Missed Conceptions

(no audio) (gentle pensive piano music) - [Donna] I think most of my life, I felt like there was something missing.

My parents, the way they reacted to me like there was a part of me they didn't know.

And I felt it.

(match snaps) How do you mourn a father you've never met?

- [Speaker] You want me to answer?

- [Donna] Yes!

- [Speaker] Are you recording?

- Yes.

(gentle pensive piano music continues) (gentle pensive piano music continues) I mean, I'd been looking for my biological father for over 20 years.

I found out when I was about 30 that my mother was artificially inseminated.

And then I started becoming very curious about who my biological father was.

I didn't have a great relationship with my father growing up, maybe because he knew that I wasn't his biologically, or maybe just because of the person he was.

He was so different.

I mean, I think we didn't grow up like a family unit.

We were all kind of isolated in a way.

I felt very different from the rest of my family.

I felt like pretty much an alien in my own family.

And I never understood why.

And I think when I found out that my father wasn't my biological father, it kind of made a lot of sense to me, actually.

So I was surprised, but not surprised.

My father always seemed angry.

I think my father had a lot of feelings about not being connected to us biologically.

I think when you first accept donor sperm, you think it's like somebody donated their blood It's like nothing.

Even my mother was reacting to me like she didn't know where I came from.

And then later on, after my parents divorced, my mother finally broke down and told us the truth.

My brother and I were conceived with two separate donors, which explained a lot.

And I wish we had felt comfortable enough with our dad to tell him that we knew, but we never did.

But in the meantime, I really wanted to know who was this person that was missing from my life, who I came from.

I mean, I was curious.

And there was just no way to find out who he was.

I mean, I thought at first, or my mother also thought that it was the doctor himself that used his own sperm.

So then I reached out to the doctor and he'd already passed away, and then I reached out to his kids.

But they didn't wanna take a DNA test.

So we hit a brick wall.

There was no way to find out.

And then I had this profound dream.

I dreamt that there were two moons that disappeared.

They weren't there anymore.

And I was so sad because my daughter would never get to see those moons.

And then I was told later on that those moons represented my two fathers, 'cause I had the one father who wasn't talking to me anymore.

And then the other father who I would never get to know.

And those were my two fathers.

When the DNA testing became popular, that's when I went on Ancestry and I had my DNA test taken.

That's when somebody reached out and it was a cousin and he found me, Mark.

And he was actually married to the woman who was related to me.

And then I just asked him, was there anybody in the family who was a doctor who might've donated his sperm in the New York area?

Because during that time it was really just medical residents that were donating.

And he said, "I think I know who it is, because the entire family was from Boston, and there was only one of them who was a doctor in Manhattan and could have been donating."

So it turned out to be Michael Ruttenberg.

And he was a biochemist.

And then went out to California to get his medical degree.

And from what I heard, was donating a lot.

(chuckles) So who knows how many siblings I have.

But- - I said to her, you know, "Jaye, I think we found a new cousin of ours, a daughter of Michael Ruttenberg."

And I said, I'll explain it later when I come home that night.

- Of course, I'm like, "He didn't have any kids.

What do you mean?"

And not quite remembering that he was a medical student.

- [Mark] Well, you didn't know of him.

- I didn't even know, donating sperm... and all these things, which brought us you, and you know, many others, which is wonderful that you've discovered.

And it was just amazing.

- Now he didn't have any siblings himself, Michael, and he didn't have any children of his own, but you know, by the number of centimorgans you have in common how you're related, so I was very closely related to his first cousin, and then I was related to people on his father's side and his mother's side.

So then, you know.

And the fact that he donated at Mount Sinai, and that's where the sperm came from.

So far I've found four sisters, which I'm very excited about.

It's incredible how... like for some reason we bonded.

There's just something about all of us, there's this thing that's similar.

I don't know, I can't put my finger on it.

We're all a little eccentric.

Marcy, she came over and I saw her in person for the first time, and it was just... That was cool because she looks probably more like me than the other sisters.

And it's just like looking at myself, you know?

It's really cool.

Hi.

- Nice to meet you.

- [Donna's Husband] Hi, how are you?

- I'm great.

- My husband's filming if that's okay.

- [Donna's Husband] Just a little bit.

