A generation of sperm donor children are discovering the father
they know and love is NOT their
father at all
Daily Mail UK By Alison Smith Squire
19th March 2009
Despair: Jo Rose loves the father who raised her but is heartbroken she'll never knew her biological father
He was the man she knew as Daddy. The man who had changed her nappies, taught her to walk and who was always there to comfort her whenever she hurt herself.
Little wonder, then, that it felt as if Jo Rose's world was falling apart when her father sat her down at the age of seven and gently told her he wasn't her daddy. What's more, he said, he would never be able to tell her who her daddy was.
Even more confusingly for a seven-year-old, he told her she was the product of something called sperm donation. That meant she may never be able to track down the man who had provided half her genes.
Jo, now 35, remembers the moment as if it were yesterday. 'As the man I believed was my father told me that news, I found myself wiping away his tears,' she says. 'I remember consoling him, telling him I still loved him. Yet, in that moment, my world had crashed down.
'The man I called Daddy wasn't related to me at all. There was a whole part of my life missing - a family I didn't know. It was simply devastating.'
But Jo is not alone. With the rise of infertility, and parents having children later in life, the number of children growing up to discover that the men they knew as their fathers are not even related to them, because they are the product of donor sperm, has grown.
The perils of such conception were made only too clear when, in last week's Mail, Sarah Newman told how her infertile husband Tom left her and the baby they had chosen to have via a sperm donor, just three months after the birth.
Tom said he could never love their daughter because he was not biologically related to her.
But what of the other side of the coin from Tom - the feelings of the children themselves when they grow up to discover that half of their own biological heritage is a blank page.
The situation is set to become further complicated by new legislation which, if approved, will mean that two lesbians who have a baby using donor sperm will be named the rightful parents on that child's birth certificate - with no mention of the real father.
Combine that with the fact a growing number of women are conceiving children via sperm donors and leaving the space for the father blank on the birth certificates, and the number of children being raised with no sense of their real identity is rising at an alarming rate.
I still long to find my genetic father
Jo Rose, a PhD student, from Totnes in Devon , says: 'I have spent half my life searching for someone I may never find. I have traced my roots and searched for my donor records, but the donor was anonymous. I have to accept I will never find him.
'My parents have found it difficult to understand the pain I've felt, and try to brush the issue under the carpet. I adore my dad. After all, he was always there for me as I was growing up. We were very close.
'Even today, I always refer to him as "Dad" - while my biological father I refer to as my "father".
'However, much as I love him, I still long to find my genetic father - to help me understand where I've come from.'
Jo had been aware since she was young that she looked quite different from her older brother - who turned out to have a different sperm donor father - and her parents.
'While they all have a darker complexion, my skin is pale and, compared to them, I felt like a giant beanstalk as I am very tall,' she recalls. '"Am I adopted?" I once asked my mum. She said I wasn't.
'However, when I was seven my dad sat me down and told me he and my mum had problems conceiving and had me following treatment at a Harley Street clinic. Since then, I have tortured myself that somewhere there is a family that looks like me.'
She feels strongly that the offspring of sperm donors should always be able to know the identity of their fathers.
Current legislation says that any child born to a sperm donor after 2005 will have the right to trace their parents once they turn 18. Those born before this date have no such rights, because their donors were promised anonymity.
'Children have a right to know where they came from': Christine Whipp, who was conceived through a sperm donor, is campaigning for the names of donors to be put on birth certificates
Christine Whipp, 52, is campaigning for the truth about every baby's conception to be written on all birth certificates.
She says: 'Children have a right to know where they came from.'
Christine, herself, knows only too well the heartache such conceptions cause. At the age of 41, she discovered she was conceived through donor sperm.
Christine, from Honiton in Devon , who has two children and three grandchildren, says she always knew there was a secret hidden within her family.
Her father Wilfred was an insulin-dependent diabetic who was so ill he died when she was six.
She says: 'When my father died, my mother was left a resentful single mum. I found her cold. In hindsight, I believe she was unhappy to be left looking after another man's child and took all her despair out on me.'
As Christine got older, her mother began hinting that, before she died, she had a 'secret' to confess.
'I always knew my mother had had some type of fertility treatment, but everyone assumed the infertility problem was on her side and not my father's,' she says. 'Never in my wildest imagination did I think it was that I was conceived by artificial insemination using donated sperm. I never even dreamed that such treatment was available in the Fifties.'
Matters came to a head on her mother's 70th birthday, by which time the two were estranged.
'I worried she would die without telling me the truth, so I wrote to her and said I wanted to know what the secret was. I promised that if she told me I would never contact her again,' she says.
But she was still 'shocked' when she received a reply from her mother. 'She simply wrote that as my father was impotent she'd gone to a fertility clinic in Exeter , where I was conceived from donor sperm.
'At first, it was an incredible relief to know the truth. But when it sank in that a whole chunk of my life was missing, I was heartbroken.'
Everything I'd thought was stable in my life
suddenly wasn't
Determined to track down her donor father, Christine turned detective and, for the past ten years, has mounted an intense search to find him.
