#donor conceived

[autisticarachnid]

today is the birthday of my oldest sibling, kaely !!! i cannot begin to describe how lovely, smart, compassionate and dedicated she is, nor how grateful i am to have met her AND be able to call her my sister. happy birthday to the greatest big sister i could’ve ever asked for ❤️

[mombian]

COLAGE, the national organization for people with LGBTQ parents, recently released an updated edition of its groundbreaking guide for donor-conceived people with LGBTQ parents. It’s an invaluable resource for donor-conceived youth and adults—but also feels critical for the parents and others supporting them.

[theshortolivia]

Do you ever wonder who your real parents are

First, thank you for my first ask ever! It’s super cool that I exist to people I don’t face to face know.

I’m gonna assume that by ‘real parents’ you mean biological parents. (Just a note I would try to stop using the term ‘real’ when talking about biological relationships it might offend people). Anyway, I actually do know my biological parents! I have two moms, one of them is my biological mother, and my parents used a non-anonymous sperm donor and artificial insemination to conceive me.

I used to be really uncomfortable about the donor thing as a kid, it weirded me out that there was a stranger involved in my conception. But I love to talk about this now for education purposes and as a fascinating story most people as old as me don’t have to tell (a two mom family having a kid not from a previous hetero marriage in 2000? pretty rare at least where I’m from!) so here’s some further explanation:

When my moms decided they wanted kids they actually chose sperm donation instead of adoption because as a lesbian couple in 2000 Ontario, they would have been pushed to the bottom of the adoption list and it would have been really difficult to get a child basically. So they went with a non-anonymous sperm donor. (This is better than anonymous for a million reasons I could go into another time if you’d like I’d love to talk about it from my perspective as a donor baby!) My moms decided which of them would get pregnant based on who wanted to, health, and family health history. They chose the donor based on a multitude of things: someone who looked like my non-bio mom so I’d look like both sides of the family, someone with good genetics both health wise and characteristic wise (no diseases run in family and family are very smart, creative), and because this donor specifically provided much more information than other did, way more than required. He gave us a video of himself talking about why he chose to do this, family and childhood photos of him, extensive family history including professions and personalities, etc. Then on March 21st 2000 (I’d have to check with my mom but if I remember correctly this is when) at 10am my mom got artificially inseminated and I was conceived. (I think it’s super cool that I know my exact conception date and time btw). Fun (not so fun) fact my moms were common law partners (mostly same legal bindings as marriage in Canada) when I was born but my non-bio mom was not put on the birth certificate out of discrimination (a common law husband to a woman’s biological baby would have been placed on the birth certificate), so, to have legal guardianship over me she had to adopt me. To make things equal my bio mom disowned? me and they both adopted me together! In similar discriminatory fashion, my non bio mother did not originally get granted leave from work and they had to go to court to fight it because a man would’ve. (My parents are trailblazers they’re so cool!)

I can meet the sperm donor if I’d like, he allowed meet ups on his profile at the sperm bank, so once I was 18 I could meet him. I’ve never really cared to though since I don’t see him as anything other than half of my genetic information, i suppose it could be interesting to see what similarities we share since I’m studying genetics but that’s about it. I do think it’s really cool I know my genetics so closely because it’s all written down though. Im half European Jewish on his side and have his eyebrows, and a mix of his and my bio moms hair!

I also know of the other 5 I think? children whose parents used him as a sperm donor scattered around the North America, my parents were in contact with them when I was a baby not not really anymore though, I also don’t really wanna meet them cause they’re strangers to me? Like idk it’d feel kinda weird to make up some connection to them cause we have genetic info in common.

Thanks again for the ask, im pretty much an open book and it’s super cool that I can give my perspective’s answers for questions!

(Sorry this was so long winded and probably disorganized, that’s just how my neurodivergent brain be)

[giftoflesbians]

Tomorrow’s post, “Donor Not Daddy,” is all about deciding what to call your donor and making sure your family and friends use the same term!

