Genotype

Genus 7 years later - What I owe the donor conceived community and myself.

In 2017 I produced and appeared in a short documentary about donor conception, called Genus. I was 20 at the time and created the film as my final project for university. Genus explores donor conception in the UK, where I was living at the time. In Genus I interview other donor-conceived people, some of whom support and others who oppose sperm donation, and use these interviews to explore the role of nature versus nurture in developing an identity

In the 7 years since then, I’ve watched Genus, several times, at least once a year. I show it to friends, family, new lovers, anyone I want to have a better understanding of who I am and where I come from. At the beginning I would proudly present the film without comment, letting my hard work speak for itself, but as time went by, I began to add caveat after caveat to a monologue which I would routinely deliver after each viewing. Eventually I began to give this speech before every showing, explaining how my views have changed since filming. Recently, I decided it would just be easier to write a companion piece that I could hand out to any weary victim of my ego. 

It’s not that Genus is bad, I’m very proud of it. I think that for many of the people who have seen it Genus was their first foray into the complicated, and oft-overlooked, politics behind donor conception (DC) and artificial insemination (AI). I have heard from countless single mothers considering AI that my work has helped them feel confident in their decision. But despite these heartwarming accolades, I began to feel that Genus was only half the conversation, a watered-down version of a much more complicated truth.

First a little about me; if you’ve seen Genus or know me personally, this will be old news (I feel a bit like Peter Parker in Into the Spiderverse’s opening monologue “all right, let's do this one last time”) but, oh, well. In 1996 my mother used an anonymous sperm donor in NYC to have me. My mother is a single mother by choice (SMC) and I was raised without a father or father figure. I have very limited information about my donor. From the sperm bank I have handwritten, unconfirmed medical records which claim my donor was a 5’8 Russian Jew with a clear health history. 

For a long time I respected, and defended, my donor’s right to remain anonymous. I saw his donation as a favor he did for me, the selfless gift of life. When I was 16, I made a YouTube video saying just that. That video, along with countless other media appearances and interviews sprinkled throughout my childhood, solidified me as one of the SMC community’s well-adjusted-children-of-choice. Even today, as one of the older and more visible SMC “children,” I am contacted fairly regularly to weigh in on donor conception discourse. In 2021 I helped develop lesson plans for the Oregon Department of Education’s sex ed and family planning curriculum and was interviewed by Fertility IQ for their course on donor conception. Most of these appearances involved what became routine questions and my even more routine (and true) answers: Yes, I am well-adjusted. Yes, I feel fine without a dad. No, I have not actively sought out my donor. No, I am not particularly interested in meeting him. No, I have never felt a dad-shaped hole in my heart.

No one was asking, “How do you feel about a donor's legal right to remain anonymous?” or “Do you wish you had access to an up-to-date health history?”. One of the subjects of Genus, whom I disagreed with vehemently at the time, made a good point when she noted that much of the narrative and language surrounding donor conception is aimed at placating intended parents and does not explore the systemic, institutional issues that might impact DC offspring. 

Something I didn’t know when I made Genus was that I had 5 half siblings. Finding out suddenly at age 22 (two years after completing Genus) that I had 5 siblings kickstarted my thinking about the ethical ramifications of the DC industry. As a child I had wanted siblings, but the reality of finding them as an adult was much different. The truth was that we were just strangers with little in common. I often imagined that if I ever found siblings,  we would each have a piece of the proverbial puzzle; that we’d be able to fit them together to see the larger picture of our conception, to discover something that photocopied medical records couldn’t show us. 

The reality, which came as a shock, was that I was the one with the most information. Disturbingly, the little information my siblings could offer only further muddied the waters. In the paperwork I have from the sperm bank, my donor claims that his first sperm donation was made in 1992, but my oldest sibling is 42 this year. Even a small inconsistency like this immediately calls into question the validity of all of the already sparse information I have.

While filming Genus, I was vehemently pro-donor conception under pretty much any condition. In my mind, the problem lay solely with parents who were dishonest with their children about their origins. Sure, those kids felt messed up, but it was nothing a little TLC couldn’t fix! I was only peripherally aware of cases of fertility negligence and certainly unaware of the motives of the fertility industrial complex itself. The sperm donation industry in the US is deeply flawed and has been since its conception (ha). The US is often referred to as the ‘wild west’ when it comes to fertility regulation, and the stories speak for themselves. 

We see cases like Cecil Jacobson, Donald Cline, and countless others: doctors who routinely inseminate patients using their own sperm, without the intended parents’ knowledge or consent. There are cases like Dylan Stone-Miller or Kyle Gordy, where donors both knowingly and unknowingly father dozens, sometimes over 100,  offspring. There are currently no laws in the US that require sperm banks to verify a donor’s medical records, meaning donors can lie about their health histories, possibly saddling their progeny with life-long negative health outcomes.

Many factors allow for this gross negligence on both a systemic and personal level. The first and foremost issue is the for-profit nature of the fertility industry itself. Business Insider reports that “Globally, the fertility-services market will be worth about $54 billion this year (2023) and is expected to grow to $90 billion by 2027, according to estimates by The Business Research Company.” Clinics are being taken over by for-profit companies, peddling designer babies to desperate would-be parents, many of whom are often already dealing with the stigma attached to requiring fertility treatment in the first place. 

