Birth certificates of people born from donated sperm may soon carry the name of the donor under government proposals announced last week. But what is it like for the thousands of people who don't know who their donor father is? By Steve Boggan

Louise was an only child until recently; now she suspects she might have up to 300 half-brothers and sisters. Tom, on the other hand, grew up with a brother, only to find out two years ago that they have different fathers.

On the other side of the world, in Australia, Joanna thinks she has found her father after years of searching, but his lawyers have threatened her with legal action if she tries to contact him. And back in the UK, Christine has recently solved one of the great mysteries of her life - why she writes poetry, something in which her family has never taken an interest.

Confused? Well, so are all these people and, research is slowly revealing, thousands more like them who were conceived as a result of anonymous donor insemination over six decades.

No-one knows for sure - records are either absent or incomplete - but estimates of the number of people born from the sperm of anonymous donors ranges up to 40,000. In April 2005, legislation was introduced that brought a halt to anonymous donation but it was not made retrospective, leaving the vast majority of donor inseminated (DI) adults in ignorance of either the way they were created (in the past, many parents kept it a secret) or of the mystery man who made them possible.

Three years ago, in order to help DI offspring who knew about their conception make some sense of their genetic backgrounds, a DNA database called DonorLink was set up by the Department of Health. It has been up and running for about two years now and has started throwing up familial links between people all over the country. Some individuals have identified donor fathers who have registered; many more have found half-siblings.

But perhaps most important of all, as the register facilitates meetings and as experiences are shared, common themes are emerging of anger, confusion, dislocation, and of families falling apart under the terrible weight of lies, deception and secrecy. For most of the DI adults, one half of their genetic history - and with it the understanding of their roots, emotions and physical characteristics - will forever remain a mystery. They call it “genetic bewilderment”.

Last year, some of them attempted to describe what it was like to find out they were the product of a donor’s sperm in Who Am I? Experiences of Donor Conception, a booklet produced with Dr Alexina McWhinnie, a retired Senior Research Fellow at the University of Dundee. Dr McWhinnie conducted much of the ground-breaking research in the 1960s that led to a greater understanding of the psychological problems suffered by adopted children.

Joanna Rose, a 35 year old a PhD philosophy student now living in Brisbane - the woman whose letter was returned by lawyers - says she was confused as a youngster over her appearance (something many DI adults report). She was young when told how she had been conceived, but her family never discussed the “anonymous man” who was a de facto family member nevertheless.

“I wanted to know what it would be like to look my [biological] father in the eyes,” she writes. “What colour eyes did he have? Were they gentle? Would I like him or he like me? I felt incensed at not knowing who my siblings were. I yearned to know about them. I wondered if they were funny, or tall, or nice?

“I had finally allowed myself to think outside the box that had silently placed its walls round my mind. I felt a natural passion grow inside me: a passion to know about where I was from and who I was.”

Joanna believes she has now found her father, coincidentally, in Australia, after years of detective work eliminating students who donated at the clinic in the UK where she was conceived, but he doesn‘t want to know her. “I have written to him twice,” she says. “The first time, I assured him my contact wasn’t about money or anything like that and that I respected his privacy but that I simply needed closure. He wrote back saying he did not wish to discuss the matter.

“Four year’s later, after spending a year formulating a letter with a counsellor, I wrote again. That was returned unopened with a letter from his solicitor warning that further correspondence would result in legal action.

“I simply don’t know what to do next. I have an unbelievably huge number of questions to which I may never find answers.”

Donor insemination took off slowly from the 1940s onwards. For many years it was conducted furtively - it was not against the law, but neither was it regulated. And social attitudes resulted in the few private clinics that offered it advising their clients to not to confide in their DI children. At one point, the Church of England likened DI to adultery.

Few, if any, records of donors were kept in the early days. They were often like-minded friends of the doctors who ran clinics, rather than random students who, in more recent times, came to see donation as a way of financing themselves through university. The donors acted out of altruism and the receiving parents were universally grateful.

Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a consultant gynaecologist and medical director of the London Women’s Clinic, which houses the country’s largest sperm bank, operated a private fertility clinic in Swansea in the 1970s. He says: “Things were very different back then. I remember when we needed some sperm for a client I would simply ring up the medical officer at Swansea University and ask for a donor with, say, brown hair and brown eyes, between 5ft 8ins and 5ft 11ins, so there would be some similarity with the client’s partner.

