Nineteen children and counting

[Tennesseer]

Interesting article about sperm donation, lies, DNA and ancestry sites.

Nineteen children and counting

CORVALLIS, Ore. —The message arrived on a weekday morning when Bryce Cleary, 53, was at his medical practice. The doctor had just finished typing up patient notes on his office computer and decided to log into his new Ancestry.com account. It had been a Christmas gift from his wife. He had just received his genealogical results tracing his Swiss and Irish family roots. But now Cleary noticed a note in his account’s inbox.

He clicked and read: “I did not expect to see such a close relation on this site. I apologize if this is uncomfortable with me reaching out to you.”

His office that day in March 2018 was crowded with the family photos of a man happily anchored in his place, a position carved out deliberately over the past decades. There was Cleary, a teenager, with his Corvallis high school football team. There he was as a middle-aged doctor, smiling with orphans in Ghana, and at his wedding to his second wife, his arms wrapped around his three grown sons.

Almost all of Cleary’s life had played out within a short drive of where he now sat. He was 10 minutes away from his childhood home. Seven minutes from the fields where he — and then years later his sons — played high school baseball. Five minutes from the church he attended as a kid, the same church where his mother’s ashes had been scattered. The only significant time he had spent away from Corvallis was during medical school in Portland at Oregon Health & Science University, where at one point he became a sperm donor.

Now, nearly three decades later, as he kept reading, Cleary realized that Ancestry had identified him to one of his donor children. In fact, to two of them.

The message was from a woman in her 20s. She wrote that she and her sister were both Cleary’s. “I thought I might write to say thanks for donating all those years ago,” she wrote, and then asked about his family medical history. “Again, I apologize if reaching out is too much or overstepping any boundaries,” she added.

Complete article here: Nineteen children and counting

[Tiny]

That's an interesting article. Even though it's based on a somewhat "sensational" headline - it did touch on more of the moral/ethical aspects of it - from the medical side to the donor and child side of it.

And of course that article lead me down a "rabbit hole" of questions:
Why would a single donor's sample(s) be used for so many children? (this isn't the first time I've read about a donor with a dozen or more of children. )
How many children are conceived/born using anonymous donor sperm each year?
When did artifical insemination start?


Found this:
www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/05/sperm-donation-anonymous/560588/#:~:text=Even%20many%20heterosexual%20couples%20are,each%20year%20were%20conceived%20through

Sperm donation—a man donating his sperm to conceive a child who for all intents and purposes belongs to parents other than him—has been happening for centuries. One of the earliest recorded cases of sperm donation in the Western world was in 1884, when a doctor in Philadelphia inseminated a woman with sperm donated by his “most attractive” medical student. The practice became more popular during the Baby Boom years after World War II, though it often remained a secret parents kept from their children and from the world—“both to protect the man from the stigma of infertility and to protect the child from the stigma of illegitimacy,” according to a 2008 article in the quarterly The New Atlantis. For the most part, secrecy was the norm until around the turn of the millennium.

That kind of explains the "horror/unease" I witnessed from some of the older generation in my youth (they were teens/adults during WWII) when the news/TV shows (think Phil Donahue) would discuss opening adoption records (and sperm donor records). It was "We don't talk about Fight Club" thing.


The article says this about the numbers:  It's from the 1979, though 

When Wellisch and Sants were doing their research, sperm donations overwhelmingly went to heterosexual couples, and the practice became more common in the 1970s; it was estimated in 1979 that between 6,000 and 10,000 children were born annually in the United States via sperm donation. Back then, “many physicians wouldn't even have considered inseminating anybody other than a married woman,” says Scott Brown, the director of client services and communications at the L.A.-based California Cryobank, which facilitated the conception of Courtney McKinney. “Most people weren't going to tell their children they were donor-conceived.”

and here's 30,000 to 60,000 in 2010.... 

The state of sperm donation today is far different. “You’re looking at an industry that’s probably 75 to 80 percent lesbian couples and single mothers by choice utilizing donor sperm,” says Brown. “Children are well aware of how they were conceived. Even many heterosexual couples are sharing with their children that they are donor-conceived, much like adoptive families that let kids know they were adopted early on.” (Though statistics are hard to come by, a 2010 study estimated that some 30,000 to 60,000 children born in the U.S. each year were conceived through sperm donation, out of a total of roughly 4 million births that year. By the late 2000s, by contrast, some 136,000 children—of all ages—were adopted in the U.S.)

 

[bean29]

Thanks for the article link - I found it interesting, although I don't think I have anything to say one way or the other.