At a cocktail party recently, the movie, “Delivery Man,” with Vince Vaughn, was the topic of discussion. The premise is that a man, in his youth, donated a great deal of sperm, which led to 500 plus women being impregnated. More than one hundred of the children born are suing the sperm bank to learn of his identity. The movie got fair reviews. What the cocktail party discussion produced was more enlightening.
It seems that there is a “new” extended family structure made up of donor siblings and this is more common than we know. A relative of one of the cocktail party attendees who was a professional woman in her forties, decided to have a child, and use a sperm bank. She has a beautiful towheaded blue eyed boy age four. She has the sperm donor number, and went on the internet to see if she could locate any other children born from the sperm of this donor. She found fifteen parents willing to become a new family unit, donor siblings. There are fourteen boys and one girl and mostly with their mothers (apparently fathers in a family do not want to admit to the use of a sperm donor) meet at Disney World once a year to connect. Many of the mothers are professional women in their forties with much in common, according to the relative. Everyone considers themselves part of an extended family. She said we should go on line and see for ourselves that there is a registry for the new family structure. Of course, I went on line when I came home from the cocktail party.
There is a registry. Here is what Wikipedia says:
The Donor Sibling Registry is a website and non-profit US organization serving donor offspring, sperm donors, egg donors and other donor conceived people. It was founded in September 2000 by a mother and son team, Wendy Kramer and Ryan Kramer of Nederland, Colorado. As of November 2013, the site is home to more than 40,000 members including sperm/egg donors, recipient parents and donor conceived people.
The “DSR” was developed as a means of connecting people born through donor insemination. It is based on the idea that when a child is born through donor insemination, they are given a “donor number” corresponding to the person they anonymously received a sperm or egg donation from. Because a donor can donate multiple times, often two or more children are created from the same donor. When multiple user sign up with the same donor, a “match” is created. Most commonly, matches are made between half-siblings of sperm donation, however there are numerous cases of donor-offspring matches as well.
When a donor conceived person, a parent of a donor conceived person or a sperm or egg donor signs up to the Donor Sibling Registry, they are automatically filed under their respective facility/clinic/cryobank by their donor number. If only one person of a donor number is listed, the posting is white. When two or more people sign up under the same donor number, they are filed together as a “match”. Matches can occur between half siblings (light yellow), sperm donors and their offspring (dark yellow), or egg donors and their offspring (also dark yellow). As of April 2013, the total number people matched on the DSR is 10,000, although many more unrecorded matches exist. The largest match between half siblings totals more than 175.[3] The largest match between a registered DSR donor and offspring is 75 half siblings to a single donor, who is also listed.
See 9/11 NY Times Article: “One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring”
Of course, I went to the article. The article can be found at NY Times.
On September 5, 2011, The New York Times published, “One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring,” by Jacqueline Mroz. It begins:
Cynthia Daily and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive a baby seven years ago, and they hoped that one day their son would get to know some of his half siblings – an extended family of sorts for modern times.
So Ms. Daily searched a Web-based registry for other children fathered by the same donor and helped to create an online group to track them. Over the years, she watched the number of children in her son’s group grow.
And grow.
Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together – they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.
We Grandmas have to go with the modern times. Just when we are getting used to accepting blended families with grandchildren with whom we are connected by marriage of their parents, or just connected by a cohabitation relationship, we now have donor siblings.
To think, we could have upwards of 100 grandchildren extensions! I have enough with just four!
So here is the reason, according to Ms.Mroz:
As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.
Of course, there are now concerns about the large number of children from one donor:
Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.
“My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason,” said the mother of a teenager conceived via sperm donation in California who asked that her name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. “She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education” for her.
Critics say that fertility clinics and sperm banks are earning huge profits by allowing too many children to be conceived with sperm from popular donors, and that families should be given more information on the health of donors and the children conceived with their sperm. They are also calling for legal limits on the number of children conceived using the same donor’s sperm and a re-examination of the anonymity that cloaks many donors.
