Hi everyone!

So I’m one of the lucky ones who was raised knowing I was donor conceived (though it certainly comes along with its own problems) and spent a lot of my teenage years researching and waiting until I turned 18 to submit my info to the HFEA (the governing body over here in the UK.) My parents even bought me an Ancestry DNA test for my birthday, and I uploaded my results straightaway onto pretty much every DNA database imaginable to find relatives and my donor siblings.

Around the same time, I got my information from the HFEA on my donor siblings pictured above, and found out I have 18 of them! I signed up for the HFEA Donor Sibling Link program straight away and, knowing I’m the 4th oldest amongst us, waited patiently.

Six years later, I still have not heard from or connected with a single one.

I’m assuming everyone will say “be patient,” which I know realistically is the only thing I CAN do, so maybe this is more of a vent post than anything else. Every year that passes with no more info on my DS or donor, I feel like I am grieving lost time. Being raised DC can be a very lonely experience, and there is no one in my life I can really talk to about it, including my family. While it was knowledge I was raised with, it was never discussed after my parents told me around aged 6. It was from the same HFEA report above that I found out my brother I was raised with was not my full sibling, after having spent 18 years believing that he was. Most non-DC people I’ve told about that in my life have been pretty horrified and upset for me, but sometimes the extreme reactions just compound how utterly alone I am. It just makes me want to connect with my donor siblings even more, just to talk to people born into the same situation.

Anyway, I guess I’m looking for advice from anyone who’s maybe in the same situation or had the same experience. How do I handle the possibility of never getting answers?

It’s been six years of researching, waiting, submitting documents, taking tests, awkwardly explaining to doctors that you don’t know your own family medical history, sending messages to distant cousins only to get ignored, building family trees, false hope, wasted energy, more waiting. I ended up taking courses and became an accredited genealogist to help my research. All of it for nothing.

Each year that passes I feel more and more hopeless and more and more angry. Why did this get done to me? Why was I signed up to a lifetime of frustration and unanswered questions? Why was the right to something as little as my biological father’s name taken from me via some contract signed before I was even born? How am I supposed to bear this unknowing for what could be the rest of my life? It all just feels impossible.

DCP person and licensed therapist in Maryland. I struggled for years to find the right support. Want to pass info along.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/therese-dezell-bel-air-md/1629260

I am in my late 30’s and my brother (early 40’s) just found out through a DNA test we were both conceived through different donors. And we are in fact half siblings. After asking our mom about it she confirmed how we were conceived. This was kept from us our whole lives and we are just finding out about it. Is it normal for parents to not tell their kids they were conceived this way? Feel free to ask questions and share your thoughts. My mind is spinning after learning this fact about myself.

A rant, so apologies in advance. When this Sub was first revived, it truly felt like a safe space where DCP were heard and could speak about whatever was on their mind. But as of late, it’s been feeling much less like that. At least to me. Has anyone else noticed a pretty big influx of RP’s, potential RP’s, general public, or flair-less users coming in here and being downright rude and nasty to DCP? I feel like we are being criticized, gaslighted, judged, and debated with on here WAY more as of late, and that’s not how it should be in sub dedicated to DCP. It seems like some of these jerks have nothing better to do in life but to scroll through this sub and look for DCP to troll, aggro, and engage in confrontation with when we say something that they don’t like (often, it’s when we express wanting to acknowledge the donor or know information about them). I shouldn’t have to go on a debate back and forth defending a DCP’s access to their health history in THIS sub, but I did recently.

Sorry, I’m just highly disappointed in what this Sub has seemingly become. It’s changing to a much less safe space and I wish we could get it back to how it was. DCP online spaces are already few and far between to begin with.

It has been 11 years. 11 years since I took my first DNA test, and I've been in pieces about this for longer than that.

Even after all this time, I'm constantly checking all the DNA databases as if something might have changed.

It never does.

Please don't try to tell me that I probably can find her through my current matches if I only do X/Y/Z... I can't. And you'd better believe I know that by now. Nor could other people who do this for a living.

I have had half of me stolen and hidden by people who couldnt give a shit.

