What follows is just a handful of testimonies from British donor conceived people. All of the donor conceived people who have contributed their personal stories here support the aims of the BRRG. Names have been changed
Zara, 25, Reading
An aspect of donor conception that is often not thought about is how the information may be weaponized against the non-biological parent/ child. After an argument with my mum, I found out by text that my social dad was not my biological father after my social dad nearly died. I later learned that my social dad had previously threatened my mum if she had ever told me I wasn’t ‘his’.
My heritage and truth would have not been weaponized against me or my mum had the truth been stated from the start. If I had have known from the start, I would not have grown up an only child but might have known a few of my 11 half siblings, one of which turned out to be at the same university as me, work at the same restaurant and live a few streets away. If I had have known from the start, I would not have had my life turned upside down at the worst point of my life.
Late discovery impacted my health. My social dad, his brother, mother and grandmother all had diabetes, blood problems and other ailments, and I was taken to regular diabetes assessments throughout my childhood despite him knowing the truth. Meanwhile, the medication I could take for actual illnesses was limited due to the “blood clotting history in my family”. When I found a lump in my breast (benign) my social dad dropped me off to my scan and helped me fill out my “medical history”.
I was later refused genetic screening because I had a full medical background of both my parents. It’s not hard to see how tragically this story could have ended, and how tragic it could be for others who may be predisposed to heritable diseases.
None of this would have happened with a simple change to birth certificates.
Rose, 23, Teddington
I must have been about 12 years old when I first learned that I was donor conceived. My parents were divorcing and I received a letter from my father informing me that I was egg donor conceived. Had I known the truth about my conception from an early age, it could not have been revealed to me in such a terrible way, at a time when I was already experiencing significant upheaval in my family life. As it was, my father was able to weaponize this fact against my mother, in a manner which led to hurt and distress for all involved.
I felt betrayed by my parents. I had never thought that they could lie to me about something like this and for a while it made me see them in a completely different light.
Most painful of all was the fact that suddenly half of my biological identity had been wrenched away from me. Many of my most foundational beliefs about who I was and where I came from were false. Discovering who my genetic mother was could have helped to fill in these new gaping holes in my self-knowledge. But, as I soon discovered, even this was denied me since she was an anonymous donor.
People who donated in 1991-2005 can voluntarily remove their anonymity. So, since my genetic mother donated in 1997, she could opt to remove her anonymity. However, most donors do not know that they can remove their anonymity, because they have never been told that they can do so, either by the HFEA or by clinics. Further, there have never been any awareness campaigns aimed at informing donors that they can now remove their anonymity. The HFEA has refused to contact my genetic mother to ask her if she would like to remove her anonymity or to run any awareness campaigns. This is appalling behaviour on their part and demonstrates an egregious disregard for the needs and feelings of donor conceived people.
Because my Mum had never expected me to know that I was donor conceived, she was ill-equipped to deal with the emotional fallout. She was not prepared for and did not want to participate in the conversations that I needed to have. Looking back, I believe that I should have received counselling, but my Mum never suggested this and I think that was because she still wanted to keep my conception as quiet as possible.
I suffered from anorexia throughout my teenage years. I believe that my mental health problems were exacerbated by my distress concerning the revelation that I was donor conceived. Things felt very out of control and one of the things of which I had lost control was my genetic identity. My way of clawing back some control took the form of an eating disorder, which caused further trauma in my life and the lives of those around me.
Elizabeth, 56, North England
It is one of those experiences which leaves you stunned. I couldn’t string a coherent sentence together that first week back in November 2019. I remember being on the phone, walking through London, in floods of tears but I could not feel the ground beneath my feet, I could only hear my heart pounding in my ears. I could only feel my soul splitting in two. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I had been stripped of my identity.
That probably sounds dramatic. It is of course. A purely rational description would say that I was experiencing shock. Maybe, but such a reductionist perspective does not begin to describe the huge re-writing of one’s life that goes on when you discover that you have been lied to your whole life by the two people you love and trusted the most. I felt angry. This anger is then complicated by guilt – I know my mum and dad had no choice, so how can I be angry with them?
I am not angry with them actually. Instead, I am deeply sad. Sad that they are both dead – Dad only gone a year before I discovered the truth. Sad that I can’t resolve it with them. Sad that they had to lie to me. That would have been a huge burden on them, and it explains so much; why my mum was often distant with my father to the point of outright rejection, why she was often on the edge of depression and why my dad was always so angry and hurt. It explains why I was put on a pedestal and seen as ‘different.’ None of this was good, you know. That’s why I feel angry. I feel angry on behalf of my parents, not with them. I feel angry that my mum could not be open with the daughter she loved so much; that for her, perhaps the secrecy compromised our relationship, as well as the relationship she had with others she loved, like her sisters. I wonder, was she lonely? Secrets can make people feel lonely and isolated. That hurts too, to think of her pain. And then my dad – how hard it must have been for him. I just feel angry that people think this stuff doesn’t matter. Well, it bloody well does matter.
I would have wanted my parents to have been taught how to break the news to me. And I would have wanted them to know who had helped to create me, so they could share that with me.
Barbara, 71, Midlands
I had always mentioned in my health screenings and questionnaires that my dad’s family had a history of early death from congenital heart disease. Suddenly all those records needed revision.
It was February 2015 my 65th Birthday and a surprise gift was sealed in a small box on the table for me to open: an Ancestry DNA test kit. “We know how interested you are in family history, Mum. Maybe you will be able to trace your Greek Grandfather now!”
