#donor conceived

Oh well, I grew up with 1. But I speak with another 2, so that's 3. But I also have another 3 I know but don't speak to, so that's 6. Then there's also another 6 I know were born between 1995 and 2002 but I don't know who they are, and that's also only *confirmed* births (I wasn't even registered as a confirmed birth until I was a teenager) in just one state out of half a dozen at least, so if you wanna assume reported pregnancies (without confirmation of birth) within that same cohort actually did result in a birth (like me) then that makes it 15 siblings, plus another confirmed 2 in another state, and also add that one woman my eldest sister found online that we suspect could be another sister - which brings us to 18, and then if you wanna bring in the multiple senior industry professionals estimates I've received then it's somewhere around

One Hundred ~•°*☆*

We need to have a discussion about Jewish Identity and community as an indigenous tribal group/nation and it within the bounds of being Donor Concieved. Its probably a pretty niche topic but 1. I do think it can apply to a few other similar situations, and 2. Even if it is niche it really has to be talked about because there is starting to be (or perhaps has been) irreparable harm being done to the Jewish community by donor concieved people, and other Jews who grew up away from their identity/people.

I had...Im unsure what to call it, but an argument with Laura High, a donor concieved person and advocate who has Ashkenazi DNA from her donor father. She has been spreading harmful antizionist people while also semi owning being Jewish but also claims to be not Jewish. Obviously this is a complicated thing and it has more than that to it but I dont plan on getting into it in this post which is really just a hey this is a heads-up keep an eye out for the in depth etc.

Also to be VERY CLEAR this is NOT a good attack Laura or even engage, and the reason I am using their name is because they are a public figure that has a large amount of followers over various social media apps and this harm, while not done exclusively by Laura, will spread far faster with more people watching and not listening/understanding to the Jewish community, and I want to point out the issue to try and stem its flow of harm. And also in honesty because I'm upset at the situation and need to kvetch I'll admit to that.

I will reiterate this point on the post when I get it made but what right do I have to talk about this you may ask? I am a Native American Jew, who is a patrilineal Jew also through donor conception who has been doing the work to be apart of my people. Being a part of two tribal people I think gives me insight that others may not have and I've been in these shoes.

With this post and the main one, this is a complex topic with a lot of nuance, and if people cannot behave when interacting with me or others on my posts I will limit/remove the ability to interact. So watch it.

And finally, this specifically has to do with tribal community relations and how said groups consider people members, and how we may be doing harm to our own people. If you are donor concieved but not a part of a group like this no, you do not get to speak over those of us who are. If you are a part of one of these tribal groups but not donor concieved, you will have right of way BUT handle this respectfully since being donor concieved has its own trauma for many people (similar to being adopted for many) so please be kind in interacting with DC people like you may with those of our people adopted and disconnected.

I took an Ancestry DNA test not expecting this whatsoever. I went into it thinking my dad was my dad, sometimes people just don’t look like one parent.

Short reason I took the test: I was curious to see if there was an ethnicity I wouldn’t expect in my DNA. The long reason has to do with the intersection between reincarnation and ancestor spirituality.

It actually all started about a year ago when I realized via tarot that in my past life I was my grandma’s boyfriend who died in Pearl Harbor. An astrologer with a specialty in past life readings confirmed that for me in a mind-blowing way. He then told me about a past life where I was Dutch. Then a separate psychic I’m social media friends with told me that I had Dutch and French ancestors. All my life I just thought I was Irish with a little English and German, and I knew that people tend to reincarnate within the same culture and/or family, so I wanted to confirm via DNA if I had this ancestry.

I got a lot more than I bargained for.

December 30, 2024, I got my results at about 9:30am. Before it lets you see your results, it shows you a disclaimer going “Some people are very surprised by their results! You can’t sue us about it!” And I went “yeah yeah whatever.”

“Who the fuck is Bruce?!”

I was the only adult in the house, watching my 2 year old twins. I sent my best friend a voice message bc I needed to talk this out with my voice and she was the only person I trusted in that moment. I didn’t trust my husband to understand. I told her something like “I got my DNA results, you know it’s the usual, Irish, German, whatever, but it matched with this man named Bruce and it’s SAYING HE’S MY FATHER!”

Among Donor Conceived People, the next few steps are extremely common. Denial: “this has to be a mistake.” Anger: “did my mom cheat on my dad?!” Bargaining: “I’ll message all these people I matched with that it’s saying are either my half siblings or aunts and uncles, and surely they will explain wtf is going on here.”

The first person to message me back said “here’s my number, call me, I’ll explain everything.”

It was about 10am now. He was in the car with his wife on speakerphone. He knew things about me before I said them, and he explained that Bruce was a sperm donor, the doctors told our parents to never tell us, there had been full anonymity, he had donated for about 16 years and there were a lot of us.

“I’ve fucking SEEN ALL THESE DOCUMENTARIES!” I said. Yelled? It felt like yelling in my head, but I was shaking so much I might have barely squeaked it out.

My new brother’s wife added “And Bruce isn’t a creep, by the way! He’s a really nice guy!”