Check out my earlier posts:

[fail-eacan]

The universally shared worst nightmare of the donor conceived.

how many times do you think at chb that someone was dating an unclaimed kid/two unclaimed kids were dating and then got claimed and ending up being siblings bc it definitely happened before. this is the real reason percy made the gods claim their kids actually

[conceivedchaos]

[emilytopaz]

[autisticarachnid]

anyways meeting my donor/biological father in person was such an absolutely amazing experience. he was just as kind and genuine as he has been in zoom calls, with a good sense of humor and such a genuine eagerness to learn about me, and all my half siblings too. i’ve dreamed of meeting him my whole life and it was well worth it ❤️

- i also got to meet two new half siblings, and see my sister kaely again in person. i went to the beach with them and i can hardly remember a happier day <33

[mombian]

Adults conceived through donor insemination who have lesbian parents were generally satisfied with their knowledge of and contact level with their donor siblings, according to recent findings from the longest-running study of lesbian families.

[epiphainie]

.

[conceivedchaos]

Breaks my heart. Even now, in 2024, people born IN 2004 and YOUNGER are STILL not being told the truth of their conception.

“Most heterosexual couples who used DI have not told their children”

— Kirkman 2007

[coochiequeens]

I've posted many times about how surrogacy exploits women but there's also the fertility industry exploiting people despretate for bio kids and how they don’t care about the future impact on the resulting kids.

Netflix's 'Man With 1000 Kids' puts a spotlight on the lack of international regulations for sperm donors

July 9, 2024, 6:00 PM EDT

By Elizabeth Chuck

A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.

Released earlier this month, “The Man With 1000 Kids” explores the fallout from the case of serial sperm donor Jonathan Meijer, a Dutch man who fathered children around the globe via donations to sperm banks, as well as through private meetings he reportedly held directly with prospective mothers. The Dutch Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology prohibited him from donating sperm in the Netherlands in 2017, but he continued to donate to other countries afterward.

The result of Meijer’s actions is there are hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of half-siblings who may not realize they are related to one another. Their risk of accidental inbreeding is real: In 2021, The New York Times reported some of Meijer’s offspring had come across one another on the dating app Tinder.

"Once, I swiped on a sister and she swiped right on me at the same time,” said a half-brother, Jordy Willekens, who lives in the Netherlands. “I have a very trained eye by now.”

Experts and advocates for donor-conceived people say Meijer’s story is not an outlier. 

“There’s nothing keeping donors from donating anywhere. If a donor is banned in their home country, they just go somewhere else,” said Wendy Kramer, director of the Donor Sibling Registry, which she co-founded in 2000 with her son, Ryan, who was donor-conceived. The worldwide matching site has connected more than 26,000 half-siblings and donors so far, and Kramer said some people have found over 200 matches.

“There’s no regulation. There’s no oversight,” Kramer added.

There’s nothing keeping donors from donating anywhere. If a donor is banned in their home country, they just go somewhere else,” said Wendy Kramer, director of the Donor Sibling Registry, which she co-founded in 2000 with her son, Ryan, who was donor-conceived. The worldwide matching site has connected more than 26,000 half-siblings and donors so far, and Kramer said some people have found over 200 matches.

Without any sort of global tracking system, donors who have been banned in one country are easily able to keep donating in other countries, said Jody Madeira, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law who is writing a book about fertility fraud by doctors and serial donors. 

“They shouldn’t donate. They promise not to. But ‘shouldn’t’ doesn’t mean ‘can’t,’” she said. “And there’s no lightning bolt that’s going to come down because there’s no international registry.”

Countries have rules for the number of offspring sperm donors can produce, though many are recommendations rather than laws. In the Netherlands, nonbinding guidelines limit clinic donors to 25 children. In the U.S., guidelines from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine suggest a cap of 25 children per donor in a population of 800,000. Norway limits donors to eight children, Spain limits them to six children, and Sweden limits them to 12 children across six families.

