A thirty-three year old man from Boston donated his sperm several times while he was attending law school. He has recently learned that the result of his donations has created over 70 children. This is a situation where medical science and genealogy connect in strange ways.
Genealogy is the study of family. Typically, a person’s immediate family consists of their parents and siblings. Extended family could include grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. When a person becomes an adult, their family might be their spouse and their children. All of these relationships are very simple to fit into a standard family tree.
The definition of family gets a bit confusing when it comes to sperm donation. Men donate their sperm, and the sperm is used to impregnate women who are complete strangers to the man who gave the donation. The donor doesn’t have any control over how many biological children his donated sperm will be used to produce.
The woman typically doesn’t have any way to know who the biological father of her child is. He may be identified by a code number, but that would be all the information she would receive.
In the United States, it would be up to the woman to tell the sperm bank that she has become pregnant. Not all of them will choose to do so. This creates a problem when it comes to keeping track of the true number of children that a particular donor has fathered. Another problem seems to be that sperm banks are not very motivated to limit the number of pregnancies that result from the donations of one person.
A thirty-three year old lawyer named Ben Seisler, (who is from Boston), has found himself in a rather strange situation. He donated his sperm to a sperm bank during the three years that he was in law school.
He has recently learned that he has fathered more than 70 children. Around fifteen of them have located him, and expressed concern that they may have unknowingly “had relations” with someone who was actually their half-sibling.
There is a website called the Donor Sibling Registry. It can be used by people who were born from donated sperm (or eggs) in order to get some information about their biological parent. The website can help people learn who (at least some of) their half-siblings are.
Donors can use the website to learn about how many offspring were produced from their donations. Some donors are learning that they are the biological parent of 100 or more children.
These extreme situations do not fit easily into the typical family tree format that a genealogist would use. It also alters the usual definition of the word “family”. You have biological fathers who never met the mothers of their children, and who played no part in raising said children. You have mothers who do not truly know who the father of their child is. You have offspring that run the risk of potentially dating or marrying someone who turns out to be their biological half-sibling.
Image by Grace Hebert on Flickr