David from Toronto

I met David through the private Facebook group called Donor Conceived Group for Donor Dads Via Being Sperm Donors Only, which may be of interest to other sperm donors. 

For those who would like to visit his personal website, you can go to drascic.net.  

Credit for background music goes to Dye O (and to my husband for picking out the song): https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCVMwu8OTZGR-NgRPdW9YcBg

Transcript

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[The original discussion is over 3 hours long. It has been greatly edited down. David has edited the transcript a bit to add some clarity and missing details. Those comments all appear in square brackets.]

SHAUN 0:06

Welcome to Donor Moms and Dads, a podcast that explores the world of egg and sperm donors who gave life to donor-conceived people.

My name is Sean Murphy Lopez, and I'm the host of Donor Moms and Dads. In 1999, I walked into a sperm bank and made my first donation. Two decades later, my 20-year-old biological son reached out to meet me.

What does it mean to be the father of a child you helped create, but may have had no contact with until years later? In this podcast, we'll learn about everyday people who made an incredible choice in their younger adult years and are now navigating unprecedented modern relationships.

Welcome to Donor Moms and Dads.

What happens when you donate over 100 times 40 years ago? You join a DNA testing website and no one appears. David is a great example of someone who has taken the time to educate himself and prepare for the future, with or without biological offspring. David, thank you for being the first person to share your story on this podcast.

DAVID 1:17

My name is David [Drascic]. I live in Toronto and I'm 60 years old. [Recorded on 28 July 2025.]

SHAUN 1:23

Okay, so what is the story of how you came to become a sperm donor?

DAVID 1:29

It was something I did in university. I started Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto in 1982, and there was a student newspaper called The Varsity that came out every week or two. There usually wasn't much that was very interesting, but there was one ad that caught my eye. I was very interested in sex at that age, of course [I was 17], and so anything that was [even] vaguely sexual at all would be something to catch my attention.

And I also had a very scientific bias. I was really interested in, [well,] I've always been a scientist.

So I saw this ad in a September issue of The Varsity that said: “Donors Wanted: Semen will be used for artificial insemination for couples who cannot have children due to male infertility. Men of all backgrounds are needed, and in particular of Chinese, Japanese, Black, and East Indian backgrounds. Donors will be screened and if accepted, will be paid for their involvement. For more information, call.” And it's a clinic that's actually still running these days. The same doctor, and the same phone number, even though that was 40 years ago. So yeah, he's still in business.

[NOTE: I DIDN’T ACT ON THIS AD. I responded to a different ad the next year.]

SHAUN 2:53

Yeah, and I'm so impressed you found the ad. You sent me a copy of it and it looks like an old newspaper.

DAVID 3:03

Yeah they scanned all of [the old issues of The Varsity and I found them] online [at the Internet Archive]. It's kind of amazing, yeah.

So I didn't do anything about it that year, but my friends at school and my sister [and I] were already doing blood donations on a regular basis. [The University of Toronto] had [bi-monthly] blood drives, and people would just go and give their blood away. And that seemed like a perfectly reasonable, sensible thing to do. Something good. You were giving something away that you had that someone else needed, and that just made sense to me. So I did that for years until they banned donations from gay men. Being a regular blood donor [seemed like a] good [thing], and the only reward you got was cookies and orange juice afterwards. No one was paid for blood donations in Canada that I know of at the time. I think that's still the rule; Canadians are almost never paid [for blood donations]. It's always [done for] free.

SHAUN 4:06

And David, again, what was the year that you saw that advertisement?

DAVID 4:12

[I saw that first ad in] 1982. [At the time], my summer jobs paid minimum wage, and I was responsible for paying my tuition. I was living at home with my parents, all of my friends were. And tuition was not too expensive at the time. I think it was only around CA$1,100. But minimum wage, working full-time all summer, would earn only earn about $2K before taxes. [The government] would [automatically] collect taxes, [and though] you'd get it all back at the end of the year because you didn't earn a lot, [it meant] you didn't even get the full $2,000. So yeah, money was tight. I continued working through the school year.

I was born in October 1964. So when I started second year, I was just 18.

SHAUN 5:05

Okay. You were 18.

