As most of you know, the sperm banks are unaware of exactly how many kids are born from any given donor. (Estimates are that only 40% of women report back on their live births). We have quite a few very large groups of half siblings listed on the DSR. In my conversations with the sperm banking industry, it’s become to clear to me that they have
no clue as to why this might be an issue for families. One sperm bank director said to me, after I mentioned that one donor had more than 100 offspring that we knew of, “I don’t see what the issue is, as longas they do not live in the same geographic area…”.

Can any of you who are in larger groups share your experiences? I know that all the larger groups are mostly made up of children under the age of 5, so it will be while before we can hear from the donor conceived as to what these numbers mean to them, but any parents willing to share their perspectives on this? (Many in the larger groups have actually removed their information from the DSR.)

One issue that I am acutely aware of is that the larger the group, the  less likely the donor is to make contact. We have had donors come and join the DSR, make contact with a few offspring, and then remove their information because they could not deal with the growing number of offspring. (For one group, a donor actually removed his information at the insistence of one of the moms, who didn’t want any more families in their “group”.) So basically for these kids, it can become a “first come, first serve” type of situation.

Knowing that many of these kids will indeed be interested to know their donors, this is an inherent problem then, as the kids in the larger groups have a much lower chance of ever connecting with their donors.

A few other issues that I can think of: The larger the group, the harder it is to share important medical information. In fact, if not for the DSR, families who use the same donor would not be able to share medical information at all. For the donor conceived children of the 90% of heterosexual couples who never tell their children the truth, the more children out there, the more possibility of dating a half sibling.

I have had quite a few people join the DSR this week with notes saying
that they are not telling their child that they are donor conceived
because their husband will not allow it. For heterosexual couples out
there:

Did you receive any education/counseling from your doctor, facility or
sperm bank in regards to disclosure? Any suggestions made? Any
counseling offered to deal with infertility?

I am pointing these folks to the reading materials on the
“Articles and Issues” page, the “FAQ” page and the Cambridge
“Research” page for articles on the importance of (early) disclosure.
I am hearing back from some of these women saying that their husbands
will not read or even consider telling the kids. I wonder how we can
get the sperm banks/doctors/clinics to better educate the dads?
Somehow the shame of infertility needs to be dealt with as well as the
fear of rejection because of not being biologically related to your
children. If these families would have told right from the beginning,
and been honest with their kids, it wouldn’t be such a loaded issue,
as now there is a secret and people have been lied to. The older donor
conceived people that have found out later in life seem to be much
more rattled at having been lied to, than learning hat they are donor
conceived.

So far, the clinics/doctors/facilities have been unwilling to include
any disclosure literature that I have sent them in their new patient
packets (except for Xytex!). So the battle is getting this industry to
realize the importance of honesty in families. The Cambridge Research
is one step along the way….but we have not made a dent in the way
this industry continues to operate.

Audrey has so kindly given her permission for me to reproduce her article here, saying ” I hope it
resonates with other children of artificial insemination and their experiences growing up without a dad.”

Artificial insemination yields real family
Blazer reflects on being raised by mom and on the reality that she may never meet her real dad

11/08/2002

by Audrey Tornblom

Like most girls, I often fantasize about what my wedding day will be like. The ceremony will be held in a small chapel, and all my family and close friends will be in attendance. An organ will play as I enter the sanctuary wearing a flowing white gown. Then, slowly, I’ll march down the center aisle towards the altar—all alone. I’m going to have to escort myself to the front of the church, because I don’t have a dad to fill the traditional role.

No, my dad didn’t abandon me, and no, he didn’t die; my situation is much more unusual. In August 1985, my mother, Claudia Tornblom, had artificial insemination by an anonymous donor. According to the National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA), 60,000 children are conceived annually through artificial insemination in the U.S.

A nameless man

Like many women in their late 30s, my mom felt her time to have a baby was running out, and she wasn’t in a long-term relationship with a man. She explains, “I felt like I couldn’t wait any longer.”

She went to the doctor’s office and filled out a survey with her own physical characteristics and the characteristics she desired in the donor: a healthy, intelligent, athletic white male who wasn’t allergic to cats. The profiles were anonymous, and there was no name, address, phone number or photo of the man.

All we know is that he had donated sperm to four other women in the past. Three had girls, and one had a boy. In addition, he was married and had two daughters with his wife. So, technically, I have five half-sisters and one half-brother.

Who am I?

I’ve always felt that because of my situation, I have permanently lost a huge chunk of my identity. According to psychiatric social worker Sue Goldstein, such feelings are normal for children who grow up fatherless. “It’s not at all unusual to feel you’re missing a piece of you,” she says. “There is more of a vacuum there, a feeling of being empty, of not being able to attach a person to a situation.”