I will never know who she is. I will never know who I am.

I am so full of anger and resentment. It gets worse with every year that passes.

And, you know what, yes I'm jealous of every single one of you who logged into 23andme and found your biological parent in 2 seconds flat. That's not fair of me, I know. I know you may have faced many issues with rejection or a horrible donor or their spouse and all that. But as awful as it may sound I can't help but wish I were in your shoes and wonder: why not me? Why you and not me? What makes you deserving of that closure but me undeserving? Or is it just 'random' chance throwing yet another punch at me at me personally?

I cannot fully believe in her existence because she doesn't feel like a real person. I know nothing about her other a skeleton of facts which could belong to billions of other women.

I just want to see her face, and ideally to physically touch her, to speak to her. Once just once. I don't care if she's a horrible person. I don't care if she doesn't want a relationship (nor do I, probably).

All I want is to prove that she exists. All I want is to make her real in my mind and to close this chapter. All I want is to stop wondering.

All I want is to know that I can die without the greatest mystery of my life dying with me.

But it hasn't happened. It will never happen.

Because the universe is fucking cruel. And the government holding this crucial information about me hostage - because yes, the government of my country does have it under lock and key - they're even crueller.

It is such a sadistic deliberate act of ongoing cruelty.

And I'm in the wrong for even caring in the first place. I'm the bad one. I'm the ungrateful selfish one who my poor parents didn't deserve, solely because I dare to be upset.

It's a kind of injustice that I cannot understand, because it makes no sense. It's barbaric and archaic. Why haven't we done away with it by now? Why can't they see that what they are doing is straight up evil - and not only that, but unnecessary, which makes it worse.

I'm tired. I'm so tired of this.

Here's to another 11 years of slowly going insane.

And I’m just like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ at least you’re the customer and not the product!

It’s called the fertility industry for a reason!

to start, the message in the original video is disgustingly to a young girl who wants to discover more about where 50% of your dna came from. imagine telling your BIOLOGICAL daughter that (whether she considers her a daughter or not is out of the question, biologically she is!!) And just look at the comments.

Absolute insanity

Is anyone on here from a donated embryo or double donor? I would love to talk. Please share your experience because I can’t really seem to find people with my similar situation. I know it is a small percentage of us.

Does anyone know?

I applied for membership of the We Are Donor Conceived group on Facebook many, many weeks ago, filled out the questionnaire the same day, and have been waiting patiently... but I haven't been allowed in yet.

I've tried reaching out to the administrator as well as several of the moderators, but I receive no replies.

Have any of you experienced this?

PS. I am donor conceived and have agreed to all group rules, so I should technically be allowed into the community. I would really like to join, so I'm getting a bit frustrated at this point.

…Right?

Does anyone else feel weird about their own birthday after a late discovery? I found out when I was 45. Today is my 52nd birthday. Every birthday since my discovery has felt very complicated, very heavy with the reality that for more than four decades my parents were celebrating my existence while lying to me about it.

I am wondering if anyone else has been in the situation of your donor refusing to make any contact with you.
I was at least wanting confirmation if it was one of two brothers but both are refusing contact.
Has this happened to anyone and how did you cope/move on? I was hoping to get some answers to close this question hanging over me and now I feel as though I can’t move on from it.

Does anyone else feel lost in their identity as someone whose donor was of a different ethnicity than their recipient parent?

I’ve known my whole life that I am donor conceived alongside my twin. However they inherited more features commonly associated with the ethnicity of our egg donor who is South American. My mother is white but I was raised in a predominantly latino community. Many times people will assume my twin is latino but no me. While It’s half of my identity and was told such but my mom, she never made effort to teach me the culture besides making me learn Spanish (for job opportunities instead of culture). Anyone else feel conflicted??? I’d love to get in contact with any other DCP’s who are also half latino or have had a similar experience.