DAVID 5:05

[NOTE: The first ad that I responded to appeared near the end of October 1983, and I think I called the number soon after.]

The woman who ran the office explained that there would be a very detailed health examination and a lot of questions to answer about myself, my activities, my family, our medical history, background, etc. I had to agree to answer questions about my sexual activity, and notify them about new partners. Checkups would be scheduled regularly. I also had to agree to continue to abstain from smoking, alcohol, and of course any other vices.

Except chocolate. They didn’t seem to think my chocolate addiction would harm potential offspring.]

But by the time I started donating, I'd just turned 19. The idea of getting paid [for doing something I was going to do anyway,] and doing something that other people would benefit from, seemed like a good thing. So that's why I called.

SHAUN 5:23

And so what was the experience like? I mean, do you remember the first time you went in or what it was like on a regular basis? Did they ask you questions? Did you meet with anyone?

DAVID 5:37

There was a big intake session that was probably done on more than one day, I think. There was a physical exam. There was a very long questionnaire that I filled out, and then a long discussion about medical history. I didn't know a lot about my grandparents, [and my parents we quite healthy at the time.] I couldn't tell them very much. [My grandparents] had all died before I was born. And because I wasn't comfortable telling my parents at the time, I didn't want to ask them too many questions that would give away my interest. [My Mum was VERY curious, and would never answer a question like that without wanting to know why I was asking!]

[It was at] a major hospital in Toronto, Mount Sinai. It's a teaching hospital, research hospital, and it's really close to the engineering buildings where I spent all my time. So that was really handy.

The intake was quite detailed. So there was blood work and a full physical inspection, making sure I was healthy. There was a long questionnaire I had to answer about my background, my parents' background. They wanted to know about my health history, my parents' health history, how my siblings were doing. And they asked a lot about… they wanted to know all about my sexual activity as well.

Because this was in the 80s, they were using fresh sperm samples that day. So they wanted to make sure they were not passing on anything to the hopeful mothers. This was long before sperm washing was available. That didn't start happening until the end of the 90s. Nowadays they don't have to be nearly as careful with sperm samples. You can wash away everything except for the sperm and still use them. But back in the early 80s, that was not the technology.

So this was meant to be a fresh insemination on that day. They never froze or refrigerated it. And there were to be two inseminations for each [attempt]. So they would do it with one day in between, and I was told that I had to avoid ejaculation for two days prior and between the two samples, so that was a big impact on a 19-year-old.

SHAUN 

Of course!

DAVID

So that [abstinence was something] I was very aware of, and the other thing of having to come in to do my donations at 7 a.m. on a school day! That was also a Big Ask because my classes started at nine, and I had to come up with these crazy reasons to explain [to my Mum] why I'm leaving the house two hours early to get to school. Because of course, my Mum notices everything!

So for the school year, I pretended there was a study group I was going to, and we were working on all these problem sets. But when the school year ended, that didn't work anymore. So I finally had to tell them.

SHAUN: 

So you told your parents? 

DAVID:

Eventually, yes. I told my Mum, and she told my dad. My dad never mentioned it.

My Mum didn't talk about it to me. She did talk to my sister about it. I remember after I came out [to my family], which was quite some time later [in 1987], my sister told me that my Mum had said to her that she was worried about the sperm donations. She thought that was a sign that I wasn't planning on having kids of my own. So yeah, she was right about that. I never did plan to have my own kids, so donating sperm seemed like a good thing to do.

I talked it over with my friends before I did it, and I asked them if they would be interested in doing it because I thought, you know, this could be good [for them, and for the people who would benefit]. I think I had called and I'd found out a little bit about it, but I still hadn't gone in for the intake yet. And I was talking it over with [my old friends from grade school who had also gone to UofT] to get their feedback and get some ideas of what they were thinking. [My friend] John felt it was complicated. [He told me recently that:] “I wondered what my duties would be to the eventual human, and what I would be to them. I also thought about legal exposure, financial duties, and what I could or should do if I learned that the child was being mistreated. Lots of stuff mishmashed together.”