In an email, Meijer criticized such regulations, writing that in his experience as a donor for 17 years, “one of the trends I see is that countries with the highest government regulations for donors, creates a serious shortage of qualified donors.”

Meijer called himself “one of the best donors you can wish for” in videos on his YouTube channel and says the Netflix documentary, which he declined to participate in, is full of lies.

He also argued that he did nothing wrong by donating internationally.

“You have to realize that I follow the guidelines of the international sperm banks,” Meijer said in a YouTube video posted Thursday. “They don’t inform their recipients, the people that order the sperm from their stock — they will never inform the parents about the amount of offspring that they have created with the same one donor.”

“So you might say, ‘You had to inform the parents correctly about a number.’ But I was following international guidelines,” he added.

Two large international sperm banks that Meijer mentioned in his video, California Cryobank and Denmark-based Cryos International, did not respond to questions about their screening processes for accepting sperm donations. 

Cryos International says on its website that its donors cannot donate to any other sperm bank. In 2021, then-CEO Peter Reeslev told the New York Times that all Cryos donors are made aware of the exclusivity clause.

“Donors sign and commit in contractual terms to not donate in any other tissue establishments than Cryos before and undertake not to donate sperm to other sperm banks/tissue centers in the future as well,” he said.

On its website, California Cryobank says potential donors are rigorously screened, with less than 1% of applicants qualifying to become donors. It lists a number of accreditations and licenses it says it has, including from the American Association of Tissue Banks, which performs on-site inspections, and the Food and Drug Administration, which has rules about quarantining sperm donations and testing them.

But those rules do not address the number of offspring a donor can have or what happens when one country tells a donor to stop donating.

While no efforts are underway to create a worldwide registry of sperm donors, Colorado will implement a law next year that states that it forbids anonymous sperm or egg donations, meaning when donor-conceived people turn 18, banks and clinics will provide contact information for their donors to them.

The law also caps the number of families that can use a single donor and requires sperm and egg agencies to make a “good faith effort” keep permanent, up-to-date medical records on donors.

It is the first law of its kind in the U.S. Australia and a number of European countries already prohibit anonymous sperm and egg donations, giving donor-conceived people access to more information about their identities and family histories. 

But some advocates say that even with the new Colorado law, there is still no oversight mandating accurate record-keeping on the number of children born from any single donor, especially since other states won’t be keeping count.

“There’s no entity keeping track of the number of kids for one donor, and nothing changes with that. Sperm banks and egg clinics will continue to have no accurate accounting of the children born to any one donor,” Kramer said. “The conversation doesn’t make sense until you have accurate record-keeping.”

It also doesn't help with the problem of sperm donations from a single donor in multiple countries. Kramer said that the discovery of half-siblings always comes with a slew of emotions for donor-conceived people but that it can be especially fraught when the newfound relative is in a different country.

"Oftentimes these people are so excited to have found each other, and they want to meet, but distance is prohibitive because of cost and time,” she said.

Language barriers can also make it harder to communicate important information.

“It’s really important to know your family health history, and also medical updates,” Kramer said. “Are you healthy? Do you have any genetic concerns? Because this can help with screenings and preventative medicine.”

Erin Jackson, founder of We Are Donor Conceived, a support group and online resource community that has about 3,600 members on Facebook, lives in California and was donor-conceived in Canada. She has found nine or so half-siblings and suspects she could have 100 or more she does not know about yet.

“I was born in the suburbs of Toronto, and I moved to San Diego,” she said. “I know that if I’m going to find more siblings, they’ll probably be in Canada. And there’s a sadness that comes from knowing I’m, like, a $600 flight away from any of them. It’s really not easy to just pop over and integrate myself into their lives, even if we both want that.”

As for Meijer’s voluminous number of sperm donations, Jackson said she was “disturbed but not surprised.”