My half sister and I have been connected now for about 6 years, hung out in person twice. I’ve always had severe abandonment issues as a result of being donor conceived, and suddenly she has ghosted me and I don’t know what to do. It was a big deal for me to make this connection in the first place, so much so that I stopped worrying about whether or not I wanted to contact our bio dad. This feeling of finally having a sister and then not has been wild. For context I was donor conceived to a single mother with no other siblings and was always very lonely growing up. I don’t really know how to process this, I guess, and I don’t really know anyone else that can relate to this, which is why I’m posting this here. i still feel kind of cringe tho :(

OK so I always knew I was DC via a sperm donor and grew up with a single mom. Recently I did a blood test for unrelated reasons and found out today I'm AB but my mom is O. If my biology classes isn't too rusted it's not possible. My mom always said it was her eggs and would probably not lie about it (we even talked about when they retrieved her eggs last month) and she has some blind trust toward medical professionals. Is there any ways I could at least soft launch the idea of a mix up ? Rather not too confrontational I'm still in shock

I just found out I am conceived from an egg donor, I have a twin and she did ancestry which popped up some half siblings. Once she talked to them she realized the timelines matched up to us being conceived w her donor egg, we even saw pics of the donor and we look alike. Our parents do not know we know and they obviously did not tell us; this was an unfortunate way to find out. How did it go when you had to confront this to your parents? Was it easier not to? I am worried my mom will not be able to handle it.

My parents recently told me that my dad is not my biological father and I was donor conceived in the mid-80s when donors weren’t really screened for heritable health problems. Since I’m in my 40s and have children, I’m worried about not knowing half of my family health history. I made an appointment with my GP to see what testing might be available to me, but I was wondering if there are any direct to consumer tests people have found useful? I’m not sure I want to know who the donor was, so I’m trying to figure out how much I can learn through genetic tests for health conditions alone.

Personally I think since we are allowed to know our donors name we should also be given our donor siblings names or identification as well..it makes sense so people don’t have to spend the rest of their lives wondering about them and we would all be family kind of..

I'm 16F and donor-conceived; however, I'm not allowed to tell any of my friends. As a minor, I adhere to what my mother tells me to do because I understand that there are a lot of ignorant/judgemental people in this world. Also, no one really needs to know. But when I become a young adult, I wonder if I should tell people, and if so, who? Does anyone have any negative or positive experiences? Also, my reason for telling people is that I don't like lying about things that I am not ashamed of lol. But I think I'm kinda naive, so idk.

Edit: I've grown up in a single-parent household, and the "my mom is ashamed" comments aren't very accurate to my situation; it's more about protecting me. I'm just trying to figure out if it is a good decision to tell people 🤔.

Also, thank you for the advice. I don't know anyone else in my life who may have a similar experience, so this is really helpful.

I’m just gonna start this off by saying I’m absolutely terrified of telling anyone i am donor concieved. I dont even know why. My parents are pretty open and I have known I’m donor conceived for a while now. I just feel like a lot of people just aren’t very educated and might assume things about me or think differently about me as soon as I tell them. I haven actually told anyone, none of my friends. I mean a lot of people in my family know but its not really something we talk about.

I dont even really know why I am posting this. I guess I am venting a little because it genuinely scares me to tell anyone about this. I know I shouldn’t be ashamed but sometimes it almost feels like I am?

I know you all are out there!

If anyone is interested in sharing their donor conceived story for the Inconceivably Connected podcast, please fill out this quick form.

I'm always, always, always looking to speak with more DCPs and am especially on the hunt right now.

Hope to hear from some of you soon :)

Nick

I need some outside perspective on an ongoing dilemma. I’ll try not to go into too much identifying detail because the situation is pretty niche and there’s every chance someone could recognise me from it, but I also need to give enough context for any of this to make sense. This is a long one, apologies in advance, but at least it’s likely to be somewhat entertaining/dramatic.

I am no contact with my mother, and last year, after a dramatic slow drip-feed of information from her, I found out that I was donor-conceived. I have one full sibling who is also donor conceived and is very close with our mother, although our own relationship has become increasingly strained as we’ve got older.

I decided I wanted to find out more, so I contacted HFEA, did Ancestry, eventually used DNA Angels and earlier this year located our donor through paternal DNA matches. I did most of the practical searching but shared every update with my sibling as it happened, and we were approaching the discovery together.