“We have more rules that go into place when you buy a used car than when you buy sperm,” said Debora L. Spar, president of Barnard College and author of “The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.” “It’s very clear that the dealer can’t sell you a lemon, and there’s information about the history of the car. There are no such rules in the fertility industry right now.”
Although other countries, including Britain, France and Sweden, limit how many children a sperm donor can father, there is no such limit in the United States. There are only guidelines issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a professional group that recommends restricting conceptions by individual donors to 25 births per population of 800,000.
No one knows how many children are born in this country each year using sperm donors. Some estimates put the number at 30,000 to 60,000, perhaps more. Mothers of donor children are asked to report a child’s birth to the sperm bank voluntarily, but just 20 to 40 percent of them do so, said Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry.
Because of this dearth of records, many families turn to the registry’s Web site, donorsiblingregistry.com, for information about a child’s half brothers or half sisters.
Ms. Kramer, who had her son, Ryan, through a sperm donor, started the registry in 2000 to help connect so-called donor families. On the Web site, parents can register the birth of a child and find half siblings by looking up a number assigned to a sperm donor. Many parents, she said, are shocked to learn just how many half siblings a child has.
“They think their daughter may have a few siblings,” Ms. Kramer said, “but then they go on our site and find out their daughter actually has 18 brothers and sisters. They’re freaked out. I’m amazed that these groups keep growing and growing.”
Ms. Kramer said that some sperm banks in the United States have treated donor families unethically and that it is time to consider new legislation.
“Just as it’s happened in many other countries around the world,” Ms. Kramer said, “we need to publicly ask the questions `What is in the best interests of the child to be born?’ and `Is it fair to bring a child into the world who will have no access to knowing about one half of their genetics, medical history and ancestry?’ . . . .
The groundbreaking Warnock Report contained a list of recommendations, including regulation of the sale of human sperm and embryos and strict limits on how many children a
donor could father (10 per donor). The regulations have become a model for industry practices in other countries.
“It is quite unpredictable what the ultimate effect on the gene pool of a society might be if donors were permitted to donate as many times as they chose,” Baroness Warnock wrote recently in an e-mail.
Without limits, the same donor could theoretically produce hundreds of related children. And it is even possible that accidental incest could occur among hundreds of half siblings, said Naomi R. Cahn, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Markets Need Legal Regulation.”
And what about those of us Grandmas whose sons are donating sperm. If they are interested in their offspring, we may find ourselves inundated with grandchildren. Donors are also worried:
Sperm donors, too, are becoming concerned. “When I asked specifically how many children might result, I was told nobody knows for sure but that five would be a safe estimate,” said a sperm donor in Texas who asked that his name be withheld because of privacy concerns. “I was told that it would be very rare for a donor to have more than 10 children.”
He later discovered in the Donor Sibling Registry that some donors had dozens of children listed. “It was all about whatever they could get away with,” he said of the sperm bank to which he donated. “It is unfair and reprehensible to the donor families, donors and donor children.”
Ms. Kramer, the registry’s founder, said that one sperm donor on her site learned that he had 70 children. He now keeps track of them all on an Excel spreadsheet. “Every once in a while he gets a new kid or twins,” she said. “It’s overwhelming, and not what he signed up for. He was promised low numbers of children.”
So, are we ready for many, many, MANY grandchildren? This Grandma’s concern would be how the grandchild looks at having 100 donor siblings. This is what Ms. Mroz says:
Experts are not certain what it means to a child to discover that he or she is but one of 50 children – or even more. “Experts don’t talk about this when they counsel people dealing with infertility,” Ms. Kramer said. “How do you make connections with so many siblings? What does family mean to these children?”
To this Grandma, a family means love. A family means belonging. A family means caring. An extended family, which this is, just extends the love and belonging and caring. Again, as the times change, we Grandmas must change with the times.
In 2013, a big family may mean a really BIG FAMILY. As for this Grandma, I would join my grandchild on his annual trip to Disney World with
Joy,
Mema
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