“A couple of days later it would come along. There would be some basic screening for bacteriology and sexually transmitted disease, and some basic details of skin tone, eye colour, blood group and basic medical history would be taken. But I never knew the identity of the donor. Then the client would be inseminated.”

The Human Fertility and Embryology Act of 1990 improved record-keeping to avoid people unknowingly committing incest and to gather basic genetic information. Details of donors were stored by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority and people who knew they were produced by DI were given the right to have checks conducted to ensure they were not related to a prospective partner. But they were still not allowed to know the identity of their donor father.

Since the termination of anonymity in April 2005, donors (sperm and egg) have been told that their offspring could be given their identity once they reached 18. That means no-one will have such a right until at least 2023. Meanwhile, those not covered by any legislation have no rights. And for many, that hurts.

Tom Ellis, a 24 year old maths student at Cambridge University, found out two years ago that he was donor conceived and that his brother had had a different donor. He believes the secrecy over DI contributed to his parents divorcing after he was told - and explained why his father had always been distant.

“My relationship with my father was very bad,” he says. “He treated my brother and me as if we were just children who had come in from the street. He demonstrated no interest in us, and now I understand why. We weren’t his children.

“It must be very difficult for many of the ‘social fathers’ of DI children. They had to bring up children that weren’t their own, work to pay for their upkeep, try to teach them things. And most would be wanting to keep their own infertility a secret.

“DI proved to be a short-term solution for the parents - in later years many had difficulty with the secrecy and the realisation that they couldn’t create the family they really wanted. But there was no consideration for the human beings that would be created.

“My social father and I no longer speak and I now feel that one half of me is completely missing. I would just really love to know who my father is, to see what he looks like and to see where my features and emotional characteristics come from.

Dr McWhinnie, the co-author of Who Am I?, says many DI offspring might be very happy or might be living in blissful ignorance. The problem is that with so much secrecy there can be no meaningful research. However, among those who know and are prepared to talk about their conception, there are common themes.

She says: “Children from DI appear to the outside world to be no different from other children born in the UK. It may be assumed that they enjoy similar rights, but the histories and findings show this to be a false assumption.

“Genealogically disadvantaged from the start and, given the current rate of non-disclosure by DI parents, likely to be denied information about their DI origins, they will, if asked, quote a family health record containing false information. This could contribute to a medical misdiagnosis. With advances in knowledge of genetics and its relevance for health and other issues, this is something that troubles many DI adults.

“All of this is clearly discriminatory and at variance with what is legally available to others. But, more fundamentally, it is clearly contrary to the contemporary emphasis on children’s rights and insistence that their voices should be head. These rights can be claimed under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child [1989]. The relevant sections are Article 7, ‘as far as possible the right to know and be cared for by his or her own parents’, and Article 8, ‘the right to preserve his or her identity including nationality’.”

Though DI offspring tell of feelings of confusion and a lack of connectivity with their social fathers, many are anxious not to upset them and do not wish to appear ungrateful or uncaring. But in expressing their feelings or in searching for their real fathers, DI children often experience guilt.

However, where DI adults find relatives, mostly via DonorLink, the results can be profound.

Louise Jamieson (not her real name), 43, is among those who does not want to appear ungrateful to her mother and social father. She was an only child and had a good upbringing but always felt something was wrong, not least with her appearance. Then, 10 years ago, her mother told her the truth.

“All my life, I had felt as if I was standing on a false floor and could not get to the real stuff underneath…Now as I caught sight of myself in the mirror I felt for the first time ever as if I was truly looking at me and, even more surprisingly, I liked the person I saw there,” she writes in Who Am I?.

If knowing the truth began the process of understanding herself, registering with DonorLink completed it. She has found upwards of 12 half-siblings (not all tests are complete) and has had contact with eight of them. She now knows who her donor father was and, from details she has been given about his prodigious levels of sperm donation, she has been told she could have up to 300 half-siblings.

“In June 2005 I got my first positive match,” she tells me. “It was amazing. Here was this envelope from DonorLink containing the first information about one-half of myself. It said a match had been made with ‘several half-siblings’ who had also registered.

“Then someone came to discuss the findings and she gave me a piece of paper. It listed six half-siblings by donor and then another who was the son of [her biological father’s name] by second marriage. Suddenly, I knew who my father was.”

Since then, the number of confirmed half-siblings has grown, and the family of her real father has given her pictures of him and lots of biographical details. He was a research scientist, but that is all she will say; she wants to respect his family’s privacy.

“My world has exploded into life,” Louise says. “I have all these brothers and sisters where before I had none.”

