Donor conception: what it means for a child's identity

“Mummy, why have I got blue eyes if yours are brown and Daddy’s are too?”

The five-year-old asks the question at breakfast, spoon in hand, already looking back down at her cereal. For her it is a question like any other, like why the sky is blue. For her mother it isn’t. In that moment her mother feels her breath catch, her thoughts racing to a clinic six years ago, to a form she signed, to a decision she and her husband agreed on — that they “would tell her when the time was right”. She says something about eye colour sometimes coming from grandparents. Her daughter is satisfied. Her mother can think of nothing else all day.

When a couple has a child with the help of donated eggs, sperm or embryos, the story doesn’t end with the birth. That is when another question begins: what this means for the child as they grow up, and what it means for the parents who love them and at the same time fear what they will one day find out. This post isn’t about medicine and isn’t about rules — the clinic where you are being treated will tell you what is possible and what applies. It is about identity, about secrets, and about how to tell a child a story that is theirs too.

Whose story is this?

When parents decide to use donated gametes, it is first and foremost their story. Behind them there is often a long road: years of trying, test results, treatment, perhaps losses. Choosing a donor is almost nobody’s first choice. It is a choice you reach when other paths have closed — and one that many people only accept after they have said goodbye to the idea of a child with their eyes or their grandmother’s laugh.

But once the child is born, the story is no longer theirs alone. It becomes the child’s as well. And this is where a tension often hides: what is, for the parents, a painful reminder of infertility they would rather not reopen is, for the child, part of the answer to the question of who they are and where they come from.

This can’t be resolved with a single decision. But it can start with the parents recognising that there are two layers to this story — their loss and the child’s origins — and that one must not cover up the other.

What research tells us

Most of what we know about families created with the help of donors comes from long-term research led by the psychologist Susan Golombok at the University of Cambridge. Her team followed such families from the child’s first year into adulthood. One of the findings is reassuring: children in these families do well on average, and their relationships with their parents are warm and close. A genetic link does not, in itself, decide whether a relationship will be good.

Another finding is less simple, and it concerns timing. In a study published in 2017 by Ilioi, Golombok and colleagues, adolescents who had learned about their origins before the age of seven reported more positive relationships with their mothers and were, on average, faring better than those who found out later. Research with adults conceived through sperm donation has shown something similar: those who learned the truth only in adulthood more often described anger and a sense that the people closest to them had lied to them for a long time.

That doesn’t mean late disclosure is a catastrophe or that early disclosure is a magic formula. But it does mean that a child who has always known the story never has a moment when their world turns upside down. For them it is simply part of what they know about themselves — like their name, or the place where they were born.

Why parents are afraid to tell

Most parents who put off telling the story aren’t silent out of indifference. They are silent out of fear — and those fears are understandable.

Fear that the child will love the non-genetic parent less. This is perhaps the deepest one. A mother who carried the child but is not their genetic mother, or a father who waited years for them but is not their genetic father, may fear that the truth will cost them a place they fought so hard to win. Research doesn’t bear this fear out. Children attach to the people who care for them — I write about how that bond forms in the post Attachment and parenting.

Fear of revealing their own infertility. When you tell a child how they were conceived, you are also somehow telling them that you couldn’t conceive them yourself. For many people this is still a source of shame, especially for men.

Fear of other people. What will the grandparents say? Will the child tell everyone at nursery? Will others look at the child differently?

Fear of not finding the right words. This is perhaps the most common and the easiest to address. The right words can be prepared, and the exercise below is about exactly that.

The grief that came before the child

Before the child arrives there has often been a loss. The loss of a child who would have been genetically “both of you”. The loss of the chance to see your own features in another face. For many people this is a grief nobody talks about, because it feels ungrateful to grieve when you are holding a healthy child. I have written about that kind of loss in the post The grief nobody acknowledges.

It matters because unprocessed loss likes to hide in silence. If a parent can’t talk about the donor without a pain they have never put into words, the child will sense it — not as information, but as an atmosphere: there is something here we don’t touch. I describe the emotional side of the road to this decision in the post Assisted reproduction and its emotional cost.

It often helps if the parents first put their loss into words between themselves — or with the help of a third person — and only then with the child. Not to hide it from the child, but so that the child doesn’t have to carry it for them.

Family secrets don’t stay quiet

In family therapy we have long observed that family secrets don’t need words to have an effect. A child may not know what is being hidden, but they sense where a conversation stops, where their mother smiles a little too quickly, where their father changes the subject. I write about how secrets work across generations, and how a genogram often brings them to light, in the post Family secrets and unfinished stories.

With donated gametes there is something else today: a secret has become hard to keep safe. Commercial DNA tests, which people receive as presents or order out of curiosity, can reveal that a genetic father or mother is not who the person believed — or turn up half-siblings they never knew about. When someone learns the truth this way, from a stranger’s website, in the middle of adult life, it isn’t only the question of origins that is shaken. So is their trust in the people who raised them.

A conversation between two parents who disagree about this might sound like this (composite example, not a real person):

“Why should we tell her at all? I’m her father.”
“Because one day she’ll find out. And then the question won’t be who the donor is, but why we didn’t tell her.”
“I’m afraid she won’t look at me the same way.”
“And I’m afraid she won’t look at either of us the same way if she hears it from someone else.”