Donors are paid per donation, and while this varies from clinic to clinic, some donors can make $1500-$4000 USD a month. This incentivizes donors to lie about how many times they’ve donated if various states or clinics cap the number of donations per donor. 

This could have been exactly what my donor was doing when he filled out the paperwork, lying about the number of times he donated to avoid being barred from donating again. It would be remiss of me not to mention that my donor very clearly states on my paperwork that he is donating for the money and has no wish to leave a message for any of his offspring. While this doesn’t bother me on a personal level it does allow me to see what his motives could have been for being misleading. Maybe that’s all he lied about, but I’ll probably never know for sure.

The promise of anonymity allows donors to disconnect from the very salient reality that they are creating a life. Don’t get me wrong, I neither expect, nor do I want, donors to have a social or legal role in their offsprings’ lives. However, it would be naive to ignore the fact that with the rise of at-home DNA tests, true anonymity is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The fact that I might very well find my donor on 23andme but would have no legal right to ask him for an updated family health history is unjust. 

It is time to stop treating human fertility like an industry, time to stop incentivizing donors with cash payments, to hold banks accountable for verifying health history, and to centralize donor databases.

Creating Genus was the first time I was really forced to confront the ethics behind the forces that brought me into this world, the first time I was asked whether or not I approved. I was here, wasn’t I? I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. You can see this thought oozing from every argument I made in 2017. I felt like the community needed the voice of someone who didn’t care about the anonymity of their donor, someone who could loudly say ‘Hey, I’m okay without a dad!’. 

To be clear, those things are very much still true for me. However, it doesn’t seem fair to highlight my voice over the voices of others who don’t feel the same just because my position might be what the community wants to hear. This is a take that 2017 Jacqueline would not have been as pleased to platform, but it is the truth. You might have a child who is completely fulfilled without any information on their donor, but you might have a child who isn’t. You might have a child, like me, who is content with their origin but still wants an up to date medical history and tighter regulation within the fertility industry. All those feelings are valid and can coexist.

The good news is that things are changing. In 2022 Colorado became the first state to ban anonymous sperm donation. All children born after 2025 will be able to learn the identity of their donor when they turn 18. There is a law currently in committee in NYC (my hometown!) which would provide similar restrictions on anonymity, and other similar laws are in the works across the US.

At the end of the Genus, 2017 Jacqueline blithely declares, “​​Maybe it's unfortunate that it has to be like this, but I'm here, I have what I have, this is just life,” referring to my sparse health history, the ethical ramifications of anonymous donation, and those who are fighting to know their genetic heritage. It is this argument which I am least proud of. I was desperately trying and failing to tie up and put a bow on a deeply complicated issue which simply cannot be encompassed in a ten-minute documentary made by a university student.

In many ways, I have long railed against making my conception a large part of my identity. I bemoaned writing my college admissions essay about it: “there are much more interesting things about me.” I resented the idea that the most interesting thing about me was something that I ultimately had no hand in. But by creating this work (both Genus and this essay), by continuing to participate in the donor-conceived community, I get to create a story that is my own. 

2017 Jacqueline wasn’t wrong, “I’m here, I have what I have, this is just life,” but 2024 Jacqueline knows that this also means that I can continue to push the conversation forward, that I have a right and duty to question the practices that brought me and others like myself into this world, and meditate on what we can do better for future generations.

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It is important to note that while I am DC I am writing from the perspective of the child of an SMC and was therefore aware of the origin of my conception from a young age. I know that the road to identity and truth for many other DC people raised in more “traditional” households is not always as straightforward and I cannot speak to their experiences.

Special thanks to Hayden, Maisie, and of course my mother for helping me edit!

Below are the resources I used to write this essay:

• “Colorado becomes first state to ban anonymous sperm and egg donations” https://www.denverpost.com/2022/06/01/colorado-donor-conceived-persons-protection-act/ 

• “Should young adults know their sperm or egg donor? Colorado thinks so” https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/12/23066535/colorado-no-more-anonymous-sperm-egg-donations-new-law-promises-medical-updates-for-donor-conceived

• “Sperm donation laws by country” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_donation_laws_by_country

• “How Much Do Sperm Donors Make In San Diego, California?” https://www.sandiegospermbank.com/blog/how-much-do-sperm-donors-make-in-san-diego-california/

• “One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06donor.html

• “Man, 32, who fathered 65 children announces retirement” https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/kyle-gordy-sperm-donor-nick-cannon-b2353777.html

• “Why Anonymous Sperm Donation Is Over, and Why That Matters” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/magazine/anonymous-sperm-donation-genetic-testing.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&fbclid=IwAR1usIuEkctq0Sa-bSFPtCyKDfbsbTp_KSLH0V_ddh-hnseG8BZGx3UUnW8

• “10 Things to Know About Being a Sperm Donor” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/health/sperm-donor-facts.html#:~:text=Compensation%20varies%2C%20but%20an%20active,for%20intrauterine%20or%20intracervical%20insemination.

• “Protections For Donor-conceived Persons And Families” https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb22-224