Goldstein also warns that children of single-parent families are often skeptical about the institution of marriage. Many of these children often expect any romantic relationship to end. “Girls, especially, wonder, ‘When’s he going to leave?’” she says.

Like many children growing up without a dad, I have often felt resentment towards my mother’s decision. When I was younger, I would yell at my mom that I hated her because she hadn’t gotten married, though I didn’t mean it.
My mom always reassured me that my birth was not an accident. “I wanted to make sure that even though you weren’t born with a father in your life, you knew you were born because I loved you and wanted you,” she tells me.

When I was four, my mom explained to me she had gone to the doctor to find a “nice man” to be my dad. I was, she joked, “the only four year old in the preschool who knew the word ‘sperm.’”

But her explanations still didn’t help me understand why I didn’t have a dad. I became obsessed with finding a father. When I was four or five, I’d look out the car window as we drove through Washington, D.C., trying to find a nice man to come live with us. I also remember many lonely Father’s Day parties at my daycare center when my godmother’s boyfriend would have to act as my surrogate father. And in third grade, one boy used to tease me and call me an orphan.

As a preteen, I was still very insecure about my family situation. I worried about everything, especially about losing my mom. Although I have overcome my worrying habit, I am still scared that if I ever lose my mom, I will lose the little understanding I have of myself and my heritage.

Every family is different

Growing up fatherless has its drawbacks, but there have been some benefits to having only a mom. Because we’ve had to depend on one another, my mom and I have a stronger and closer relationship than the average mother and daughter.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to embrace my family’s uniqueness. So what if my family isn’t the ideal one typified on television and in magazines? A child with two parents doesn’t necessarily receive more love than a child with just one.

My mom says she has never for a second regretted her decision to have me. “Overriding any difficulties is the fact that I have you in my life. Besides,” she adds, smiling at me, “Christmas was a lot more fun with a kid around!”

In many ways, I consider myself one of the luckiest people alive. I have a family, albeit a small one, and friends who love me. And hey, given that my family has never been a traditional one, perhaps I’ll bend one more custom and have my mom escort me down the wedding aisle.

NEW BOOK!!! Pig Blood:  A collection of autobiographical short stories by a former sperm donor Sandman. http://www.cabrimed.org/book.jsp

What if you had dozens of children whom you had never met - never seen?  If you were an anonymous semen donor, like Sandman, this would be the reality  that you would face. One day in the spring of 2006, he received an e-mail from a  young woman in a nearby town who was just about to graduate from high school.  It said, ‘I think you are my biological father.’  As this unusual friendship developed, he learned that they both spoke French,  enjoyed writing, and shared a weakness for a certain soft drink. The sense of  relief, curiosity and closure that his daughter expressed came as a surprise.  Tapping a few numbers into a calculator, he realized that there could be more than  one hundred others like her. Almost all their parents would have concealed the  circumstances of their conception from them, as hers had, until by some medical  emergency or slip of the tongue, it would accidentally pop out. When these  children (or even their children) came to know this unexpected fact, they would  come searching for their genetic roots. They would want to know something about   the man who helped to give them life.  Sandman is a doctor and a medical scientist, but one who had no prior experience  writing except for the scientific press. Faced with the length of time that it takes a  donor child to find a parent, and the difficulty, once found, of establishing signifi-  cant levels of contact, he decided to become an author of a different sort. He  gathered together some short stories and other bits of creative writing that he had  accumulated over the years. He added some newer essays, to document for these  unknown children his experiences, opinions, and a bit of his personality. The result  is the collection of short stories called ‘Pig Blood.’

Hello DSR members!
My name is Jessica Frantz and I have been working as an intern this summer with the Donor Sibling Registry.  What an amazing opportunity this has been and continues to be!  Every success story I hear fills my heart with joy.  I feel blessed to be involved with an organization that brings happiness to so many.
With a grant from the Arcus Foundation Gay & Lesbian Fund and the support of the Women and Gender Studies department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the focus of my internship is to extend DSR outreach to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) community.
Approximately one-third of the children searching for their family members on DSR are from GLBT-headed households.  While the Donor Sibling Registry is a non-GLBT specific organization, we are strongly supportive of GLBT civil rights, equality, and diversity, and are uniquely positioned to be a watchdog advocacy organization to ensure that GLBT prospective parents and donors are treated equally and fairly.  We are seeking to build coalitions with GLBT specific organizations so that our alliance will be broader and stronger.

The outcomes we are targeting include:
-Coalition partnerships with GLBT nonprofits for advocacy and education;
-Greater awareness about DSR and the issues of raising donor conceived children in the GLBT community;
-Greater number of GLBT registrants.

