Donor-conceived woman horrified to learn she has 700 siblings

As the fertility industry in Australia grapples with growing scandal, one donor-conceived woman has spoken out about the horror of discovering she has hundreds of siblings.

Key Takeaways:

• Katherine Dawson, a donor-conceived woman, opened up on a recent podcast about discovering she has over 700 siblings.

• Victims of the fertility industry in Australia have increasingly been speaking out about issues like being impregnated with the wrong sperm, or donors fathering thousands of children.

• A lack of fertility industry regulation has allowed these problems to flourish.

The Details:

In an interview with The Briefing, Dawson spoke about her conception story, and how she discovered who her biological father is. She previously said she had always known she was conceived through in vitro fertilization, which she initially brushed off as an interesting part of her backstory. And at first, she didn’t have any interest in finding out who her biological father is.

“I assumed he’d be a nice, generous, healthy bloke because that’s what they advertise,” she said, referring to IVF clinics. “You don’t think there’s any lies.”

Things changed after her mother died, and she began to wonder if she had any half-siblings. At a conference for donor-conceived families in 2015, she met a woman who looked similar to her, but their donor codes didn’t match, so she assumed they couldn’t be related. Once she joined an online ancestry site and uploaded her DNA, she was proven wrong: that woman was her half-sister. And she wasn’t the only one.

As she continued to find more siblings, she realized they all had different donor codes, and they were from two different companies in the Australian fertility industry: Melbourne IVF (which is owned by Virtus Health) and Monash IVF.

Eventually, she was able to find her biological father and meet him — and he came clean to her about what he had done. “When I met him, he told me he’d used seven fake names across four hospitals and six clinics,” she told The Briefing. “So he was sort of using that as a side hustle. Essentially, he was using donor conception to make money on the side.”

With that information, and the number of clinics and hospitals he admitted to donating through, she was able to estimate that she has over 700 siblings.

“My estimates are conservative,” she said. “One donor code alone has 22 families and 33 siblings.”

Zoom Out:

The Australian fertility industry has been embroiled in controversy in recent years, as more and more of the people affected speak out.

One company, Queensland Fertility Group (QFG) was accused of implanting the wrong sperm into patients and allowing donors to donate hundreds of times, creating thousands of children. One man, Donor 59, is known to have donated sperm 325 times in just five years. Each sperm donation can be divided into four separate ampoules, with more than one embryo able to be created from one ampoule. That means Donor 59 can have as many as 5,200 children.

Monash has been accused of implanting the wrong embryos into their clients — meaning women gave birth to the wrong children — and was also forced to settle for $56 million after wrongfully destroying healthy embryos.

Virtus, meanwhile, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to weed out “unfit” embryos, which are destroyed simply because a computer program didn’t rate them highly enough.

The Bottom Line:

Donor-conceived children have been speaking out as they reach adulthood, as the fertility industry treats children as products to be created and then sold to would-be parents… and along the way, no one is stopping to consider how this affects the actual human beings who had no say in the matter.

As Lyndal Bubke, who was conceived at QFG, said, “I don’t think we’ve ever stopped and thought about the costs of having someone else’s biological child and not knowing that person.”