As Use Of Sperm Donors Grows In Popularity, Children Face Emotional Reckoning Of Discovering Half-Siblings
Eli Baden-Lasar talks about his discovery that he has 32 half-siblings that he knows about. Meanwhile, thanks to do-it-yourself genetic testing, the era of anonymity in sperm donation is passing by.
The New York Times:
I’m 20. I Have 32 Half Siblings. This Is My Family Portrait.
It was never a secret in my house that I was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. For a majority of my childhood, I never really thought about him. But when I was around 11, I went through a period of having questions. My parents — I have two mothers — gave me a photo copy of a questionnaire that was sent to them from the sperm bank they used, California Cryobank. The donor filled it out in 1996, two years before I was born. I remember carrying the form with me in my backpack, taking it to school and studying it occasionally when I remembered I had it. (Baden-Lasar, 6/26)
The New York Times:
Sperm Donors Can’t Stay Secret Anymore. Here’s What That Means.
To be the biological child of an anonymous sperm donor today is to live in a state of perpetual anticipation. Having never imagined a world in which donors could be tracked down by DNA, in their early years sperm banks did not limit the number of families to whom one donor’s sperm would be sold — means that many of the children conceived have half-siblings in the dozens. There are hundreds of biological half-sibling groups that number more than 20, according to the Donor Sibling Registry, where siblings can find one another, using their donor number. Groups larger than 100, the registry reports, are far from rare. (Dominus, 6/26)