- Sure.

That's fine.

- Isn't it unbelievable?

- It's unbelievable.

- We're sisters.

- Yeah.

- It's so crazy.

- It is.

It is.

My mother's still not- - She's not admitting- - She's not admitting a thing.

Won't even, you know, go down the road with me to discuss it.

- Even though you told her that- - I told her, I said, this is science.

It's proven fact.

- Back then, you know, in the '70s, everything was hush hush.

Everything was, you weren't supposed to talk about it.

They actually would find sperm from a man that looked like your dad, so nobody would know or suspect.

And they could pretend you were the biological child of your father.

But you can't, because the truth inevitably always comes out.

It always rises to the surface.

And it affects everything.

And I think it put a lot of strain on my parents to have to hold that secret for so long.

When my parents got married, they wanted to have a family, like every other couple in their generation.

But unfortunately, they weren't able.

So this was like a miracle for them.

- I judged from our telephone conversation that you and Mr. Bennett are having difficulty in starting your family.

- The idea that they were willing to do this experimental procedure, I mean, it was fairly new in the '60s.

It was a testament to the fact that they really wanted us.

And I know that they adored us, really.

But I think as I grew older, it became more and more evident that I was from someone else entirely.

Somebody none of us knew.

When I finally discovered who my biological father was, I was thrilled.

But then when I was told that he was no longer alive, I felt robbed.

I began to ask questions.

I learned that he was not only a biochemist and a doctor, but he was a humanitarian and an artist.

And it was funny because I'm an artist in the field of medical advertising.

There were just so many similarities.

I felt I had to learn more.

So there was this website with all of Michael's artwork, and at the bottom was Jori's name.

So I contacted Jori, and Robert told me to get in contact with Sandy, who could tell me everything about Michael.

And I found out that really his friends on the West Coast were his family.

They were the people that knew him best.

And so I felt like, well, these are the people I need to get in touch with.

- There was so much material, just like so many paintings.

And Michael was not gonna make any more paintings.

- I wanted to do something because of commemorating Michael.

I started collecting some of the images.

And I went up and took a picture of the thing in Fred's office with the, you know, what is it?

His graduation project, the collage.

We put 'em together, and Jori wrapped the whole thing into a website.

- I don't know, I was like, in my own mind thinking that all of these small paintings represented his offspring.

Like subconsciously, subconsciously.

Did he... - Why not?

- He'd love that image.

Oh, what propagation!

- Did he ever talk about his, like the fact that he donated sperm and that he had many- - [Jori] Never mentioned it.

- Never mentioned it never.

He mentioned it to some people- - I think he mentioned it to me one time.

- Oh, he did?

What did he say?

- He said, "Yeah, I was a sperm donor and I don't know how many children I actually fathered, but they're out there.

- [Jori] He knew?

- [Robert] So, what was his motivation?

Was it just, you know, like he wanted- - Humanitarian.

- There are lots of stories.

- [Jori] Like what about Kosovo?

- [Robert] Kosovo and- - [Jori] Have you heard about the Kosovo- - [Donna] I don't think so.

- [Speaker] He was helping the refugees and- - [Fred] Tried to sign up with Doctors Without Borders.

- [Sandy] But they wouldn't take him.

- [Fred] Wouldn't take him.

But he went by himself.

- [Donna] But why wouldn't they take him?

- [Sandy] They have rules.

- [Fred] Yeah.

- [Sandy] You can't just show up.

- [Donna] So he worked with the children on this as art therapy?

- [Speaker] Yeah, this was in the refugee camp.

- [Speaker] This is so sad.

- [Speaker] What he would do is he would collect from his friends all sorts of donations.

- [Fred] I gave him medicine- - [Speaker] Antibiotics and bandages and all sorts of stuff.

And he would take it.

- [Donna] Unbelievable.

- [Jori] But he was in Guatemala too.

That was a big earthquake down there.

(gentle soft music) - This is down in Baja California.

- [Donna] Let me see.

Oh, this was Baja?

- [Bob] Yeah.

- I have this photo at home in a frame.

- [Jori] It's a great picture.

- [Robert] It's very Michael, the enthusiasm.

- He used to like to camp and hike and- - [Bob] Yes.