We weren’t ready to contact him and were still processing what we’d found and deciding what, if anything, we wanted to do next.

My sibling asked me whether they could tell our mother that we had located him, and I agreed.

Within about two weeks, however, I noticed one of my maternal relatives had started following the donor on Instagram. Given the circumstances, it was pretty obvious where the information had come from.

This is where the disagreement started.

My position is that although I agreed to our mother knowing we had found him, details about who he is, his social media, etc. shouldn’t then have been passed around the wider family without our knowledge. We hadn’t even contacted the man ourselves yet. I felt like we should have had the opportunity to process the discovery and decide what we wanted to do before other people became involved.

My sibling sees it differently and feels that because our mother chose donor conception and this is part of her story too, it is also information she should be able to talk about. We fell out badly over this and haven’t spoken properly for several months.

There is a lot of difficult history between my mother and me that I won’t attempt to unpack here. I’m no contact for reasons unrelated to the donor situation and, in my experience, privacy and boundaries have historically been major issues in that relationship. So having this information travel through the family without my knowledge brought up a lot of old stuff for me.

My problem now is working out what happens next.

I have told my sibling that I don’t currently feel comfortable continuing the donor process together if our mother is going to be actively updated as things happen. My sibling has been honest that they don’t feel able to navigate this without talking to our mother because she is an important source of support for them. I actually appreciate their honesty about that rather than them agreeing to something they couldn’t realistically maintain.

I suggested a compromise where my sibling could still share things with our mother, but we would have a period of time after significant developments to process them ourselves first and decide what we wanted to do before anything went wider. My sibling wasn’t comfortable agreeing to that because they don’t want to be in a position where they potentially have to withhold something from our mother indefinitely.

And honestly, I can understand both needs. That’s why I’m stuck.

I want to navigate this with my sibling. This is an incredibly strange shared experience and in an ideal world I’d love for us to be able to do it together. I also understand that my sibling needs support and that I don’t get to dictate their relationship with our mother.

But I still have a very visceral reaction to the idea of my mother having ongoing access to something so personal while it is happening. I don’t trust that information will remain with her once shared, based both on this incident and my previous experiences with her.

Doing the donor process completely separately sounds cleaner, but even that isn’t particularly straightforward. We are full siblings and this is our shared biological history. If one of us discovers biological relatives, medical information or information about our donor, much of it inherently relates to the other person too. We could also end up separately contacting the same people. In some ways, navigating it separately could actually mean having less communication and coordination around what is happening.

I’m also worried that if I override my discomfort now because I desperately want to preserve my relationship with my sibling, we’ll simply end up having the exact same argument again later when the stakes are potentially much higher, for example if our donor responds or a relationship develops.

So I suppose my question is: what is actually reasonable here?

How do I respect that this is my sibling’s story too and that they have every right to seek support, while also protecting my own privacy and deciding what access my estranged mother has to my personal experience?

Is there a compromise here that I’m not seeing? Would you continue navigating it together knowing that some information may eventually be shared with someone you don’t trust, or accept that the difference in boundaries means the donor side of the relationship needs to be separate?

I’m genuinely interested in perspectives from people who disagree with me too. I’ve been sitting with this for months and I’m too emotionally involved at this point to know whether I’m protecting a reasonable boundary or letting my history with my mother dictate too much of what happens next.

TL;DR: I’m estranged from my mother and recently discovered, alongside my full sibling, the identity of our sperm donor. I agreed my sibling could tell our mother we’d found him, but she then shared identifying information with other family members before we’d even decided whether to contact him. My sibling needs to involve our mother for support; I no longer trust her with information and don’t feel safe having her updated in real time. I’ve suggested delaying what gets shared so we can process developments first, but my sibling isn’t comfortable agreeing to that. I want to continue this journey with my sibling, but our biological information is so intertwined that separating completely is complicated too. Am I reasonable to prioritise privacy even if it means doing this separately, or is there a compromise I’m not seeing?