[NOTE: My friend Brian said the same thing, pretty much, ending with, “Basically, I wasn’t ready at the time to even consider being a father. But I think you had a better way of separating it from yourself, of making it a one-time transaction. I wasn’t able to do that. Plus, you have always been really good with kids. So if some kids showed up in 20 years, I don’t think it would have bothered you.” And he was right about that. I was always open to them finding me, when they were ready. I even told them at the clinic, during the intake session, but they said that was not an option.]

SHAUN 10:38

What did you? I mean, so you were… It sounds like you were in this situation where you were really open with several of your classmates, I guess you could say, or your peers, about this. You were almost like talking about it, like I don't know that you were trying to recruit them, but you were just bringing up the idea to them to see what they thought. So you were hearing all these things from them, but what did you think at the time? Like you ended up doing it, you were the one. So, how did you think about it at the time? I'm so intrigued because I don't remember thinking a lot about this when I did it, and so I'm just intrigued about what you were thinking.

DAVID 11:20

Well, one of the things you just mentioned was talking to my [childhood] friends about it. One of the reasons I think I did is something that [my friend and eventual boyfriend for 11 years] Brian told me. [Brian] said he remembered me telling him that they were very interested in recruiting people in “very demanding academic roles”, especially people who had a musical background [as we all did]. So I think [the clinic was] encouraging me to try to recruit my friends because as I said [earlier in our conversation], [my friends] are all scary smart.

[NOTE: As to what I was thinking, this is what I wrote prior to our interview: To 19 year old me, donating money, donating blood, and donating semen were very similar. When I gave money to someone on the street, it was no longer mine. I had no say in what they did with it once it was theirs. The blood I gave away wasn’t mine anymore, it belonged to someone else. And that’s how I thought about donating semen. When the father-to-be needed some of my body’s fluid, I gave it to him unconditionally. What I gave away was no longer mine, it was his. And any child that resulted would be his, not mine. He wanted the privilege and responsibility for raising that child. I just played a tiny role in helping him do that. As did all the staff at the fertility clinic. It took all of us together to make it happen. 

And that felt like a good thing to the 19 year old me. I was doing an anonymous good deed, helping someone who needed it. I always imagined the wannabe parents were grown up and responsible, in a financial position to be able to raise a child. I felt like I was just a boy, many years from earning a living, and was certainly not in a position to help with any of that. But I could help them out by providing my semen.

Of course, the money was a big motivator. I would still have been willing, I think, but not if it meant getting up at 5am on a regular basis in order to do it. And I would have been turned off by the restrictions on my sexual activity, but I still might have done it.

The nice thing about donating blood is that the blood drives were held very close to my engineering buildings, and I was able to donate on my own schedule! Plus, cookies!

But despite being paid for my efforts, I never felt like I was selling my sperm. To me, the money seemed like a fair compensation for the big impact making these donations had on my life.

Though I had just turned 19, and hadn’t come close to discovering what being gay actually meant, I knew I would probably never marry, and would never have any kids of my own. And I was fine with that. I was quite content with being uncle to all of my str8 friends' kids. So the thought of helping people, earning some money, and having an impact on the timeline that will live on after me appealed to me.]

SHAUN 11:55

So have you found any of your biological children? Like, have you taken DNA tests? And is anyone out there, or what's that experience been like for you?

DAVID 12:08

I have not found any biological children yet. And I'm kind of afraid I might never. I know there's a fair number of them. I was donating for a couple of years, and as I said, there were 120 donations, so that was at least 60 attempts. On some weeks, they had me come in three times: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I think they were splitting the middle dose. So there might be more than 60, but let's say 60. And so there could be as many as 20 or 30 kids out there, possibly more, who are all half siblings. And so it took me a long time to get around to doing anything about it.

[NOTE: WHEN I ASKED the clinic about how frequently the inseminations worked, all they would say was “We wouldn’t be using you so often if you weren’t effective.” I guess being “effective” is good!

At the time, I assumed that they would stop after about 8 or 10 kids had been conceived, and just figured that the success rate was low. I had no data to work with. Now, looking back, I think it was extremely irresponsible for any clinic to use the same sperm donor for so many children! The chance of accidental incest is just too high!]

SHAUN 12:59

So [your D/C kids today] would be in their early 40s or about 40. Okay.