- I like to do that kind of stuff too.

I don't do it very often, but I love to hike.

- I had no idea.

You are not as tall as I perceived you to be.

- I know.

- You're gorgeous.

- Oh, thank you.

- Oh my God.

Whoa!

- [Donna] Barry made me laugh so hard over the phone the few times I spoke with him.

I couldn't wait to meet him in person.

- And I've seen pictures of your daughter, and she's gorgeous.

Is she taller?

- Thank goodness.

Yes.

- I wouldn't want to be an inch taller than you are.

Oh my God.

You are a jewel.

- Well, I heard Michael was kind of short and his mother was short, right?

- Very much so.

- Yeah, so maybe that's- - No, you're following in a genetic tradition, I guess.

Of course.

You're giving us a gift.

We're reconnecting.

I was telling Susan that, wow, he's still out there, man.

He's still pulling the strings.

- Yeah, no, it's so true.

I'm sure of it.

- For you to do this adventure is very Michael-esque.

The drive and the chutzpah.

You have the smile now.

I see it.

Yeah.

- Really?

- The smile and the teeth.

Michael, when he really was smiling- - I know.

- pullback.

(donna laughing) - [Drew] His whole face lit up.

- [Donna] Really?

The same.

- Yeah, the same.

It's great.

I can't get over how much she looks like Michael.

Her face is Michael's.

- [Donna's husband] She looks like Michael, right?

- It's incredible.

Yeah.

- I remember the first time I saw the two of you.

- It's the schnoz.

- Was it three years ago?

- You look so much like him.

And even this expression you're making right now where you're touched is reminding me of Michael so much.

It's literally like, I'm talking to Michael in drag.

I know that's probably offensive, but- - But this is, there's a continuity that goes in a fascinating way beyond a singular life.

It's wonderful.

Here's to life.

L'Chaim.

- L'Chaim.

- L'Chaim.

- I remember the first time I met Michael.

I was 15, and Michael came to our parents' home in DC to get a patent on his insulin made from bovine.

Or was it cow?

- It was human insulin.

That's what it was.

Up to that time, people had been using insulin derived from the pork.

And he was the first to synthesize human insulin.

- By the way, something you should know about Michael is he was very much a healer.

He was a doctor and an acupuncturist.

He taught a class in the '70s on cancer prevention.

And he was way ahead of his time.

- What was your impression of him?

- Oh, I loved him immediately.

He was joyous and smart and sparkly, you know, very sparkly.

- He was always a New Yorker to me.

New Yawwk.

- Did he have a New York accent?

- Oh gee.

- Yeah.

And he did have a booming voice.

- Did he really?

- Oh, he could, he didn't always.

He could talk just like this- - But if he wanted to, he could project, whoa!

You know, he could command the room.

- He would particularly project when someone would say something that he would react to, and he'd go, "Whoa!

", you know, this big voice would come out of him.

Like, "Ah, wait till I tell you this!"

You know, he was really, he was so expressive.

He was full of passion.

He was- - And yet he was impish.

I loved, I really related to the impish part of him, always dancing around, feeding you, cooking.

- Huh.

- "Let's go to the beach and collect mussels."

We'd go to the beach and then he'd cook 'em up.

- He wasn't a normal cook, you know, like, let's see two cups of flour, one cup of broth, mix and stir 12 times.

And that's why sometimes I think Michael could be described as manic.

He could summons forth energy and move at a pace like you described, spinning, spinning around, doing 10 things at once- - [Lena] And multitasking.

- A wonderful cook.

- He loved to entertain.

He really loved to have people over.

And he knew that cooking was a vehicle for bringing these people together.

Every time I'd encounter Michael, that big grin would come up on his face and people were describing him as sparkly.

It was the twinkle in his eye.

He would look you right in the face and give you his full appreciation.

It was a beautiful thing.

- We're going back in time.

- Let's go back in time.

Do you wanna start?

You start, and then I'll listen, 'cause I think you have something to tell me- - Memories.

When I think of Michael Ruttenberg, I remember cartoon show with two crows, and when my brother was with Michael, they would do this little act and they would sort of like, go back and forth with each other.

- I remember you telling me that there was not a day you didn't think about Michael.

- No, that's still the case.