'Eventually, I took a DNA test linked to a register of sperm donor children, and it revealed that I was related to two other men who were also sperm donor children from the same area - my half brothers - and through them I was matched to a doctor, who it turned out was my real father.'
Sadly, more heartbreak was to follow. 'It was terrible to find out he'd died several years before,' she says. 'But I did discover he was married with children and wanted to donate to help women have babies.
'I never forgave my mother and since that day I never saw her again.'
Christine believes the truth should always be put on a birth certificate. 'Birth certificates were brought in to enable people to say who they were, and to know where they came from,' she says.
'If this information had been on my birth certificate, I could have traced my real father.'
Accountant Sara Browne, 33, a married mother of three, from Watford , shares Christine's sentiments.
She says: 'Every so often, the sick feeling I felt when I discovered my father wasn't my real dad comes back. I was 19 when I learnt that my father was dying from a hereditary illness.
'Finding out he was so ill was bad enough, but when I knew I too might be struck down with it, I was terrified.
'But, weeks after he died, my mother sat myself and my older sister down and told us she had some news. Our father was not genetically related to us - we had both been conceived using sperm from different anonymous donors.
'The relief that we weren't going to contract this rare disease after all was enormous, but then the implications of her crushing announcement sank in.
'First, there was grief that my dad wasn't my dad, and that everything I had thought was stable in my life suddenly wasn't.
My grandparents still believe I am their true
grandchild
'Worse, despite my pleas to discuss it, my sister and mother never spoke about it again.
'I felt resentful to my mother for keeping such a secret from me and today, although we speak, there will always be a rift between us, because I can never really forgive her. If my dad had not been ill, I might have lived on in blissful ignorance.
'I tried various ways to trace the donor, but it was impossible.'
Sara went on to have her own children, but still feels a huge gap in her life: 'Having my own children has been therapeutic - after all, they really are related to me.
'However, sometimes when I look at them I see mannerisms and physical details such as the shape of their eyes, and they look strange to me. I realise then that these are characteristics inherited from a grandfather they will never know.'
She adds: 'I have told my children everything. But because my mum refuses to tell my dad's family that we were not really his genetic children, his side of the family are none the wiser, and my grandparents still believe I am their true grandchild and my children are their real great-grandchildren.
'I live in fear that one day my children will blurt out the truth and it will be devastating for everyone. It is a terrible burden to carry.'
A woman who has experienced many of the same emotions is 30-year-old lawyer Martina Simpson, from Leeds .
She says: 'The day my mother told me I was conceived by a sperm donor, I remember running off crying and locking myself in a bedroom wardrobe.
'Since then, not a day has passed that I haven't thought about it or looked in the mirror and wondered who I really am.
'My mum made her shock announcement when I was just eight. She had just split up with my dad, and I wondered why he didn't seem keen to keep in contact with me.
I could have hundreds of unknown siblings all
over the place
'One day, when I came home from school, she simply said: "We wanted you and you are much loved, but we couldn't have children. So a kind medical student donated his sperm."
'I will never know what made her tell me, but I believe she couldn't live with the deception. Over the next few years I put it to the back of my mind. I couldn't deal with it and so it seemed easier just not to think about it.
'But when I was 27, I was reading about how a man had died but had some sperm frozen for his wife to have children without him. The feeling of loss came flooding back. I went on a register and took a DNA test. I was matched to a man, also conceived from donor sperm, who had also registered.
'He worked as a doctor and was three years younger than me. We met, and although we don't look physically alike we are remarkably similar in so many ways. We love the same books and films, and love foreign languages and travel.
'Finding my half-brother has gone a long way to helping me come to terms with my situation, as I have someone who feels exactly the same as I do.
'But while there is someone close to me in my life now, the nature of my conception has stopped me having close relationships because I feared they could be the children of the same donor, too.
'The thought that I could theoretically have hundreds of brothers and sisters all over the place is terrifying.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1163032/A-generation-sperm-donor-children-discovering-father-know-love-NOT-father-all.html#comments
No roadmaps on sperm donor
voyage of discovery
Julie-Anne Davies | January 08, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THERE is no emotional roadmap for the journey 19-year-old Riley Denham and his mate, 64-year-old Roger Clarke, have begun.
Riley Denham says meeting his sperm-donor father Roger Clarke 'does shed light on me as a person'. Picture: Michael Potter
They are Australia 's 21st century guinea pigs in a social experiment that began for them in the cramped back rooms of a Melbourne fertility clinic in the mid-1980s.
Clarke, then 40 and already the father of two daughters, decided to become an altruistic sperm donor. Between August 1988 and May 1989, he helped to conceive five children. Denham is one of them.
Clarke hasn't met the other four and knows little else about them aside from their sex -- two girls and another two boys. But he is getting to know Denham, the son who isn't but is Clarke's flesh and blood all the same.
Last July, they met for the first time after Denham exercised his right under Victorian law to trigger a meeting with "the dude who helped get me here".
"I wanted to say thanks," Denham told The Australian.
Despite their relationship, Denham is clear about who his father is. "I'm not going to start changing who my family is because of biological circumstances," hesaid.