DAVID:

Yeah.

SHAUN:

So did you take DNA tests?

DAVID 13:13

I did. I finally got around to doing it last year [2024]. Another one of my friends, Jeanette, who [I’ve known since] high school as well, she has been encouraging me for years to try to connect with my donor-conceived kids. And I've always felt reluctant to do anything about it.

I got sick some years ago, chronic fatigue. I couldn't work, and my career just sort of disappeared. I had no income, and I didn't feel like I wanted to share my life with anyone [new]. I didn't think finding me would make them [my donor-conceived offspring] feel better about themselves. I was just so low at energy that I couldn't really cope with anything. And it took me a long time, like years to get out of that, to a point where I could actually be semi useful. And the brain fog is still an issue. I still have a lot of fatigue, but it's better. I can live with it now.

So I kept putting it off and letting my insecurity get in the way. But her message stayed with me, and eventually I started looking.

My friends and I would talk about them [my d/c kids over the years]. At the time [1983] I was wearing different-colored running shoes, one red, one black, or one blue and and green, that kind of stuff. And that got a LOT of comments back then in the early 80s. People noticed, and everyone would point out that “your shoes don't match”, and little kids would find it really exciting that my shoes didn't match. So that became a [running] joke: I'll be able to recognize my offspring by the fact that they have strangely-colored shoes.

SHAUN 15:02

So even in your 20s and 30s, you were thinking about looking for any offspring or any of your kids that came about.

DAVID 15:20

I never thought it would be possible because there was no registry. There was no [way for them to find me.] [The parents] didn't have enough information about me to be able to find me. All they had to work with was [what clinic] probably told them [which was] that I was a medical student, because that was the default. [Every sperm donor] was a medical student, which isn't true.

They might have the year of my birth, but they wouldn't have my birthday.

One thing that THIS clinic did that was very particular is they were very carefully matching the donors with the actual dads, with the real dads. So they wanted a donor who looked enough like the real dad and had a racial background that was close enough to the real dad that there would never be any reason for anyone to be suspicious that this wasn't the natural child of the father.

So they did that matching really well, I think. And that might be one of the reasons why none of the bio kids have thought to do the DNA testing. So when they finally do get around to doing it, if they do, there's a good chance they will be very surprised to learn that their father was not their biological father. [And maybe they will appear on the podcast DNA Suprises.]

SHAUN 16:46

Or it could be their kids too, because you know, say any of them had kids when they were about 20, when you were doing your sperm donations, yeah, you could have grandkids out there too that would be adults.

DAVID 17:01

Exactly! And that's one of the things that's really kind of haunted me, this idea that there are grandkids [and maybe great-grandkids] out there that I'll never see makes me sad.

I was always a natural teacher as well. I spent far too much of my time explaining everything to all the other kids in my class. And then throughout my university experience, I was a TA and spent a lot of time working with other kids. It's just something I always expected to be doing. I thought when I finally graduated, I would become a professor and then do a lot of mentoring to all sorts of kids. That's always what I figured I would be doing as a big part of my life. And that never happened, which is part of the reason I always felt so insecure and disappointed in myself.

And the idea that I've missed out on all that with all these kids, that there's ways I might have been able to help them through difficulties just by being encouraging or helping them find a solution to whatever they're having to deal with. That makes me feel a bit sad. And the fact that there's now likely a second generation, grandkids, it's nice that they're out there. I'm glad they're out there. I do wish I was able to be in touch with some of them or all of them, as many who want that from me.

But [of course] I have to wait until they're at that point in their lives where that becomes something they want to do.

SHAUN 18:42

Yeah, your your view on you know being a donor and what that means and kind of the emotions you have around it today, you know, how you feel now, it seems to be kind of in opposition to maybe I think what a lot of people think about donors, you know, I think a lot of people think that we're absent or not interested, or there couldn't be any emotional attachment or connection. And it's good to hear you verbalize those feelings, and I hope it helps other people to hear that too.

DAVID 19:28

I know that a lot of donors want to be anonymous and they're really upset that their privacy is being violated.

They have all this defensiveness and fear that people are gonna demand stuff from them, but they have to get over it. That's just that's like such a selfish viewpoint. You have to think about the kids as well.