No, you know, Donna, and I'm sure everybody says this, Michael was such a nourishing soul.

You know, you'd be with him for two minutes and like, he just expanded your mind.

Everything was so stimulating about Michael, sparkly.

- That's what they said about him.

Didn't they say that at the other house?

They said he was sparkly.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

I was always impressed by his prodigious memory.

- Around the campfire, he would recite these poems from heart, like this Lewis Carroll poem, Your old father William, and your hair is white, but you insist on standing on your head, do you think at your age this is right?

He would recite the entire poem and he'd recite Kipling.

- Michael loved the Marx Brothers.

And in a way, after bringing it up to myself and to you, I got to think, you know, he was all four Mars Brothers, or five, whatever there were, rolled into one.

And he had internalized so much shtick from the Jewish tradition.

He could recite bits and pieces of shtick in a voice or little bits of a song or...

He just came up with stuff.

He had more stored up here than the average person.

- He had so many interests.

Ballet, painting.

- Just like you said, you had had a one man show, he had a one man show that he put together and he performed, you know, he took one of those classes and I went to see it.

But I mean literally he could play like every instrument.

- Really?!

- What?!

Yes!

And he had this little ukulele.

He was such a character, your father, he was so eccentric.

And that was very appealing to me.

- His moving away from La Jolla was a big loss for us.

It was almost like an abandonment when he decided to go to north.

- Why would he do that?

- He wanted to study the arts and dance.

And he wanted a new chapter.

- Not many guys take ballet.

- [Jori] He did take ballet.

- [Bob] He did, sure.

- But, you know, all the gals, lots of gals show up for ballet and they all wear leotards.

And they need a guy to pick 'em up in various different ways.

- He knew how to be gracious.

He knew how to steer you in and make you feel important.

"Sit down, I'll get you a drink.

What would you like?"

- But he had really messed up relationships with women.

He knew how to be appropriate and kind, but in his personal relationships with women, he had some doozies.

- When he finished at MIT and at Rockefeller, he then went to the Weizmann Institute.

And he was married.

He got married.

While in Israel, Michael decided it was the wrong thing.

And they got divorced.

And Michael had ECT while he was in Israel.

- [Donna] Yeah, you told me.

So why did he choose to get electric shock therapy?

- 'Cause he had such a severe depression.

- I think Michael, having known him over the span of perhaps 25 years, I'd say, he was one of the most complicated people I've ever known.

And I would never put him in a little niche that says, "he was depressed."

He was much more than that.

Did he have some depressive thoughts?

Did he have some OCD?

Did he have some anxiety?

Yeah.

But I would never have put him in that niche.

Eclectically, he was magnificent.

Funny, smart, colorful, creative, delightful.

Just absolutely delightful.

And bigger than life.

Even though when he was a small man physically he was just bigger than life.

- Did he ever talk about that he donated sperm?

Like did he ever talk about it?

- [Barry] He did to me.

- [Lena] I knew.

- [Donna] Like, what did he say?

- He would make casual reference to having earned, it was kinda like maybe joking that he worked his way through college.

"Oh yeah.

What'd you do?"

"Oh, I was a sperm donor."

We joked about it.

- He always wondered what, you know, it was just like a question mark in his mind.

- What did he say, for instance?

- He would say, "Oh, you know, I used to go down to the sperm bank to get five bucks every so often.

I wonder whatever happened."

- I was telling him a story about my daughter who was six then.

And it was kind of a heartfelt story.

I've forgotten exact, I think it was a story about how I had wound her up on a swing and she was just back flowing around in a circle.

And I watched Michael kind of close in and he'd get this big smile on his face and you could see the thoughts sort of fomenting in his mind.

And when I finished the story, he looked at me and he said, "I always thought that I would be a father."

He said something like that.

And he said, and then I remember the afterthought was, "Who knows, maybe I am a father out there somewhere."

And I said, "What do you mean?"

And of course I thought he was talking about, you know, old girlfriends or something.

But then he said, "Oh, I was a sperm donor way back in my childhood."

- What you're saying it really affects me.

I don't know why.

I'm just like... That he even said that.

It's weird.

- Just so you know, he was really interested in becoming a father, which was part of my appeal.

