Illustration by Angela Mitchell
In 1998, things were going pretty well for Joe, a 26-year-old graduate of Santa Clara University in California who was just beginning to launch his professional life. Still, he thought, a motorcycle and some extra cash would make the situation even sweeter.
He didn’t have to look far to find something to sell.
Donor-sperm banking was a growing area of reproductive technology in the late ’90s. The local buzz was that California Cryobank paid good money—as much as $600 a month. He began making regular deposits.
The decision was a practical one for Joe, but it was life-changing for Robyn and Angie Baerman, halfway across the country in O’Fallon, Mo. They had been together for two years when they decided they wanted children—and they didn’t want to adopt. They bought a laptop—quickly dubbed the “baby-daddy finder”—to begin their donor search. Through California Cryobank, the couple found a donor whose sparse information met their basic criteria. “We weren’t really sure what to look for,” Angie admits, “just someone who seemed well-rounded and had some sort of special talent. We chose a donor who was an artist and a rock climber; he was also very smart, with a degree in microbiology, and he had the same physical characteristics as us: brown hair and hazel eyes.”
In February 2002, Robyn became pregnant.
“When I was pregnant, I had this weird obsession with trying to figure out who the donor was,” Robyn says. “I had so many questions for him: Did you have braces? Are you tone-deaf? Just silly little things you’d want to know about your kid.”
Logan, a girl, was born in November 2002, and in 2004 Angie became pregnant—using sperm from the same donor. While she was carrying their second daughter, Macy, she learned about the Donor Sibling Registry. The online service had been conceived in 2000 by Wendy Kramer of Nederland, Colo., in response to her 9-year-old son’s questions. At first, Angie was skeptical.
“I was afraid the donor would find us, and I was afraid that Logan would be taken away from us,” Angie says. “You hear horror stories—you could get a conservative judge who thinks the father should have rights even though he gave away those rights by donating.”
Robyn had no qualms whatsoever, though, and once Angie thought about the issue from a medical standpoint, she agreed that it was a good idea to begin a search. “What happens if something is wrong with them and they need a sibling?” she asks.
Thus the “baby-daddy finder” became a “donor-sibling finder.” The couple logged on to DSR, where a parent, child or donor can publicize a donor number and wait for matches. Even before Macy was born, the Baermans had turned up four of their daughters’ half-siblings: two children in New Jersey and two in New York—Lorenzo, 7, and Sophia, 4—with whose parents they have talked on the phone, e-mailed and exchanged photos.
“Sophia and Logan look a lot alike—frighteningly so,” Robyn says. “They apparently say a lot of the same things and do a lot of the same things. They’re both really hardheaded and stubborn but have a sweet side to them. They are both very particular about their clothing and how they look. They even seem to like the same TV shows and books.”
Watching the children grow is changing Robyn’s ideas about how much of one’s identity is determined by genes. “Logan and Sophia seem to have inherited their attitudes,” she says, “although it could just be a 4-year-old thing—and Logan and Macy even have the same facial expressions.”
Both Robyn and Angie say having information about the children’s siblings is adding a new layer of understanding as they watch their daughters’ development.
Meanwhile, out of curiosity, their donor had posted his own query on the registry, and, over time, the e-mails they exchanged reassured Angie that her worst fears would not materialize.
“He wouldn’t even tell us where he was from,” she recalls. “He was being cautious, and it made me realize he was just as worried as we were.” His nightmare? That they’d ask him to pay child support.
Not a chance. But they did relish learning about his interests, traits and talents. “Joe is an award-winning oil painter,” Robyn says, “and Logan loves to paint. It will be interesting to see the differences between Logan and Macy. Angie is more left-brained and book-smart; she’s into sports. If Macy turns out to be this incredible artist, chances are, it came from the donor.”
“I can barely write my name,” laughs Angie, a paramedic for the St. Charles County Ambulance District.
“And if Logan becomes a doctor, it didn’t come from me!” retorts Robyn.
Another donor-sperm recipient, Kenna Weber of Columbia, Mo., savors even the smallest details she’s learned about her 2-year-old son Liam’s half-siblings. Using the same registry, Weber, a single mom, located her son’s two half-brothers, both of whom are also 2. One is the child of a lesbian couple; the other is being raised by a mother and father.
Weber says Liam doesn’t look like the donor, but his half-siblings do—and one of the boys shares with Liam the kind of only-a-mother-could-love-it anomaly that parents compare so eagerly: The boys each have second toes that are slightly shorter than the toes on either side. The three siblings also share a mild, bothersome skin condition, “a little bit of eczema,” Weber says. “It wasn’t in the donor profile—my family doesn’t have it—but in the sibling families both boys have slight eczema.”
The contact’s more than a matching game, though. Weber is delighted by the diversity of the new families in their lives and would like to meet them one day: “I see it as extended family. They have become a part of our family because they are part of Liam.”
As Liam grows older, Weber plans to be completely honest with him about the details of his conception; she compares it to the issue of adoption. “Twenty years ago, people didn’t talk about adoption,” she says. “It was a secretive thing, and lots of children came out of that feeling their families had lied to them. They were missing a part of who they are, and I never want Liam to feel that way.”