I get that you don't want to turn over your entire lives. You may have relationships, families you're dealing with who would find it difficult. But they would survive. You know, you don't have to keep it a secret. Keeping it a secret has been toxic to the [donor conceived] kids, and it's been toxic for you [the donors] as well.

So yeah, it's time for you to grow up enough to at least acknowledge that you did something that matters to someone else.

And because of that, you have a relationship. No, you're not family particularly, but you're connected: you're connected through your DNA, and you owe them something because of that. You owe them at least some information about who you are and who your family is, your parents, your grandparents, where they came from, what their histories were like.

You certainly owe them medical information, anything you know about your own health, your parents' health, and maybe the health of your own kids, [because] that could be relevant to them. People are living so much longer these days, we need to know this kind of stuff. We need to know to look for all the things that can be going wrong.

So we owe a lot to these kids. We have a connection to them, even if we don't want to acknowledge it.

BUT! That's something I've only learned in the last few years. It's not something I've really thought about before. I never had a reason to think about it! It didn't occur to me that they [the kids] would be thinking so differently about it than I [did].

When I imagined if it happened [to me], if I discovered that my dad wasn't my biological dad, I would think, “Oh neat, there's like some other fascinating thing out there [to learn about!]” I don't think I would have particularly felt betrayed or too hurt about the lying, because I totally get that. I know what life was like [back then], I know how crazy people were back then [about anything to do with sex].

I had no clue at the time what I was committing myself to. I think I still would have done it if they had insisted it was open. Or if it would become open when the kids were 18. When I signed up, when I went for the intake, I said, Well, I don't, I'm not not worried about that. I don't need to be anonymous. And they said, Yes, you do. That was part of the whole thing. I was protecting the anonymity of the parents, and they were protecting my anonymity. And at the time, there was no one to speak for the needs of the child. There weren't enough donor-conceived kids at that point. And they didn't have a loud enough voice for anyone to pay any attention to. And that hasn't happened until shockingly recently. It's only been in what, the last 15 years, really, that things have started to change in some countries? Not in Canada yet.

SHAUN 23:16

And mostly not here either in the States. But have you contacted the hospital to, I don't know, ask them any questions or update medical information or get the agreements that you signed?

DAVID 23:33

Or that's interesting. I did not think of that. And so now I will have to!

SHAUN 23:40

I like to know how that goes!

I'm just curious because they're still doing it. [The same clinic is still operating out of Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto.]

You had mentioned, and one of the things that I've heard or learned in the past couple months is that donors can, you know, a lot of donors can see people want updated medical information, like that's the baseline information they want, even if they never know the donor at all. They just want to be able to walk into a doctor's office and tell them their medical history biologically. So, so yeah, that's one of the baseline things, but then there's other stuff in there too. Like, I know that some of the sperm banks here in the States at least, they offer, you know, that you can become a known donor if you sign additional paperwork. I've actually tried to do this, and I actually have never signed the paperwork because I'm uncomfortable with some of the stuff it says. I feel like I would be violating some of the things that they want me to promise with DNA testing. You know, so anyway, it's just fraught with a lot of issues, and so that's why I was really curious to know if you had tried that.

DAVID 24:57

Yeah, no, I haven't, I didn't even think of that. They were so adamant [at the time] about not associating me in any way with the offspring, that I just figured it would be impossible. But maybe it's not. Maybe they did keep it [sufficient records for the donor-conceived kids to be able to find me]. But it was so long ago, I doubt they still, oh no, they would have been required to keep those, I think. It's interesting. Hard to know.

SHAUN 25:22

Yeah, keep me posted. I'd love to hear if you

DAVID

I will have to call them.

SHAUN

Oh, go ahead, David. What were you gonna say?

DAVID 25:32

I was gonna say that you mentioned the idea of sperm banks keeping records that they can pass on, that the donors themselves can update and the kids can have access to eventually.

But there's a lot of kids who don't discover it [their DNA surprise] until after their parents are gone, and they will never find out what the clinic was, and the parents themselves may not remember by the time the kid finds out, so that's not a good enough solution. We need something better.