But he also said, you know, that he was gonna get nannies.

And I was like, "Well, why are you gonna have kids if you don't really plan on raising them yourself?"

So, I mean- - Michael may not have wanted a kid tearing the books out of the bookcase and breaking the records.

He lived alone and he had things the way he needed and wanted them.

- His lifestyle wasn't suited for having children.

- That's what it was about.

But his heart was so big.

- So what do you think he would've thought of me creating this documentary of him?

- Wow.

He'd probably be delighted.

He's still in the picture.

He's still connected.

He's still in our thoughts.

He's still in our hearts.

- Do you think he would've wanted to have met me?

- Of course.

- Okay.

Now what do you mean by that?

- Do you think he'd be like...

I wanna know this one and this one.

- He'd be a tornado.

He'd swallow you up and all the others and be probably start looking for 50 more kids- - [Lena] And ask you 4,000 questions.

He'd be asking the question.

- Oh, he'd be the greatest father figure in his later years.

He took away something very dear to us.

And he took something from you in a way.

Imagine if he were still here.

And through your search you were able to unite with this incredibly important figure that you've searched for all your life.

Who knows what would evolve from that moment forward?

- That's what wistful and sad and bittersweet is all of that, 'cause it'll never come to fruition.

So yeah, I can remember being really sad, but very angry that he died.

- I always thought Michael would live to be 120.

I mean, he just seemed like a person...

He took good care of himself.

But it was schizophrenic in the sense that he would do something, like 500 pushups or go to the dancing thing and stretch his thing and then he'd do something really crazy, like overdo it or take chances.

He drove like a meshuggenneh.

(all laughing) (energetic music) - [Lena] I'm sure he self-medicated.

Never in my wildest dreams would I ever believe that he did suicide.

I think that's just not possible.

- [Donna] She said it was not suicide.

- So what was wild about the parties that was too much?

- [Donna] That's a good question.

- Well, the drugs.

The drugs.

- [Robert] Which ones?

- Oh, PCP and anything above- - [Robert] Cannabis?

- Cannabis, yeah.

Yeah.

Anything above that.

I didn't want to have anything to do with it.

- [Robert] Wanted to keep colors down.

- Yeah.

- [Retro Commentator] The human brain is made for thinking, not fumigating.

It's hardly a tinker toy for experimenting with drugs.

- He had, you know, big things that he would, he could distill different chemicals together.

And it was pretty amazing, underneath his house.

And I was amazed, and he said, "You wanna try some of this?"

And I said, "No, I think I'm just fine."

- You know, people in one aspect of his life really didn't know a lot about other aspects of his life, or at least that's the way that I saw it.

- We were up there a couple times to see him.

He didn't show us the basement.

- Oh, he didn't show you the drug lab.

- Nah-huh.

- He was making what, ecstasy down there?

Methadone?

- A little this, a little that.

Maybe it'll make you smile better, you know, or maybe this or maybe that.

And when it came to a trust thing, Michael was a doctor.

Hey.

And he's one of us, he's family.

Okay, we can trust this.

- The meaning of life is to be peaceful in your day-to-day existence.

And I'm not sure I would say that Michael was necessarily...

Okay, he passed at 61.

So I'm not sure I would say that at that stage of his awakening, he was necessarily peaceful.

He was many things, brilliant, complicated, creative, fascinating, funny, and neurotic.

He wasn't a man of peace.

- He was always driven, but driven in, as I say, in a weird way.

It was like he was trying to escape his demons rather than pursue anything constructive.

- Like you went to medical school, you know, you're terrific.

Why don't you be a doctor?

It makes people happy to be a doctor.

- [Donna] But he didn't want to be tied down to one thing.

- That's right.

- [Donna] He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

So, you know, the acupuncture would have been good, but even that became sort of a pastime and didn't give him much structure.

Michael went to China on a World Health Organization scholarship.

And I think the proposal he submitted was to see if acupuncture would have any effect on slowing dementia.

So he got the WHO grant to go to Beijing and study acupuncture.

While he was there, he met this super amazing Italian woman.

Just a lovely, lovely person.

And she had a 4-year-old son.

And Michael was so excited about being with her and having a family.

And you know, she was that wonderful.

But when I think about Michael's life, his going to China really started his decline in so many ways.