"My dad is my dad and although I have eight other siblings I am biologically related to, I only have one brother and one sister. That given, I wouldn't be here without Roger and the coincidence that is my life is partly due to him."
It is inevitable that in the early stages of their relationship, the whole nature versus nurture question loomed large.
"You could tire yourself out trying to make the links but there is no denying that I felt a connection when I met Roger," Denham said. "It does shed light on me as a person, getting to know him. There are traits that we share that you can't just dismiss. They're real, they're there."
They have the same blue eyes; both are prone to sentimentality and have an unerring inability to understand mathematics.
There are estimated to be thousands of other Australians who could also be making their first step into this largely unknown terrain. Until recently, Victoria was the only state to keep a register of children born using donor sperm, eggs or embryos. But according to research to be published later this year, very few will make the journey that Denham and Clarke have.
The Donor Conception Support Group of Australia is petitioning federal MPs about the lack of a national register.
Research by infertility pioneer Gab Kovacs, national medical director of Monash IVF, has found that two out of three couples who conceived children as a result of donor insemination have not told their children about their biological origins.
"Despite being counselled at the time they went on the fertility program to tell their children, and preferably when the kids were young, I've found that in reality very few parents have," Professor Kovacs said.
"I think husbands feel threatened by it. My feeling is they want to forget where the sperm came from."
His findings are backed up by figures collected by Sydney 's Royal Hospital for Women where surveys of their donor program show that only 10 per cent of the 800 babies born through the program have been told of their origins.
Victoria was the first place in the world to establish a donor register, making contact for donor offspring possible when they reached 18.
But buried in the groundbreaking infertility laws, which came into effect in 1988, was a clause that gave donors the same right. The ethical minefield legislators had created did not become obvious until two years ago.
Although a donor-conceived child could refuse permission for contact, they had to be informed by Victoria 's Infertility Treatment Authority, which regulates the infertility industry, that a request had been made.
The prospect of thousands of donor offspring finding out their true biological beginnings via a letter in the mail was very real, and still is. Hence the beginning of a continuing campaign when the first of the post-1988 donor babies such as Denham came of age to get their parents to come clean with their children.
As of January 1 last year, there were 600 donor offspring who could apply for identifying information about their biological parents. The roll-out will continue to expand each new year as there are estimated to be 3000 donor-conceived children in Victoria .
Stephen Steigrad, director of the hospital's Department of Reproductive Medicine, said this had led to Victorian couples crossing the border to have donor insemination.
Like all fertility clinics, his hospital accepts only donors who agree to have their identity disclosed when their offspring reaches 18 years.
"But that doesn't stop people vanishing without leaving updated contact details," he said. "Or not telling the clinic they have conceived."
Not telling was not an option in the Denham family. Riley Denham can't remember a time when he hasn't known the facts about his conception. It was private family business but never a secret.
His younger brother and sister were also conceived using donor sperm, although his parents stipulated that their children have different donors. "That's something I think my parents showed tremendous foresight in because hopefully my brother and sister won't feel that anything I do with Roger is a template for them," Denham says. "I was there when mum was being inseminated by a doctor to conceive my younger brother, Oliver. Even though I was only three at the time, so I can't recall the actual event, it's something we've always been open about in my family."
His mother kept a file, a mysterious envelope that contained all that non-identifying information Clarke had so carefully compiled when he first signed on as a donor. It was always understood that on his 18th birthday, Denham would be given the envelope.
He says he was never consumed by the contents of the envelope -- "I was pretty Zen about it" -- but when he did finally have it in his hands on the night after his 18th birthday dinner, he was intensely curious.
When Clarke first became a donor, he had to fill out a voluminous and searching questionnaire, a personal time-capsule that contained not just his physical and medical details but also small and telling personal things such as his interest in photography, the fact he was hopeless at maths at school and the intriguing snippet that his grandfather was a bugler at the ceremony to mark the opening of the first Australian parliament in 1901.
"I remember when I completed the forms, it was like having a conversation without revealing my identity," Clarke said. "I was having a chat with someone who hadn't been conceived yet but knowing that one day this information could be very precious to that person."
He never paused when it came to ticking yes to the last question. Would he be happy to meet any donor off-spring in the future?
Riley was born in 1989. So as 2007 came around, Clarke admitted he was on heightened alert. The letter from the Infertility Treatment Authority, which oversees the donor register, arrived in July last year -- a year after Denham legally could have made contact. Clarke was elated but says he knew he had to tread softly. "I wanted to measure up to my child's expectations and I was worried about whether we'd be able to form a relationship, which was something I wanted to do," he said.
"When Riley walked into the room, I knew there was a biological link immediately, the way he looked, carried himself, spoke. There was a connection and from that moment on, it has grown."
That said, Clarke especially understands he is vulnerable. "I have to guard against getting hurt. I'm careful not to swamp him with things like, 'Oh Riley, will you meet my brother?' Most of all, I want to reinforce to him that what is going on between us is the right thing."
Denham summed it up this way. "I'm related to Roger but we don't have a family label; we just have a really good thing going on."
Secret Gift of Life By Teresa Ooi 26 April
2003
(The Australian Newspaper) |