I mean, I'm thinking about what these kids will do if they don't discover it for another who knows how many decades, and I'm [already] gone. I would like to leave them at least some kind of record of who I was, what my issues were, that kind of thing. And maybe it won't help them anymore because they'll already be older than me now, but it might help their kids to know. 

But where do I, what do I do with it? How do I store it? There's no registry for anything like this, and there's there needs to be. There really needs to be national registries, for at least every country would have one where donors can leave like a link to their DNA results and have that tied into records they leave in terms of photos and medical histories and whatever stories about themselves and their families they want to share.

SHAUN 27:09

So tell me what DNA testing websites you have gone to, or or if you have gone to say the donor sibling registry? I’m curious.

DAVID 27:24

The first thing I went to was the donor sibling registry. Okay. I did make a profile there, but it's expensive, and I didn't see anything even close to being a match. There seems to be very little use of it in Canada. So I registered on the donor sibling registry. I wrote a couple of write-ups. I don't think they're even all that visible or people can find them, and I didn't feel it was worth spending any time there.

[NOTE: I WAS able to find the name of the doctor who was running the clinic at the time: Dr. Abraham Eisen. It turned out that his son was one of my classmates in Industrial Engineering!] 

But I went on to then look at the DNA testing sites and think about doing some of that. I guess before I did that, I went to the “Donor Conceived Group for Donor Dads Being Sperm Donors Only” on Facebook.

SHAUN:

Yes, where I met you.

DAVID:

Yes, yes, exactly. That's so that's where I really started learning a lot.

SHAUN 28:17

Okay.

DAVID 28:17

I posted publicly there [in that group on Facebook] back in 2024 in June. I [also] posted on my own personal page as well, publicly, so anyone can see it. [And I updated both places with new posts after registering with Ancestry, 23AndMe, and MyHertige, and my disappointment at finding no matches.]

SHAUN 28:28

Oh wow, interesting.

DAVID 28:31

So I tell the story: from 1983 to 1985, 120 donations.

SHAUN 28:38

What sort of reaction did you get on your Facebook page, on your personal Facebook page, when you posted this to all your your friends on Facebook?

DAVID 28:50

I actually have that all exerted in another Google Doc. I could look it up if you want.

SHAUN 28:56

Yeah, well, I'm just curious what the general response was.

DAVID 28:59

I mean, everyone was supportive, and some were telling their own stories.

One of my Facebook friends, a friend of a friend who lives in New Zealand, her kids are all donor-conceived. And we talked about it a fair bit, and she told me that she knew the donor. He died when he was 41 [long before her kids were grown.]. And none of the kids were interested at this point of being particularly aware of him or knowing anything about him. She's a lesbian, and so the kids always knew that they had a donor dad, but they were not interested in him until they were much older. And even now, only I think one of them was [interested] at the age of 17 or 18. But he [the donor] was already dead at that point. But he left a legacy for the kids with his family. So photos, his own medical history, and what he knew about his parents and grandparents, that kind of thing. So they have something. Well, their mum has that, but as I said, only one of them was even interested in looking at it so far. They're all still quite young though. So that was one of the interesting things that came out of that.

SHAUN 30:31

Yeah, you know, David, I never even thought to, well, maybe I did think about it. I just never, it never occurred to me some of the benefits of posting on my personal Facebook page, too. I've never done that, what you did. So I think that's really interesting. That's kind of a oh, it's a good, maybe it's a good way to educate people, but also then connect with people who you never would have thought were also involved in the community because it's so secretive.

DAVID 31:03

I had no clue [about anyone else’s experience], of course. And okay, so that was really good to learn. And I got to know my friend Liz so much better because of it. Until that point, she was a friend of a friend, and I liked her comments [on Facebook] all the time. And I knew we would get along really well if we ever spent any time together, but we had never had a reason to. But she's actually going to be coming to visit and stay for a few days in a month or two. So yeah, that's kind of neat. And because of that post.

SHAUN 31:34

How do you wish, like, you know, just I guess imagine you're calling the hospital tomorrow. Like, how do you hope that they handle all this? Or how do you wish the hospital would change their practices there in Toronto, just knowing what you know now 40 years later?