“There just aren’t legal protections that would stop someone from doing this,” she said.

“There’s a lot of psychological damage that comes out of this type of situation,” she added. “I can’t imagine being one of this guy’s children.”

[enemymine2000]

Laura High on TikTok, a donor conceived person and huge advocate for regulation of the fertility industry in the USA raised an important issue today: If you and your partner have not yet both adopted your donor conceived child, do it now! Especially if you are part of the LGBTQIA+! You might no longer be able to do so once Trump has been sworn in. And if you plan on using donations to conceive a child, move to a blue state. States rights might protect you better down the line. Addition by myself: 1) Don't use period trackers. Don't talk about your cycle with people whose affiliation you don't know. Don't text about it via any messaging service, where your data might be seized. 2) If you are pregnant now and past January, don't cross state lines to red states. If something might happen to you or the fetus, you are just as fucked as the people with uteruses living in these states. Even under a nation-wide abortion ban being in a blue state might keep you safe. (As long as MAGA doesn't contest those pesky state rights, they are so keen about.)

[whentherewerebicycles]

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[fail-eacan]

This is an almost perfect description of how my racial/ethnic situation feels to me. You have no idea how comforting it is to see it written down by someone else, even as science fiction.

Imagine you're a human, living long after humans have gone out into space, but you grew up so far from human space that you've never seen another human. You were adopted from a trading colony on the edge of a human empire and taken further out far past where any human civilization has really explored, you lived your entire life of a city planet, and despite seeing so many different races none of them have ever been your own.

You've only ever known aliens, robots, and other distinctly inhuman creatures. Maybe the closest you've seen is something created by humans, but those creatures have even less reason to like humans then aliens do. Though most people are nice to you, they just see you as something so exotic, if anything people think it's cool that you're such an out there race, most people think of humans as mysterious and ancient, even though you've never felt like any of those things.

You don't know how to deal with any normal human things. There are libraries where you can research your lifecycle, or how someone from your species would clean themself or what kinds of clothing would go over your body. But none of those things tell you how you'll feel, how it'll actually be to go through the natural lifecycle of your species.

You will always feel like a stranger in your own home. Even those closest to you have a degree of separation. Your adoptive parents are sentient machines, built by a long dead race. Your partner is shaped somewhat like you, but has an insectoid exoskeleton, and massive glowing eyes. Your best friend is something sharp toothed and serpentine, closer to the monsters of myth then a fellow human. These people love and care about you, and you about them, but there will never be a common connection that you would have with a human stranger, even if these are people who are close to you, people who care about.

At one point in your life, you start leaning about human culture. You read through as much as you can get your hand on of ancient human literature, translations of Tolkien, Homer, Milton, Shelly, all these things you imagine being part of humanity's canon.

You try your best to embrace your human culture. But ultimately, it's just a foreign imitation of something you'll never feel a part of. You feel part of the planet you've lived your entire life on more than anything else. You don't even know what human culture you'd embrace if you did embrace one. Though everything you do pick up, from some ancient human languages, to the ways of dressing you find most comfortable, to a few religious practices from various cultures, you hold on to as your own.

Among some there's scorn that you're too human. That you act too human, or have too many of their cultural quirks, people would be more comfortable if you acted like a member of a more common race even if you're stuck in a human body.

Among others you seem not human enough. They want you to be that legendary empire building race, and then you're just some guy. You seem like a disappointment. You're embarrassed that you don't know as much about humanity that people want you to.

Eventually you meet a crew of humans from a trading ship. They offer to take you back to human space. But you don't see your fellow countrymen, but a crew of aliens, with alien nature and customs. They want to talk to you, to educate you, but you have so little in common, less than you would with any alien raised on the same planet as you.

There will always be a loneliness, an alienation. And if you aren't given a self, you'll have to forge your own.

[barnbridges]

not to be um... siding with the catholic church on something. but yall agree with surrogacy for the WRONG REASONS and it shows.