She does not condone all her biological father’s donation, believing he had not thought through the consequences, but adds: “I recognise that he was a man of great intellect and spirit and, yes, part of me feels proud of my heritage.

“It has sometimes been difficult meeting my half-siblings - there is no etiquette or form to refer to on how to handle these meetings - but they have been intelligent and interesting, and what came across the most is that we seem to share the same love of language and mischievous sense of humour. I suddenly feel fulfilled and much, much happier. And for some reason I like myself a lot more than I did.”

The poetry-lover Christine Whipp, 52, a mother of two and grandmother of five, has experienced similar feelings. Her “social” father died when she was six and she says that she had a poor relationship with her mother, because, she believes, her mother had difficulty with the secret of her conception. Ten years ago, she was finally told the truth.

“At the age of 41, I was effectively reborn,” she says. “There I was, on an otherwise ordinary November morning, walking through middle age with a face I had never met. My ancestral home was a glass sample jar and my parents never knew one another in either the personal or biblical sense.”

Through similar detective work to Joanna Rose’s, she discovered who her father (since dead) was. After a period of correspondence, his sons co-operated with DNA testing and when a positive match came, they showed her an unpublished autobiography her father had written, a family album and a published book of his poetry.

“I had been writing poetry since I was six but it was something that would ever have interested my mother,” she tells me. “Suddenly I felt this invisible umbilical cord and from what I learned about my biological father, I felt like a chip off the old block. My younger daughter is the spitting image of him.

“I felt a warm glow inside and I felt this vacuum inside me fill up. Now there was a genetic continuum that made sense of who I was and where I came from. And, as important, there was a sense of history and continuation for my children. It has been very cathartic.”

More than 150 people have now lodged their DNA profile with DonorLink or are going through the process. It will not say how many matches it has found, arguing that the information is private. Two-thirds of those on the register are DI adults and one-third are donors.

Liz Stephens, DonorLink co-ordinator, says she and her colleagues (the agency has 15 counsellors) have received positive feedback from those people who have been united. She also reports similar themes of confusion and a “sense of not belonging” among DI children before they were told how they were conceived. Similarly, catharsis and fulfilment seems to follow the discovery of a genetic history.

On the other side of the coin, it is only fair to point out that there are many happy results from donor conception and that modern parents are encouraged to tell their children from a very early age where they came from - secrecy is actively discouraged.

Olivia Montuschi of the Donor Conception Network, which offers support and advice to parents, says: “Modern attitudes are completely different from the past and while it is important to understand and listen to the experiences of those conceived when secrecy was the norm, they are now a historical group that should not grow larger.

“We encourage donor conception parents to begin telling their children when they are under five. It is a process and we produce booklets that give advice on what to tell, the language to use and on when and how to explain. There is no longer the stigma that there was and while, yes, children will ask questions and have curiosity when they grow older, they should not have the same dark experiences as DI children had in the past.”

Two issues remain in this tale; where do the genetically-dispossessed go next for information? And what has happened to donation of sperm and eggs as a result of the end of anonymity?

In terms of donation, many clinics have reported that supplies have dried up - but there are signs that recovery might be possible. Peter Bowen-Simpkins of the London Women’s Clinic says supplies are “almost at normal levels” following intensive newspaper advertising for donors. Now, however, donors are not simply after money. He says they appear to be more considerate and are prepared to be identified to their siblings in 18 years’ time.

As for the thousands of DI adults who want to know more about themselves, they may remain disappointed. In 2002 Joanna Rose successfully fought a High Court case that concluded: “An [ID] child is entitled to establish a picture of his [her] identity as much as anyone else” but that ruling was not retrospective.

Whether future legislation or fresh court challenges will give ID adults more rights remains to be seen, but those conceived by anonymous donor point to the rights of adopted children to trace once-anonymous parents as an important precedent.

“If the law recognises the rights of people who can’t have children naturally, then the mirror image of that is that the people produced as a result of donation have rights too - including the right to know where they came from,” says Joanna. “My God, do some people have more rights than others?

“At the moment, I have nothing but questions. I have no closure legally or emotionally and I have no knowledge of my paternal ancestry or kin. Not a photo, a smell, an item of clothing, nothing. And I have no right to find out.”

Who Am I? Experiences of Donor Conception with a foreword by Dr Alexina McWhinnie, ISBN 978-0-955403-10-1.

DonorLink: http://www.ukdonorlink.org.uk/ .

Donor Conception Network: http://www.donor-conception-network.org/.

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