Fast forward a few weeks and my results were online. I was astonished to see that my Ethnicity was over half European Jewish when – having traced back my maternal and paternal family to the 1700s – there did not appear to be any evidence of their Jewish heritage. Although delighted that my lifelong attraction to Jewish culture now had relevance I didn’t bother pursuing matters any further until April 11th 2016, when I received a shocking email from a man called Simon in Toronto. He gently pointed out that he matched with me on a site called Gedmatch as a likely half-nephew and that his mother (and others) was most likely my half-sibling.
I shook for an hour, then glimmers of truth began to insist on my attention.
Small and apparently unrelated details began to form a storyboard about my early life: my mother had visited a private clinic for a “D and C”, and my dad had been very ill for a few of years after the Second World War and had Deep Xray treatment. It wasn’t however until my “cousin” (my dad’s sister’s only son) offered to take a DNA test a couple of weeks later that I was able to know for sure that I had been donor conceived; he proved to be not even distantly related.
Thanks to others who had been on this path before, and who shared their DNA data on GEDmatch, I was able to know within a few more weeks who my birth father was. Even then the disbelief and shock persisted for months.
I am able to forgive all those who concealed the truth because from the 1940s through to the 1980s, when DNA testing was not widely available. Now, in 2019, it is nothing less than criminal that openness and truthfulness is still not validated. Why is it that lies can still be told on a birth certificate?
Everyone has a right to know their genetic inheritance and their cultural heritage. It is no exaggeration to say that one’s health and happiness can even be dependent on it.
David, 68, London
One evening in the Spring of 1965, when I was 12, my father said he had something to tell me. We went into my bedroom. I sat on the bed. He stood. He explained that after some years of trying to have a baby, he and my mother had found that he had an exceptionally low sperm count. They had been advised that they could consider Artificial Insemination by Donor – “AID”: another man’s sperm could be used to impregnate my mother. After a number of unsuccessful attempts my sister (17 at the time of this conversation) was conceived. In the years following her birth, they tried many times for another baby but every attempt ended in early miscarriage. Finally, some five and a half years after my sister, I was conceived, also by AID. My donor was not the same as my sister’s (this turned out, decades later, to almost certainly be untrue). My parents knew almost nothing about the donors; only that (like my father) they were Jewish, that they were successful men who were married and already had children of their own. It had been a condition of being accepted for treatment that my parents accept the donors’ anonymity. They had also agreed that they would never tell us that we were conceived by AID but now they thought it in our best interests that we should know. My mother had told my sister and now he was telling me.
I did not know then that my mother had told my sister first, without consulting our father. My sister had a near-phobic terror and hatred of our father and could not bear the idea of being connected with him, the flesh of his flesh. My mother said that she thought knowing the truth might help my sister. In fact it did not and my sister was to become less and less able to cope with our father or with life at all. She eventually, many years later, took her own life.
In one breath, as it were, I learned that my father was not my father, my sister was my half-sister, I had been conceived by means of a medical procedure, and I could never know who my progenitor was. People always ask how it felt. Six years earlier I had been hit by a car as I crossed the road. It hit me in the side. I was flung in the air and landed on my back in the road, without either losing consciousness or feeling any pain (in fact I escaped with a chestful of broken ribs). Being told that I had been artificially conceived by a stranger’s sperm was like being hit by a train. It didn’t hurt. I wasn’t angry or grief-stricken or excited. It felt as though I had been told something immense but meaningless: somehow, the most important thing I had ever been told was empty of content.
After a bit I realised that my father was deeply anxious, and it occurred to me how hard this was for him. I wanted to make him feel all right. So I told him that he was the “father of my heart”. He said that if I had any questions or wanted to discuss it, I should have no worries about doing so. We did not talk about it until many years later. But I have spent most of my life since trying to understand and come to terms with the meaning of what he told me in 1965. In my 40s I “came out” and started to talk publicly about AID and, in particular, about the iniquity of a system in which people like me were left with a huge vacancy in their own life stories, not from necessity but because it was convenient for other people.
My parents’ marriage, never good, started to deteriorate and within a year of me being told about my conception they had separated. It was as though the need to maintain the fiction that we were my father’s natural children had been the glue that held them together. I gradually came to understand that my mother’s disclosure had been prompted by her need to frame a narrative in which my sister’s difficulties in life were caused by my father’s inadequacy. My father – a sweet-natured, perceptive, and immensely erudite man plagued by anxiety and insecurity – was cast sometimes as a buffoon and sometimes as emotionally crippled. For his part, such self-confidence as he had was eroded almost to nothing: he felt he had no right to stand in the place of a father; I think this had always been the case but the disclosure was the final destructive blow.
For my part, the knowledge that I had been conceived by a syringe in a clinic was always present. It made me feel a little less than human. I have described finding half-siblings and the sense of human kinship that brought with it as being like the sun warming a frozen landscape. I have always struggled to know how far these feelings were authentic and how far they reflected my mother’s long war against her husband but I am confident that to some extent they are truly mine.
What has all this to do with birth certificates? If my parents had known that one day – probably a day much earlier in our lives than my sister’s 18th and my 13th year – they would need to explain our origins to us, I think they would have been at least more likely to face their own feelings about it. AID would not have become the weapon which blew us all apart.
Birth Registration Reform Group UK 