Tamara Smith, who lives in St. Charles and asked that her real name be withheld, also wants the best for her 14-year-old son, whom we’ll call Keaton. He was conceived through the use of donor sperm. Smith and her husband never planned to tell Keaton about his origins, but, when he was about 6 years old, he began asking, “Mom, am I from Mars?” Smith thinks it was because he felt that he was very different from his father. Keaton had difficulty with numbers, for example, whereas his father had minored in math.
A few years ago, Smith learned about DSR and, for health reasons, began to dig deeper into Keaton’s biological ties. The search revealed that Keaton has a 15-year-old half-sister in New Jersey. Smith began corresponding and trading photos with the girl’s mother.
“When I received the pictures, I was so excited,” Smith writes in an e-mail. “They have the exact same smile, and their eyes look very similar.”
Smith finds it difficult not to tell her son about his half-sister. She says she may share the news with him one day, but for now she’s respecting her husband’s strong feelings against doing so. “I guess it’s an ego thing for a man,” she writes.
Parents’ fears often keep a lid on the truth, says Dr. Doug Pettinelli, an associate professor at Saint Louis University and a psychologist whose practice includes addressing adoption concerns: “One of the big issues parents are often afraid of is being rejected by the child.”
Often those fears prove to be unfounded, he continues. “In adoptive families, searching for birth parents usually strengthens the relationships. The children most often feel profoundly understood and supported if their parents help them.”
Pettinelli believes donor-sperm children have similar feelings. One thing’s for sure, he says: Secrets regarding a child’s origins always slip out. It could be a relative, a neighbor or a healthcare provider who blows the parents’ cover. “A doctor may ask, ‘Do you have heart disease in the family?’” he says. “A young person may say, ‘Yes, my dad died of a heart attack.’ Then he comes home, and the mom has to say, ‘No, that wasn’t your dad.’”
The sooner the child knows, the better, according to Pettinelli: “Secrets in families are always destructive. There is a sense that, ‘If you lied about this, what else have you lied about?’ When children sense they’re not being told something, they use their imaginations and make up all kinds of things.”
It’s much easier for lesbian couples to tell their children the truth, Pettinelli notes. “They know they need to explain why there’s no daddy. Explaining why this daddy isn’t your daddy is a much harder task.”
Joe is now living in the Midwest. Recently married and planning to start a family, he says that although it’s a complicated subject, he probably will tell his future children about their donor siblings.
“I would like to meet them someday,” Joe writes in an e-mail. “But I’ll also have to contend with my wife, who was not so enthused when I told her about the donor kids. Obviously, it would have to be handled delicately.”
Tyler Gibson, a University of Colorado freshman, can’t imagine not knowing about his origins. Ever since he can remember, his single mom has been open about having conceived him—and his sister—using donor sperm.
“If I hadn’t been told and I found out, I would have a very shattered trust, and I would probably end up pulling away,” Gibson says. “My half-brother Justin, he was really surprised when his mother finally told him. He had noticed that there were physical differences between himself and his adoptive father; there were things he didn’t inherit from his mom or his dad. He just kind of blew it off, I think—but when he found out, he wasn’t mad or hurt, just interested in how this could change his life.”
In the past three years, Gibson, his sister and his mom have located and begun meeting five of six donor siblings—and he’s now going to college with his half-sister. Both had considered the University of Colorado, but finding each other clinched the choice.
“They’re more than friends,” Gibson says of his donor siblings. “There’s more of a connection, and there’s a lot more trust. It’s like a sister-brother-friend.” He chuckles. “All of us can roll our tongue except for one half-sister. Finding traits like that—it’s exciting. You think, ‘You really must be my half-brother or half-sister!’ It makes it more real—and you know where you both came from.”
Gibson and his newfound band of half-siblings have also befriended Ryan Kramer, the boy whose curiosity spawned DSR. Ironically, Ryan and his mother, whose efforts have led to thousands of reunions for other families, have had mixed results from their own search, locating two half-sisters whose parents refuse to let them have any contact with Ryan, now 16. They hope that when the teenage girls are older, they’ll find Ryan on their own.
DSR has matched up more than 2,781 family members, and the participation has grown so large that, in addition to her full-time accounting job, Kramer spends 40 to 80 hours a week working on the site. Sixty Missouri families are registered; half have already found matches.
On the heels of DSR’s success, California Cryobank began offering donor-sibling matching exclusively for its clients in June 2004 and has so far made more than 350 connections.
It’s an exercise in nature versus nurture, a real-life experiment in the way genes play out. It’s also instant family—or, if not quite family, connection. But even more than that, it’s a way to show children conceived through the use of donor sperm that they’re not so different after all.
“It’s important that they know there are other people like them,” Angie says. “It’s one thing to hear it from us, but it’s another thing for them to see that these people exist.”
Logan’s a little young for that kind of complexity, though.
“I’m gonna kiss my brother!” she announced when Robyn mentioned Lorenzo.
Robyn smiled: “What else would you say to Sophia and Lorenzo?”
“Ummmm ... I’m a baby.”
“And what would you want to know about them?” Robyn asked, no doubt thinking of all those tangled issues of medical history and genetic inheritance.
“I’d ask them about the teeth place.”
“You mean the dentist?”
“Yeah, the dentist.”
After all, what’s a sibling for, if not reassurance?
