After discovering he has at least 17 kids, man sues fertility clinic
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It is said to think that my biological father is probably dead. He was apparently a Vietnam vet who needed some extra money. I'm glad he did what he did.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/magazine/sper...
A lot of us siblings live in the same area so while its conceivable that inbreeding is an issue, it's probably like a 1 in a few million chance that you meet a sibling randomly.
That's beautiful and I'm very happy for you and your siblings.
I'm so curious, what advice or insight would you have for parents or children whose conception was supported by a donor?
I would say that it's important to not make it into a big deal. I think it's cool and I am grateful they spent the money and went through the extra pain of conceiving that way. There's no need for drama and tears :)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/magazine/sper...
Did you notice that you were particularly attracted to any of your half-siblings?
But I don't feel attracted to them, I mean, I only really feel attracted to someone based on their personality. And once I learn someone is my sibling, I think I'm influenced to not be attracted to them hahahaha
Somewhat related: I was conceived in Germany in 1989. It's really unlikely that I'll ever find out any information about my biological father. Clinics there (until recently) only had to hold some info for 10 years. I don't think my parents even knew anything about the person - as when I came out... I looked nothing like my parents and I don't think they intended that. Brown eyes to their blue. Every facial feature completely different. Olive skin to their paleness. And this extended to the entire family - I always looked out of place. They didn't tell me until I was about 24. I wasn't shocked - clearly.
I've never done any DNA testing mostly because no one can place my race and I like the mystery! Sadly - I'm the perfect mix where most white people treat me like I'm brown and most brown people treat me like I'm white. Never got to fit in - lol. I still have a genuine curiosity but not knowing is all the more interesting. Your experience of race is mostly what people think you are anyway.
I had a friend in Germany who had dark hair, dark eyes, and a complexion that always made it appear as if he had a real nice tan. His family and the people of the small community he originally came from were all similar as far back as anyone could trace.
Likely some inter-mixing or resettling of tribes a thousand or more years ago. They're as Bavarian / European as just about anyone, and probably you are, too.
I just happened to live there for a while and thought it worth pointing out that the people of Germany are more genetically diverse than the stereotypes. In retrospect, it was kinda shitty to do when you said you enjoyed the mystery. Please accept my sincerest apologies.
There are multiple fertility doctors who have used their own sperm to impregnate their patients. Sources are listed (in plain text--looks like they need to fix the HTML), but it was shocking to learn about. Here are a few of the references:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/fertility-doctor-pregn...
* https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/08/26/fertility...
* https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9193014/British-man-fathere...
Likely some, but I suspect the set of "sperm donor kids" has a pretty big overlap with "people interested in DNA relative matching."
At least, for my experience, if you look significantly different from your family then you start to really question things and want to do DNA testing ASAP.
I looked nothing like them or the extended family. While that happens for non-sperm donor kids - it's exceptionally rare that they look nothing like anyone from the extended family on both sides. In my case - I probably look a lot like my biological father's side.
In terms of what it tells you - it tells you what your potential ancestry could be. If you have parents who have no idea what they're ancestry is (mine don't) then you might have interest. Of course - once you do it... you're gonna find out you're a sperm donor child pretty fast.
Of course, if you convince your parents to submit to a DNA test, then sure, the jig is up.
In my day job, I'm a geneticist, and have worked on population genetic typing. There is a fair amount of heterogeneity in any population, so it wouldn't surpise me to see unusual patterns in the data. There's also the fact that consumer DNA tests oversell the granularity that can be gleaned about ancestry.
It's a good thing we've cured all genetic diseases then.
It's delivering a value people want – relative discovery – and uncovering malfeasance, and further may be helping to prevent undesirable incest.
That offsets these registries' other scary potential uses, like the risk of them being used to disadvantage certain genetic subgroups, or find wrongly-persecuted individuals.
I would agree that this highlights how scary gamete donation is, when handlers/recipients may not be trustworthy.
It's gonna be non-scary to some, scary to others.
Plenty of people donated sperm thinking they'd stay anonymous forever, back before the Human Genome Project was a $1B undertaking.
If a sibling or parent sends DNA sample X, they do not know what your DNA is.
