Lies the Doctors Told Our Parents

Our donor sibling group was born between 1955-1984.  While this wasn't the beginning of sperm donation practice, it was a time when it was developing further.  There are some interesting articles about the history of donor insemination: Kleegman, "Therapeutic Donor Insemination", 1953; and Swanson, "Adultery by doctor: artificial insemination 1890-1945", 2012.

The doctors practicing donor insemination prior to 1985 told our parents many lies about the sperm donors they were using for our conceptions.  This was part of the thinking at the time by the network of physicians practicing donor insemination, based on these articles.

The lies:

(1) Our sperm donor was a medical student.
False.  Our sperm donor had a 9th grade education, GED, and worked at Chrysler and did odd jobs to help support his family...including being a sperm donor for 30 years.  Based on his offspring, the donor must have been an intelligent man.  Education level and intelligence don't always correlate.  People had to work to support their families and didn't always have the opportunity of education.  Nevertheless, the doctors routinely lied to our parents and told them the donor was a medical student.  OMG, I spent so many years searching for the donor, knocking on the wrong doors, based on that misinformation.

(2) Each donor was used for 6-8 families.
False.  Some of our half-sibling's families were told that our donor provided sperm for 6-8 families.  This same information was again told to a half-sibling when she called the physician's office to gather information about her background.  At this point, with 41 half-siblings in our donor group, we represent 34 families.  This is the tip of the iceberg.  This only includes the people who have done DNA testing.  One can only imagine how many families our donor provided sperm for to help create their families in the Detroit area.  Scary thought!

(3) Families were told that the doctor used the same sperm donor within their family.
False.  Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't.  Some of the families in our sperm donor group did get the same donor.  For example, my sister and I are full genetic siblings.  More often, when our half-sibling's familial siblings did DNA testing, they found out they were conceived from different donors.  They were genetically half-siblings as well.  Feeling confused?  It is very confusing. The physicians created a large, intricate web of relationships, with different families sharing a pool of donors.  Sometimes a family's offspring had the same donor, sometimes not.  Each donor was used for a large number of families.  It's difficult to picture or write about this web of relationships because there are so many different connections in it.  More on this later...