was open to it, but he’s my donor, not my dad. As a student, he had donated because it was a good way to make some extra money. He also believed in the science and helping parents to start families. He couldn’t possibly have imagined that he would be tracked down by the children conceived years later, when he had his own family. He sent us photos of himself and older generations – there’s that family resemblance again – and responded to each of us separately.

Having combed through donor-conceived forums, we can see that not all donors are so generous with their time. Donors were told they could be anonymous and were never warned that children may try and find them.

Finding him was only the beginning of the story. The big question that remains for us is: how many of us are there? I had five siblings at the beginning of this process, now I have 11. We found them through 23andMe and the other home DNA testing service Ancestry.com. They mostly live in the south-east of England and are between the ages of 37 and 41. Two went to the same school and had no idea they were related.

We suspect the number is far higher, based on everything we’ve read and learned so far. I read another donor-conceived person describing a feeling of being “mass produced” – I’m starting to understand what they mean.

In 1987, Bridgett Mason featured in a Granada documentary and told barrister Helena Kennedy she would limit the number of children per donor to 10, or 20 as an absolute maximum. We are sceptical about this.

At this rate of growth, I’ll have 70 siblings when I reach my 60s. Our sperm donor told us that he used to donate up to three times a week for a few years. The statistics from the time suggested couples had a 50 per cent success rate over three cycles.

We can only currently find siblings if they do the DNA tests. According to a Swedish study, only 6 per cent of people who know they are donor-conceived actually take DNA tests. Most of the children from this era of donation don’t know because of the advice given. How does anyone truly know they aren’t donor-conceived?

Our modest estimate, based on how often our donor handed in samples, the success rates for insemination, and the percentage of the population that takes these DNA tests, puts our potential sibling total at about 400.

There is now a Donor Conceived Register to try to match siblings and donors from pre-1991. But so many people don’t even know. I’m not angry with my parents for not telling me. This was an emerging science and they were simply following the advice they were given. I think if they had known what we know now about child psychology they would have told me. I understand that they had been trying for a long time and desperately wanted me. Our relationship hasn’t changed.

I am angry at the clinics. It feels like no one is being held accountable for the unethical way donor conception was approached pre-1991. We don’t have the rights and access to information that, say, adopted or fostered children have.

These are some of the reasons that we all feel we have so much emotional responsibility for each other as a sibling group. There’s no other form of support out there. Everyone responds differently of course – some siblings don’t want to be involved in the group. But for those who do, we’ll give them what we can. This experience has opened a whole new, complex chapter of my life. On one hand, it has given me an extra appreciation for my parents, especially my father’s relationship with me. But finding the sperm donor didn’t give me closure. We will never get this until we know how many of us there truly are. And unless everyone in the country does a test, we’ll never know. So I’ll wait for more to be discovered – undoubtedly they will. And whenever I see someone with similar eyes walking down the street, I will always wonder if they are my sibling too.