Donor-conceived woman with hundreds of siblings won't have children due to incest fears

Australian parents are distraught after finding out their donor-conceived children have hundreds of siblings. One mother says her now-adult daughter refuses to have children out of fear that she will become unknowingly involved with a biological cousin. Despite widespread issues like this within Australia's fertility industry, men are being encouraged to donate sperm.

Key Takeaways:

• The fertility industry in Australia has been rife with scandal and controversy.

• Parents whose children were donor-conceived have spoken about how traumatized they are to learn their children have hundreds of siblings.

• One mother said her now-adult daughter is refusing to have children of her own after learning she has hundreds of unknown siblings.

• Despite these issues, men are encouraged to become sperm donors.

The Details:

Carol Braunack told SBS World News that she and her husband used a sperm donor after experiencing infertility. One of the reasons they decided to use a sperm donor was that they were told no donor could be used by more than 20 families. They had two children, a son and a daughter, and were led to believe they were conceived using the same donor.

Braunack said she and her husband also chose not to tell their children they were donor-conceived until they were in their late 20s, when their children said they were undergoing DNA ancestry tests. While their son seemed unbothered, Braunack said their daughter was "devastated."

And the devastation only grew worse. "The results revealed something that was new information to all of us," she said. "Our son and daughter were biologically half-siblings and had different fathers."

READ: The fertility industry is not pro-life. It’s a profitable eugenic industry.

They also learned that their daughter's donor had donated "over 300 times across different clinics." Now, her daughter is afraid and refuses to have biological children of her own.

"She says she fears that her children would be at risk of dating biological cousins they were unaware of," Braunack said. "This is one of the reasons she is adamant about not having kids. So, there will be no grandchildren from Lyndal. I understood the fear and the trauma but, still I was utterly devastated. Not only for me, but for her and her husband to miss out on parenthood and their own grandparenthood. They would have been the most wonderful parents."

Braunack said she used a sperm donor because she felt she could never be happy without children; now, that decision has left her with serious guilt.

"[O]ur decision, paired with a mix-up I still don't quite understand, has caused great pain for my daughter," she said. "And I am angry that hundreds of donations from the same donor have impacted hundreds of people conceived with that sperm. Having children has been the greatest joy of my life. I love them both enormously and am so proud of them. But I still feel guilty that my want — my need — for children resulted in these consequences."

The Big Picture:

The Brauback family is far from alone. One woman discovered that her donor could have fathered over 1,000 children, leaving her horrified. The donor had given sperm 239 times in four years, and samples could be divided into four separate ampoules. More than one embryo can be created from one ampoule, which means the number of children this donor may have fathered is almost impossible to estimate.

“The document shows that his sample made four ampoules on one day but in some cases a donation could be split as many as 16 times,” the distraught mom said. “But just keeping it at the lower possibility my children’s donor could have 956 kids or even more than 1000 children. I always knew he was a popular donor and my own investigations had shown he probably had dozens of kids, but these numbers have broken me. I feel so guilty. I would never have used him if I had any clue of what was going on.”

She added, “It makes me physically sick that my kids will for the rest of their lives have to fight off the fear of incest,” she said. “They will have to get background checks on anyone they might be even slightly interested in. Just last week my teenage son came across someone he is likely biologically related to.”

Other Australians affected by sperm donation have found they have hundreds of siblings, with multiple companies engaging in these disturbing practices. One company, Queensland Fertility Group (QFG), for example, was accused of implanting the wrong sperm into patients and allowing donors to sell sperm hundreds of times.

Zoom In:

Despite the widespread fertility scandals in Australia, one company is still running an ad campaign encouraging men to donate sperm. Virtus Health, one of the fertility companies rife with scandal, is asking Australian men to “join the w@#kforce” and boost the number of sperm donors.

Jane Power, Virtus Health’s chief marketing and experience officer, said they wanted the campaign to be “big, bold and impossible to ignore.” 

IVFAustralia | BOOST THE W@#KFORCE

“We need men to lean in and lend a hand," ad agency Cocogun’s creative partner Ant Melder said. "The nation’s w@#kforce is at its lowest ebb, and it is time to get the numbers up.” 

Yet the last thing Australia needs is more fertility chaos in a country already overrun with it.