Sperm Donors Can’t Stay Secret Anymore. Here’s What That Means.
To be the biological child of an anonymous sperm donor today is to live in a state of perpetual anticipation. Having never imagined a world in which donors could be tracked down by DNA, in their early years sperm banks did not limit the number of families to whom one donor’s sperm would be sold — means that many of the children conceived have half-siblings in the dozens. There are hundreds of biological half-sibling groups that number more than 20, according to the Donor Sibling Registry, where siblings can find one another, using their donor number. Groups larger than 100, the registry reports, are far from rare.
Because of the increasing popularity of genetic testing sites like 23andMe, in the past two or three years a whole new category of people, including those who never knew they were conceived via donor insemination, are reaching out to half siblings who may have already connected with others in their extended biological family. These individuals have no idea when the number of their donor siblings will reach its final limit, or on which day an email will arrive from yet another family member of sorts, someone who is looking for connection or nothing in particular or has an eerily similar birthmark in the same place on a cheek.
Surprise starts with secrecy, which often starts with shame, a factor that clouds the history of anonymous sperm donation practically from its earliest days. In 1884, an older wealthy man and his younger wife sought treatment from a doctor at Jefferson Medical College because they were struggling to conceive. The doctor determined that the husband was infertile, likely from gonorrhea; but rather than explain that uncomfortable fact, he anesthetized the wife under false pretense, and inseminated her with the sperm of another man — a medical student deemed, in a vote held for this undertaking, the best looking in the class. The doctor eventually told the husband, who kept that secret from his wife; but years later, in 1909, the medical student revealed all in an article in the journal Medical World. The story could be seen as an early parable for the industry over all: Eventually the truth will out.
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