throwawaydonor19

Hey there, I guess I'm your opposite number. I'm a former sperm donor who found out about my 19 (and counting) biological child in the last year, when 23 & Me connected the dots and one of the recipient parents reached out to me. Since then, I've been in contact with a handful of the parents and some of the kids, but most of them are still pretty young. It has been quite a shock learning about all this, but seeing the similarities between all the half-siblings has been pretty amazing. How did you initially contact your donor dad?

Gotcha. I was anonymous as well, and haven't updated my status with the bank, frankly because I don't entirely trust their methods. At the time I was donating, I was assured that my identifying info was kept very secure, AND that their policy was to "retire" a donor after 12 live births. So, many years later when I heard about the Donor Sibling Registry, I search my donor info on there and was pretty shocked to see the quantity of info that was there, plus way more than 12 kids. I don't know if the bank's contact program is just another profit center, so my communication with the recipient families has been through social media. I have my own family now, with concerns for their privacy, so I'm taking it slow. However, the majority of my donor kids are pretty young, so their parents are rightly protective of them communicating with someone who's basically a stranger, aside from genetics. I'm curious about what the future holds though.

OK, so I'm guessing your donor had chosen identity disclosure from the jump. At the time I was donating, I wasn't sure, so always defaulted to "Undecided" and figured I'd make the decision later in life. Well, time and technology caught up to me, because several of the half-sibs had connected through the Donor Sibling Registry, and when a family member did 23&Me, all of them were suddenly linked up to me. They found me on social media and one of the recipient parents reached out, and here we are.

You'll probably be connected almost immediately. I'm a former donor and a family member did 23&Me ( I was unaware) and then suddenly I was coldcalled by a recipient family that had looked me up on social media. I discovered a network of ~8 families that were all in close contact with each other. It was quite surprising to suddenly learn about 12+ kids and see all your genetic variation on display.