DAVID 31:57

I would like them to reach out to [all of their former] donors and invite them to agree to connect with any of their donor-conceived kids who are interested in connecting with them, at least through an intermediary that the hospital provides. That would be a great first step!

[That way] the kids could at least send questions, and the donor dad could answer them, but still remain at a safe emotional distance until they [all] have a chance to process and cope and learn and deal and maybe agree to do more.

And of course, the kids, when they discover it, they're in shock, a lot of them. It can take them months or years to figure out what the hell they want from their donor dads, if they want to ever have any kind of connection with them. So you have to give them lots of time to process and for them to change their minds about what they want from you.

So I want the hospital to be able to facilitate that. I want them to, as I said, reach out to all their former donors if they can find them. But that's the thing. You've got data from 1980. What the hell? How are you going to track someone down?

Of course, with my last name, it's pretty easy. There's only a few of us in Canada. But if you have a generic last name, yeah, good luck. For them to have a way to just make it easy and help the kids when they do need it, because [the clinic] owes them that too. They  were partners in this whole deal in the same way that I was. They were part of this, and they owe these kids something because of it. And they're not acknowledging or accepting that responsibility yet.

So I would really like to see that change. And that's actually another good reason to contact them.

SHAUN 33:53

Did you have any idea that this would be so impactful? I mean, as a 20-year-old and looking at your future self like where you're at now, 40 years later. Yeah, did you, could you have ever imagined this?

DAVID 34:18

No, no, not even a little bit, because I didn't anticipate that DNA testing would become so easy, or that it could now be so cheaply, and people could profit at $100 or $80 bucks or $70 whenever [DNA testing is] on special. That never occurred to me.

So I didn't think I would be having any way ever of finding these kids. But as I said, I was always aware of them and thinking about how old they were and what they would be doing with their lives at that point, and thinking about do I ever pass them on the street? Do they still live in Toronto?

SHAUN 34:56

You're looking at those shoes, aren't you? You're looking at the shoes?

DAVID 35:01

Yes, I have actually looked for the shoes! I haven't seen anybody that looks like me particularly, but I'm not very good at faces anyway, so I probably wouldn't notice. I'm one of those people who can walk into a room and not notice anything that's different. I will see exactly what I think I'm supposed to see.

I was one of those idiots [who never thought of the needs of the donor-conceived kids] until fairly recently. I didn't think of trying to make an effort to connect until I was finally in a position where I did encounter the material that taught me to see things from their kids' eyes.

Until that point in my life, I had never had a reason to see it from their perspective. So it just didn't occur to me how much of a difference it would make to them. And that makes me feel sad now.

But I understand that ignorance. Why would you [as a donor, understand the needs of the kids]? Until you've had a reason to think about life from someone else's perspective, it's hard to have empathy or understand what they're going through. So you don't even recognize the need. And that's the position almost all of these donors are still in. They have never had a reason to look at the experience of the donor-conceived children.

It hasn't occurred to them that their experience is so different because the word isn't out there yet. It's available, but there are so many other things that's competing for their attention. How will you ever reach them? That's the thing. So yeah, we really have to change the way it's done these days.

Every donor needs to learn about what it means to be a donor and what effect it has on the kids. And that connection that you're gonna have to deal with at some point.

SHAUN 36:47

Well, David, thank you again for sharing your story, and I look forward to hearing updates in the future.

LINK TO PODCAST: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2515824/episodes/19484069

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL:

• Donor Moms and Dad Podcast:
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2515824/episodes/19484069
  
  
  
• You Look Like Me podcast:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-you-look-like-me-117512803/
  
  
  
• DNA Suprises podcast:
  https://dnasurprises.com/
  
  
  
• “Born from the Same Stranger” (2024), produced by ITV in Britain
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_from_the_Same_Stranger
  https://www.itv.com/watch/born-from-the-same-stranger/10a4041
  https://tv.apple.com/gb/show/born-from-the-same-stranger/umc.cmc.6fidb0fe6uqcrce92byn8yl54
• David’s Conversations with Brian and Carol
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AWzBwidn8xQKnZFqBDIZ7R3WRcGATP_d/view?usp=drive_link