If someone also provides DNA sample Y, they can know that it is the DNA of a relative of X.
But...is that really worse than normal life? That's approximate not admissible in court. And DNA or not you can already figure out someone's associates a hundred different ways.
For an anonymous sperm donor, potentially from the other side of the country decades ago? Absolutely.
> The discovery prompted Dr. Cleary to send his DNA to Ancestry.com, which led him to uncover fifteen other children. Most of them live in Oregon and he has now met three of them. In the press conference, he noted that there may be even more children.
The children found him via Ancestry.com before he submitted his own DNA.
It was funny though... the commander said, "Are you afraid we will clone you?" to which I replied, "No sir, you should be afraid you will clone me" and we both laughed because I was right. I explained everything you described and he helped me through the process.
However, it could certainly become a problem in the future, because half the American population really wants the ACA to be rescinded so that insurance companies can go back to that, and they keep voting for candidates who push this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-u...
Everyone has problems. But everyone's problems are not everyone else's problems.
There’s no signed contract that he’s produced, and doesn’t remember how many times he donated. It was decades ago, he could easily be misremembering someone saying the “average” donor is used 5 times. It wouldn’t make sense for a standard contract to include those limits either.
I’m interested where this goes. I’m guessing he’s trying public pressure to force a settlement, knowing he’d lose in trial.
Also, if it wasn’t a cash grab, I think he’d have already committed to giving any settlement to those children.
If I left a donation, I wouldn't want a knock on the door 18 years later, let alone 15 knocks.
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/10/oregon-doctor-says-h...
The problem comes when you have many generations of family marriages in a row.
The Catholic church tried to make cousin marriages taboo as a way to break up clans and solidify church power.
What people might not realize is even when there's not a specific disease caused by the inbreeding, there is still an overall negative effect on health, "inbreeding depression".
Here is a paper that estimates the effect in humans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26131930.
Which is why this whole thing is immoral (not to mention dangerous) to begin with. How can you not assign children to both the (real/biological) father and mother to keep track of these things?
I have 2 recessive things that I know I carry, thanks to genetic screening. If I boinked a half sibling, they'd probably be a carrier of 1 of them, and there's a 50-50 chance any resultant offspring would have the conditions.
(Neither would be fatal but both would be severe chronic things-- e.g. hemachromatosis.
There's probably other rarer recessive things that I'm a carrier of and don't even know about.
...you could take steps to assure safety first, thanks to genetic screening.
It's selfish behavior on both the donor and the recipient, and who ends up paying for it are the offspring and most likely society as well.
No, but we're in a large society where men can and do have sex with women (consensually or not) once and leave them pregnant. I'm not making a moral judgement, I'm saying that mostly anonymous sperm donations have been happening long before IVF and sperm banks were a thing, so the results aren't as unpredictable as you paint them.
It's interesting how far left/liberal culture today mocks communities that have cousin marriages as "inbred" and "backward", yet they engage in severe and reckless practices that we have no idea how they're going to pan out.
We're ending up in a society where people don't know who their offspring are, and where children don't know who their real parents are. This is untrodden ground, and may very well have extremely serious consequences.
Whereas artificial insemination is literally having the woman carry another man's child, it goes against conservative values (would they let another man sleep with the woman to impregnate her if there weren't artificial insemination?)
2. My wife is adopted, has had some contact with her biological mother, but zero reliable information on her biological father (her bio mom lies about pretty much everything). She has shown no interest in the various genetic tests out there, even though she has to keep on writing on those health forms at her doctor "unknown" for all the "Does X run in your family" questions.
As if this excuses this sort of behavior.
Two of the children contacted him first. That might have been just them innocuously looking for their biological parent, or it might have been a demand for parental support. If it's the latter then having 17 or more children potentially making a demand on him would make a big difference to his life.
Also how could a clinic guarantee a specific number?
They could count the number of successful children born with sperm from a donor and stop using that donation once there are 5 children.
ivf nowadays is also very much more strict about what you transfer. i did ivf a few months ago and we only transferred one PGS tested, day 5 embryo because a second one was not going to do anything good for me or the pregnancy odds.
