When Should You Tell Your Donor-Conceived Child?

i think that the key insight about and danny and i become advocates for early disclosure uh when we do talks like this you know the point we try to stress to professionals in the reproductive medicine space is look at us as an example of what happens, what can happen, both good and bad, when a disclosure is three decades too late.

And I think Danny was caught off guard because he didn't know You know, his own mental profile reflected in me.

I mean, it was, you know, useful to him to see, you know, in his late 50s, some new information about, you know, his own genetics that I helped be a mirror for him for.

But, you know, he also didn't know up until that age that he had a donor conceived person walking around.

That's relevant information, I think, for him to know.

On my side of it, there are key aspects of identity formation.

You go to the doctor's office and you write down your medical history and half of it's wrong every time you have no idea.

And you end

up

feeling weird about the waste of hand energy that goes into that as small of a things that sounds like it's just a dignity issue that you, you feel like you've been told something that's a lie on the basis of which you've built part of your identity.

That's a significant thing to be dealing with.

And some, some of this stuff is difficult enough when you're a kid and, You need adequate support and guidance and explanation during key identity formation stages.

You know, when you're a child, it's a developmental stage.

So doing some of that out of order in your late 20s or 30s or beyond, you know, that That's hard.

And I think as an adult, you do have more tools potentially to deal with it.

But just the disjunctive nature of it, you know, Danny's quote, well, this is a surprise, right? That it's just it's something that you don't expect to be having to confront or deal with later on in life once you have a pretty well established concept of self.

Sure, sure.

I think it's really funny, Dr. Shapiro, that you said, well, this is a surprise, especially considering that you are a reproductive endocrinologist.

And so you have been on both sides of, yeah.

Yeah, though, I mean, I was a donor in the 80s.

Stopped donating in 88.

So the youngest possible offspring from that right now would be 37.

Everyone else would be well into adulthood, potentially have kids of their own.

And, you know, there was a point where I had put myself on donor sibling registry, right, 2008, 2009, primarily because my kids were at a day school where one of the teachers slash parents was on the cover of the National Enquirer Yeah, she had her own reality TV series briefly.

Her kids were both donor conceived, and her husband was, frankly, a little humiliated by it.