Neither of them is wrong. They are both protecting the same thing — the relationship with their daughter — they just see the danger on opposite sides. Once they recognise this in each other, the conversation shifts from “whether to tell” to “how”.

A child doesn’t need a disclosure, but a story

Parents often imagine one big conversation: we sit down, we tell, we wait for the reaction. But children don’t take in stories about themselves like that. They take them in piece by piece, many times over, at different ages and with different questions.

For a small child a simple story is enough: we wanted you very much, but we couldn’t have a baby on our own, so a kind person helped us by giving a tiny part from which you grew. What matters is that the story carries two messages: that the child was very much wanted, and that the donor is a person who helped — not a mysterious stranger and not the “real” father or mother.

Over time a school-age child will need more detail: what eggs and sperm are, what it means to donate, why some people do it. A teenager may have questions about the donor, about what can be found out, and about whether they have half-brothers or half-sisters. What can be learned about a donor depends on the rules of the country and the clinic where treatment took place, so it is good for parents to check this there before the child asks.

Most important of all, the child needs to know they are allowed to ask. That the subject isn’t closed once it has been told. A story you are allowed to talk about belongs to the child. A story told once and never again is still a bit of a secret.

Identity: who I am and where I come from

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described adolescence as the time when a person asks who they are and builds an identity from the pieces of their story. Part of what they draw on is what they know about their origins: who they look like, where their sense of humour comes from, which part of the family lives on in them. As early as 1964 the British psychologist H. J. Sants described how people who know nothing about one part of their origins can feel confused, as if a chapter of their story were missing. He called it genealogical bewilderment.

That doesn’t mean everyone conceived with donated gametes is confused. But it does mean that curiosity about the donor is normal, and it isn’t betrayal. When a teenager asks what the donor is like, they aren’t asking because they love their parents less. They are asking because they are putting themselves together. Something similar is true of adopted children — I write about the emotional side of adoption in the post Adoption: the emotional journey before the decision and after it, and there is a short explanation in the knowledge base under adoption. The differences are big, because a donor-conceived child grows up with at least one genetic parent and was never given up, but the question of origins is related.

The parents change along the way too. Parenthood is a transition that changes who you are — more on that in the post Parenthood as a transition — and with donated gametes that transition includes one more task: accepting that you are the parent of a child whose story includes someone else as well.

Exercise: write the story before you tell it

If you are the parent of a child conceived with donated gametes and haven’t told the story yet, or would like to tell it better, you can try this. Both parents do the exercise, each on their own first.

1. Write down what came before the child. A few sentences about the road to the decision — including what hurt. You won’t tell your child this, but you need to know what you are carrying.
2. Write down what you are afraid will happen once your child knows. Be precise: “I’m afraid they’ll say …”
3. Write the story for your child in five to seven simple sentences that suit their age. Include that they were wanted, and that the donor is a person who helped.
4. Read your stories to each other. Where do they differ? Which words are hard to say out loud? Agree on a shared version.
5. Choose a first opportunity that isn’t a big occasion: at bath time, over a book, in response to a question like the one about blue eyes. And agree that you will keep coming back to the story.

If in the second step you find there is more fear than you expected, that isn’t a bad sign. It is a sign that you need to tell the story to yourself first.

Where this doesn’t apply

I want to be honest here about the limits of what I have written.

Not everyone conceived with a donor is distressed by it. Many know about their origins, come to terms with them, and don’t experience them as an important part of who they are. Some never want to know more about the donor. That is fine too, and it doesn’t need “fixing”.

Research has its limits. Most long-term studies have been carried out in the United Kingdom and other Western countries, with families who were willing to take part — and those families may be more open than average. We know less about other settings and about families who don’t talk about this.

Not every family difficulty is linked to origins. A teenager who rebels may not be searching for the donor, but simply be a teenager. If we start explaining every difficulty through the donor, we load the child with a story that may not be theirs.

Late disclosure is not beyond repair. If the parents didn’t tell early, it doesn’t mean the relationship is lost. It does mean the conversation will be harder and will have to withstand the child’s anger as well. And that it is worth seeking support for it.

Medical and legal questions belong elsewhere. What is recorded about the donor, what can be found out and under what conditions — the fertility clinic will tell you. My role is with what happens in the family.

How therapy can help

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see the family as a system in which each member has their place and in which unresolved stories are passed on until someone puts them into words. Christian Gostečnik writes about how feelings that one generation cannot process show up in the next as an atmosphere nobody can name. Donated gametes are no exception: a parent’s ungrieved infertility can become a silent task for the child.

Therapy can help parents who disagree about whether and how to tell. It can help a parent who is afraid of losing their place beside their child. And it can help an adult who learned about their origins late and doesn’t know what to do with anger, sadness and curiosity all at once. One way of looking at a family’s story from above is a genogram — a drawing across several generations that shows where the secrets, losses and bonds lie. That is the purpose of the longer session A Look into the Past. I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• The donor story is both the parents’ story (their loss) and the child’s story (their origins) — one must not cover up the other.
• Research shows that children in these families do well on average, and that early, honest storytelling is linked to better relationships.
• A child doesn’t need one big disclosure, but a story that grows with them, and permission to ask.
• Curiosity about the donor isn’t a betrayal of the parents, but part of building an identity.
• The fertility clinic can tell you what can be learned about the donor; what is happening in the family is worth talking through with a therapist.