In order to assess the extent to which these goals are achieved, we will measure new registrants to the DSR over a time period and track how they heard about the DSR.  We also will measure the number of people reached by the circulation of newsletters.  We will look at the number of coalition partnerships and their quality based on frequency of joint activities, commitment to ongoing joint activities, and the interest from the leadership level of our coalition partners.
I am now in the phase of this project where I need input from DSR members who are members of either the GLBT or straight community.  I am interested in your comments, questions, and advice on extending DSR outreach to the GLBT community.  I would also love to hear from GLBT members about their experiences with the DSR, as well as any GLBT parenting or family-organizations you have been involved with or that you feel could possibly benefit from becoming partners with the DSR.  You may email me at JessicaFrantz@yahoo.com .
As the Donor Sibling Registry continues to be pioneers in building a more inclusive concept of family, I look forward the future and hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Jessica Frantz
JessicaFrantz@yahoo.com

We continue to have people come to the site to research clinics and specific sperm donors. A reminder: we have many user comments and stories for most of the sperm banks on our “Resources” page.  You will need to sign in with your username and password to be able to view the lists.

There is at least one website that “helps” people choose sperm banks and donors, although they do not include any information on how those sperm banks have dealt with past clients and no information or feedback from the families who have had to deal with the sperm banks post pregnancy. People are then choosing donors with no idea of how many families have already had children from the donor, and no idea of any medical issues that have occurred in the offspring or even the donor himself. Frustrating… as I see people come to the DSR all the time so surprised to see families already having children from their donor. I also see how important it can be to make contact with families to share and keep up to date with medical information.

I remind everyone to please post, as if you contact a match without posting, they oftentimes contact me to make sure of the legitimacy. If they can actually see the match, your match families will feel a lot more comfortable returning initial emails. I estimate (by how often I correspond with match families not posted) that the DSR has between 25-50% more matches than we actually show on the site. Remember, many do not post until they see a match…so if you are not posted you could have matches also out there also watching and waiting!

As we prepare for a busy website in July due to the Oprah re-airing, I remind everyone to please
check your email address on the DSR to make sure it’s current. I spend a lot of time helping people reach their matches who have not updated email addresses on the site. (This is why listing snail mail addresses is also so important).

Remember to check your spam folders, as I hear that some of these DSR member to member communications end up in people’s spam folders.

As always, my fingers are tightly crossed for those of you who have been waiting on the site for a long time. Every time we have a media bump, so many more of you get to connect.

On another note, more of an update, we have had a very busy June, surpassing last years numbers without any huge media. Last June we had Primetime and this year…who knows why we’re so busy. Maybe people are reading the recent magazine coverage (”O” Magazine, Cosmo, Der Spiegel and Newsweek) in their doctor’s offices? I have heard some
amazing connection stories (lots of people meeting up this summer!) and also see that more and more people are using the “medical” pages to share important medical information with their matches. I see that more donors are coming to the site to share and update their medical information that families would never get to know otherwise.

Cambridge University and the DSR are presenting a talk at the ESHRE meeting (European version of ASRM) in Barcelona next week, that comes from the Cambridge Research we conducted on the site last year. We also have a paper waiting for publication approval at the journal “Human Reproduction”. More papers to come as well. Please check on the
“Research” page of the DSR for updates. Thanks to all who participated!

Please remember to sign in with the same username and password you already have on the DSR- if you forget, please go look at your posting to see your username. People write all the time wondering why they can’t get a new username to sign on….only one username per person please. And if you forget your password, the site can automatically send it to you. All internal member to member DSR messages sent and received can be seen on the “Add to Registry” page.

Also, we have a “How Do I…” page if you need help.

We’ve been working on fine tuning the DSR database so that we can
better understand the who, where and when of matched people. Here is
one piece of new information:

The DSR has matched people in the US, Denmark, England, Canada,
Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong,
Israel, Korea, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, S. Africa, Sweden and Switzerland.

Many of these people used US sperm banks, but some did use local
clinics and sperm and were still able to match. What we have been
seeing lately is that many clinics outside the US use US sperm banks,
but do not tell the parents. This makes watching for matches a much
more challenging job!

If any of you are wondering whether or not the donor conception
industry favors the idea of donor conceived people being able to
connect with their genetic relatives, Dr. Adamson who is president of
the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (overseers of the Sperm
banks) said at the March 2008 symposium “Registries can be
discriminating,” indicating that a lot of traditionally-conceived
children don’t know their parentage, so why should gamete donor
children? As long as this type of logic passes in a room full of
medical, mental health and legal professionals, we are not going to
see any movement.

We have a television production company interested in speaking with donor conceived people, parents and donors who are willing to tell their stories of searching and/or finding biological relatives. Particularly, if anyone out there is interested, who has connected on the DSR but not met yet, this could be an amazing opportunity. Please contact Wendy if interested.