At 26, I don’t know if my donor father is dead or alive – or if I’m ready to find out

Before I arrived home from uni several years ago, my dad messaged me that we were going to have a family meeting – a letter had arrived that day from the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.

In the lounge room, my little brother was next to his mother (my stepmother), and when I entered, our dad sat down beside them. My dad began to speak. My little brother’s biological father had died.

Louis Taffs was conceived by sperm donor, but is yet to meet his biological father. Credit: SMH

This letter – both its contents and the fact we received it – was the result of a long campaign from and on behalf of donor-conceived children in Victoria for their right to know their biology and history. At the time, I was 20 and my brother was 11. That nine-year gap places us in different epochs in Victorian donor anonymity legislation. He was conceived in an era when his donor was automatically on the registry. I was not.

As I sat across from them, my dad and stepmother slowly explained to my brother that his donor father – a man unknown to my brother other than by concept, and to our parents by little other than a brief information sheet at the IVF clinic at the time of his conception – had died of a heart attack.

The letter contained an abridged medical record; the disease that killed him was not genetic, the letter assured us. These facts are valuable, and we were glad to know them. But a situation like this also raises questions beyond the legal and the medical. As donor children, for whom should we grieve? For whom we should care? Who should we love?

There were 1159 pregnancies achieved in Victoria last year using either donor egg, sperm or embryos, and tens of thousands of Australians have been born through donor conception to date. This number will continue to grow; male and female fertility is decreasing across the board and the number of same-sex couples and singletons who want to (and are increasingly permitted to) have children is increasing. IVF is a technology that is allowing these lives to be created, providing children to those otherwise unable to have them. The legal and cultural shifts around donor anonymity and the creation of donor registries such as the one managed by Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA) are the trellises that will support these lives as they grow.

Knowing your history, your origin, is important.

When I was an older teenager, I was invited by VARTA to talk to new and prospective parents of donor children through a program called “Time to tell”. I would go to a school hall on a Saturday and watch other donor children speak to the crowd. These “children” were older than me, usually in their 30s, and they had found out the truth of their biological origin in adulthood.

Sometimes it was revealed by a sibling or aunt who crumpled under the weight of a family secret. But more often, and increasingly so, the speaker had sat at home at their kitchen table, trying to produce the copious amount of spit needed to fill a direct-to-consumer genetic test kit. A month later they would sit at the same table and read their DNA results on their laptop – results that did not, and could not, fit in with their biography as they knew it.

There was a common theme to the stories of the older donor-conceived people on stage before me. They told tales of a life before and a life after; stories of the destabilisation of their identity and family relationships that followed their stumbling onto the truth, and more significantly, their uncovering of the lie.

When the previous generation finished speaking and passed me the microphone (often while fumbling with tissues they had brought for their tears), I would speak to the crowd, offering a solution to avert this trauma, one VARTA clearly supported: tell your kids when they are young. If you need proof, here I am standing before you, telling you the story of my life, as it has always been. And as interesting as it may be to you, to me, it is mundane. No tissues required.

For us, the conception of the donor registry and knowing our truth was our journey’s first step. But now, as I and these children grow up knowing our biological history, we grow up knowing we are part of a bigger picture – a longer sociotechnical story. If the past 25 years were about ourselves and society understanding and accepting how we came about, the next 25 will be about what we make of our combined, related existences.

Donor children now are born with a set of relationships with people known, yet to be known, and, for some, forever unknowable. How will these relationships shape the identities of donor children and the ideas they have about family, kinship and community?

VARTA as an organisation foresaw the importance of some of these questions, and the services they provided were a reflection of that. Unfortunately, the Victorian government is set to disband VARTA by the end of this year, with its responsibilities absorbed by the Department of Health. I worry that this will result in a dilution of the specialised services the organisation provides.

After receiving that letter from VARTA, my brother struggled with the death of his donor father. Yet there are no books written on how to manage this grief, no parables or narratives exploring the meaning of such an abstract loss. Perhaps he will write one. And if he did, I would perhaps need it.

I am 26, and I’m yet to put my name on the registry. I do not know whether my donor father is dead or alive. When I do decide to register, I do not know what form my relationships with the people I will meet will take. However, I do know that I would like an organisation that has earned my trust to support me while I do it.

Louis Taffs is a medical student at the University of Sydney and a junior researcher in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine.

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