JWT on the Children of Sperm Donors
As part of their shots guest edit, JWT gives us another way of looking at togetherness.
By forging relationships with the siblings they never knew existed, children of sperm donors are redefining family for the modern era.
Your friend has a coworker who, he swears, is a carbon copy of you. You share the same mannerisms, the same chin, the same taste in music, even the same mango allergy. It’s a story more common than it seems. Chance encounters used to be the only way donor-conceived people — who know little to nothing about half of their genetic identity — could learn about the existence of siblings.
There are millions of donor-conceived people in the world today, though the exact number is unknown. Loose regulations on the sperm banking industry means there is no record of how many babies are born each year through sperm donation, how much spermis bought and sold, or how many children a donor can have. One donor in Britain has reportedly fathered 800 babies.
While anonymous donation is banned in the UK, it’s still legal in the US. Proponents of anonymity argue a ban would lead to fewer donors and higher fees for clients (though it’s worth noting that the UK saw an increase in donors after the ban was instated). However, that anonymity prevents donor-conceived children from understanding their genetic history and medical predispositions. It also prevents them from connecting with biological siblings.
Thanks to the internet, though, true anonymity no longer exists. The emergence of DNA services like Ancestry.com and 23andMe have empowered donor-conceived people to fill in gaps in their genetic history.
The Donor Sibling Registry is a website dedicated to helping half-siblings connect. It has 53,000 members and has helped over 14,000 siblings make contact since its inception in 2000. The site’s co-founders, Wendy Kramer and her son Ryan, who is donor-conceived, created the site after Ryan became curious about his biological father. “Knowing his siblings is an important part of his identity, how could I deny him that?” says Kramer.
The connections become instant — not just for the siblings, but for their families as well. “I look at my son’s half siblings and I see part of [him] in them; I feel this innate connection, says Kramer, “with the mothers and fathers. Our kids share something really special and unique and that makes us bonded.”
The Donor Sibling Registry alone has seen countless success stories. One memorable case involves a group of half siblings, all born within months of each other, who live in different states. They get together frequently and are all considering attending the same college.
In some cases, the siblings share many similarities, including physical characteristics, interests, and even the same sense of humour. Other times they’ve had such different early lives and upbringings that it seems they have nothing in common at all (except, of course, a father). But in each case, the siblings share the feelings of uncertainty that come with not knowing half of your genetic background; the kind of genuine empathy that’s lacking in our world today.
Connecting with half-siblings comes with other benefits too. According to a study of 800 parents of donor-conceived people, the main reason to connect with siblings is to develop a “more secure sense of identity”. So in making a bond with others, donor-conceived people form a stronger bond with themselves.
So how do we keep empowering half-siblings to meet each other and unlock clues to their genetic background? Wendy Kramer believes the answer is transparency; “Sperm donation is a subject that makes people uncomfortable to talk about, but it’s not fair to the kids. It’s their identity, ancestry, their family.”
For Kramer, stricter industry regulations are the first step to transparency. Since their inception, sperm banks have prioritised the rights of donors by allowing anonymous donation; by that logic, the only way to prioritise the rights of donor-conceived people would be to ban anonymity. So in January 2017, the Donor Sibling Registry filed a petition with the FDA to do just that. According to the petition, “open donations not only allow for necessary communication, but also for healthier identity development of donor conceived children; it would be beneficial to allow contact before the age of 18.” The petition also calls for stricter regulations arounds around health and medical history, giving donor-conceived people and their families access to critical information they often go without.
Regardless of which side of the debate they’re on, both advocates and opponents of open donation can agree on one thing: sperm donation is enabling a new kind of family model to emerge. People who endured the struggles of infertility are able to start the families they feared might never exist; donor-conceived children are creating a profound togetherness that binds complete strangers unlike any other force on earth. As one donor-conceived child puts it: “We are family. We’re a different kind of family. But we’re a family.”
Turns out, she’s your sister.