After we got off the phone, he invited me to our sibling WhatsApp group, Facebook group with our siblings, Bruce, Bruce’s wife, and one of the sons Bruce raised before he started donating. He also sent me a Google doc with information on Bruce each sibling.

So within an hour of getting my DNA results, I had a new dad, 30-something new siblings, and an onboarding packet.

I say 30-something, that’s just the number that have been found out of more than 100 that Bruce sorta knows he made. He wasn’t supposed to know anything about the parents or babies, but he somehow got nurses at the clinics he donated at to illicitly tell him when he “landed one.” He lost count around 80. He feels certain it’s over 100. One of our siblings grilled him on his donation schedule and estimates the number could be as high as 220.

There’s also a problem with the fact that my mom never went to a clinic. She was inseminated by the same OBGYN who eventually delivered me, at the same hospital that Bruce himself was born in. I don’t think he knew that his donations travelled like that.

The day I found out, I just let myself spin out. I didn’t try to approach my mom. I needed the dust to settle a little. My husband begged me to wait until we didn’t live with her anymore, he was scared she would have such an outsized reaction as to kick us all out of her house, but we had no timeline on moving out, and I knew if I didn’t ask somewhat soon, I would explode.

The day after I found out, I waited for my mom to sit down to lunch. Made sure she had at least a few bites in so she wouldn’t be hangry AND blindsided.

Except she couldn’t be blindsided. She had put the DNA test in the mail for me. She had tried to talk me out of taking it at all. I thought she was just taking it as a personal affront to her genealogy skills.

She had 6 weeks to decide how she wanted to handle this conversation. And the tactic she apparently decided on was to act like it was boring and casual. Like I was talking about the weather.

“Does Dad know about the fertility clinic?” “What fertility clinic?” “The one you apparently went to?” “Oh, that. Of course.” She shrugged.

It was like pulling teeth, but I learned that he’d had a vasectomy during his first marriage, Mom was his 2nd wife.

“I told him it was a baby or nothing,” she said in a tone that told me she thought she was very clever. I also learned that Dad requested the guy be Irish, which Bruce is not. Or, he is a little tiny bit, but if you had asked him in 1987 when I was conceived, he would have said “No, I’m German.”

I didn’t find out that Mom never went to a clinic until one of my brothers came to our house to meet me and she dominated the conversation.

She was friendly and interested in him because she couldn’t escape him, but whenever I try to talk about my biological family, she’s very clipped. She doesn’t wanna hear about it. The other day she went “Aw, you were born at the same hospital, how sweet,” in a very mocking, seething tone when I was talking about Bruce, after I’d come home from having coffee with one of my brothers. She has never asked how I feel about the situation, never will.

It took me a month to figure out how to approach my dad about it. He’s a very emotionally repressed, very conservative Irish Catholic. I decided an email would allow him space to deal with his emotions in private, which is what he would want. I told him everything, told him how much more respect I had for him, tried to frame everything as positively and lovingly as possible.

The day after I sent the email, he came into my room and told me he wasn’t happy I found out at all, everything was great as far as he was concerned (it was not great), and he wasn’t happy about sharing. Like I’m a fuckin pizza.

I never really bonded with my dad, he doesn’t talk to me even though we’ve lived in the same house my whole life, so I don’t even know what he thinks he’s “sharing.” 🤮

And then there’s Bruce.

He and I started emailing back and forth. I get my passion for writing from him, as do a lot of my siblings. I also inherit his interest in spirituality and “alternative states of consciousness,” as he put it. Most of us also inherited his wanderlust, which he himself inherited from several generations of pioneers, missionaries, and other intrepid travelers.

He sent me his grandmother’s memoirs. She was one of the first women to graduate UCSF back in 1896, and took her MD straight to India, where she met her husband, a missionary, and had a bunch of her 7 children. Her daughter also met her husband in India, he was from New York but he worked for a tire company and went where the rubber was.

To think, I had no idea about any of this when I moved to Morocco to be with my Moroccan husband.

Unlike my parents, Bruce has asked me about my feelings and tried to get to know me. Despite all the kids he has, he gives everyone as much attention as we want.

That means he also respects it if we don’t want to be involved. There are a few siblings in denial, and we leave them alone.

The siblings that are in contact are awesome. I adore them. I’ve met 3 brothers and one sister, all live in California. Most of us were born in California, but most have moved around. Wanderlust.

It’s surreal meeting a stranger who looks like you and has the same sense of humor as you. The other day I noticed my brother and I both rub our eyes a lot, a similar mannerism. My sister was the first person I’ve ever met who also didn’t understand why everyone was freaking out about lockdowns in 2020. I told her “Finally! Someone who gets it!”

She’s also into psychics, and one had just told her that she had some kind of connection to Canada, and was spooked when I mentioned our great-grandfather was Canadian. She didn’t know.

Which brings me back around to my grandma’s boyfriend who died in Pearl Harbor.

The same astrologer who confirmed that for me was thrilled to get a birth time for a sperm donor.

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:

People are allowed to want to know where they come from. It’s natural for Denny to want to know who his bio mother and bio father 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!