As Father’s Day approaches, ads from the consumer DNA testing companies ramp up. But they don’t warn that in a few weeks, a new wave of unsuspecting people are going to discover half-siblings – perhaps many – and then deduce or discover that they were conceived using donor sperm.
This year, Ancestry.com had the courtesy to contact those of us upset by past DNA results with the offer to opt out of their Father’s day-centered promotional emails. But the newbies are in for quite an experience.
Finding surprise half-siblings from a long-ago sperm donation is, to put it mildly, jarring. After the initial disbelief and shock begin to ebb, some of us question our sense of self, suddenly recall strange feelings during childhood, and even go through stages of grief.
Until the family roster expands enough to include a half-sibling who knows for certain that a donor was involved, disturbing alternate scenarios – rape, infidelity – loom and make the news very hard to accept. Those who find out that the donor was their mothers’ physician have another scenario to process.
And so we try not to think about the findings, or we try to reconstruct narratives. Had doctors duped our parents, even if well-intended? The practice has a new name – fertility fraud – and the first law against it just passed in Iowa, the Fraud in Assisted Reproduction Act.
Reflections
For many of the donor-conceived, our fathers are the men who raised us. Not the men who anonymously donated in minutes.
It’s simple. A sperm donor provides cells, albeit special ones. But unless he raises a child resulting from his donation, he is not that child’s father.
My sperm donor didn’t clean me up when I was 2 and barfed all over myself (actually neither did my dad, he put me in the bathtub until my mom came home!)