2-3 decades ago both the tech and the feelings around donor identities and limits were very different. but nowadays we’re moving towards smaller limits and open identity of some sort, while fewer donor gametes are necessary for people to get pregnant. it’s curious.
As for guaranteeing a specific number, first, if they couldn't guarantee that, why would they agree to the limit in the first place? And even if the guarantee was violated without intent, I would expect perhaps 6 or 7 children... not 17.
>Some go to the same school as the kids he has with his wife.
That's so awkward and uncomfortable for me to even think about it, being in this situation...
>Some go to the same school as the kids he has with his wife.
The objection that the clinic couldn't actually guarantee a specific number of children doesn't hold water since they could have stopped using his sperm once the 5th child was born.
For IVF, the best practice is to implant 3-4 embryos, sometimes less when the woman doesn't have fertility issues. Obviously circumstances vary and IVF results in more multiples, but you're not going to get 5 sets of triplets if the clinic is doing what they agreed to do.
i had genetically tested day 5 blastocysts with my last cycle and most fertility doctors will not dare transfer more than one of those at a time regardless of age. but that is the best quality to transfer nowadays.
nobody wants to optimize for multiples any more since the rate of issues for both the embryos and the gestational parent are pretty high.
Let's assume his 17 kids (k) are locals. Let's say he lives in a city with 1 million people. That's 500000 potential other sex mates (assuming hetero) We're only interested in people more less our age, about 20% of the population (actually much smaller), so 100 000 = N
Chance of incest = 1 - p where p = N!/(N^k (N-k)!)
Using the sterling's approximation, and that half his kids are opposite gender, k -> k / 2 = 6.5
About 2 in 10 000 chance of incest. Which are really high for something many people consider worse than death.
Now, my assumption of 20% is too generous. What if it's 10%, and he has more, undiscovered kids (presumably who haven't gotten tested)? Let's say 30 kids (it's happened)
1 in 2 thousand for every mate. You wouldn't get into a car that had those odds of a fatal accident, never mind 6, 10, 30 times.
Either they shouldn't have guaranteed this, and made it clear that they couldn't, or they should have abided by the agreement. Either way, the clinic is at fault.
Some of his kids went to the same schools and churches.
A friend of mine made a deposit in a sperm donor bank prior to getting a vasectomy. Two years later, he met a woman, who he dated for a few weeks before breaking it off.
9 months later, he was presented with child support demands from the state. She had stalked him, determined he had made a deposit in the sperm bank, then specifically chosen his profile to get pregnant.
He is now liable for child support, whether he likes it or not, for the rest of his life (California, in case its of importance). They didn't have sex - she stalked him, got artificially inseminated, and then went to the state to extract money from him. He now has a kid he never wanted, and is resigned to being a father to the child, even though he never planned it and it was forced upon him by a criminal stalker.
This highlights just how dangerous it is for men to use these services. Clearly, more regulation and oversight is required - especially if sperm banks are making their own decisions about how their resources are applied.
The relevant law in California states that sperm donors are not legal parents: “The donor of semen provided to a licensed physician and surgeon or to a licensed sperm bank for use in assisted reproduction of a woman other than the donor’s spouse is treated in law as if he were not the natural parent of a child thereby conceived, unless otherwise agreed to in a writing signed by the donor and the woman prior to the conception of the child,” states California Family Code 7613.
This is the problem with people saying "this isn't legal in America": it's all based on how good your lawyer is, and if you can't afford Johnny Cochrane, you get screwed, no matter what the law says.
Like I said before, either your friend lied or he needs a better lawyer. Given the story that you stated, the law is definitely on his side.
Anyway, he fought back and is now a very dedicated father. He has visitation rights, and soon enough the childs decision to move in with her Dad, because her Mom is a criminal, will be ratified in court ..
i have a further thought - i am a legal owner of an “intimate partner” storage account where my partner’s sperm is stored for only my use as their spouse. even with the very very low FDA testing/paperwork bar for this type of account, there’s a paper trail that can be followed and a chain of custody for every single vial ever used. they’ll have even more documentation if the friend’s sperm was ever for sale.
Your friend was not very wise here.
So can he not prove this in court ? Sure it still adds hassle for him to go through all this legal stuff. But it is not like he just has to shut up and pay IF what you said is true.