Cocaine was legal in China.

And Michael bought many kilograms of pharmaceutical cocaine and started using it heavily and became very...

I don't know what, psychotic from it, and paranoid.

He became convinced that she was cheating him, and that friends we had from med school were really FBI.

And I mean, he went psychotic, for real psychotic.

And I'd say, "Michael, this is what happens when you use a pound of cocaine a day".

And he wouldn't stop.

But he became convinced she was cheating him, and became very abusive.

And then their relationship fell apart.

Michael met Elizabeth at California Arts College.

- [Donna] College of the Arts.

Yes.

- College of the Arts.

And you know, when, however wondrous and irrational ways love works, he became super infatuated with Elizabeth.

And she was not leading him on or using him.

She was like a real person.

Michael would get very obsessive.

- [Donna] Well, she was living in his house.

Where was she living?

- Well, Michael, you know, in his generosity, said, "Oh, well I have a big house, I live alone."

So he offered her to live, and Michael had a art studio there.

- She was only 30 at the time, right?

Or 33.

- Yeah, she was about 20 years younger than Michael.

- She really sort of was a, you know, kinda sort of- - [Donna] A tease?

- Tease.

Yeah.

She would encourage him and, you know, they had stuff going on, but he never managed to, you know, complete the deal.

- [Donna] You said that he was on the phone with you and he was talking about methadone, right?

And he said it was the only thing that was helping him- - Morphine.

- [Donna] It was morphine?

- Yeah.

Michael was shooting morphine.

- [Donna] I thought it was- - At the end of his life.

- I thought it was methadone because, well, he died of an overdose of methadone.

- There may have been methadone in the concoction.

It was a concoction, as I recall, of many things.

But Michael was shooting morphine.

- [Donna] But why?

Why?

- Michael was so severely depressed at the end of his life.

Every time I spoke to Michael, we would just break down in tears about how lonely he was and how much he loved Elizabeth and how life meant nothing.

- If he was able to meet his biological children earlier on in life, do you think that he would've been as depressed and as lonely as he was?

- So that's a great question.

I had the privilege of knowing Michael for 30 years, and my constant mental health advice to Michael was, you need structure and you need ballast, over and over I said, "Michael, you can't be a free spirit.

It's making you crazy."

But that wasn't what a free spirit ever wants to hear.

So, yeah, I think if Michael knew he had family, 'cause, you know, his family...

So that's interesting.

So I was just thinking about Uncle Joe.

I never met Uncle Joe, but I was just seeing this fantastic movie that was shot by Uncle Joe.

- [Donna] Which one?

"Gaslight?"

- No, no.

It was a Fritz Lang movie, I think.

You know, we always used to talk about going see Uncle Joe, but I never met- - [Donna] Joe Ruttenberg.

- Yeah.

I never met.

but Michael had no other family.

- So maybe, if Michael knew us earlier on or met us, he would've felt- - I think it would've been a lot more ballast in his life.

And he so desperately needed that.

- You said the ending of his life was like a Greek tragedy.

You had mentioned that in one of your letters.

Can you talk about that a little more?

- You know, Michael was trying to really understand what his life was about.

You know, he'd done so many things, and yet at the end, nothing was bringing him joy.

And then Michael just got more and more desperate and angry at himself and frustrated and, you know, it was just a horrible time.

He was seeing a psychiatrist, he was getting SSRIs, but I don't think they were remotely helping.

You know, looking back, I think the first thing Michael needed to do was to get sober.

And I don't think he was ready for that.

You know, I mean, it's just- - [Donna] Well, maybe not.

- a common story when people feel that there's no pleasure in life, then drugs make a lot of sense.

The older I get, the more I'm impressed with the 19th century belief that madness and genius were a razor's edge apart.

- When he came over here, he was sure that tonight was gonna be the night, this was gonna be it.

They, I think, had both graduated and they were having this party.

It's just the two of them.

And then the next day was gonna be the big party.

And I guess it didn't work out that way.

- They did say that the partner, the girl had sort of passed out on the floor for 40 hours.

- Yes, and then her arm was paralyzed, I think, for a little bit after she had to get therapy, 'cause she was like sleeping on her arm.

- [Lena] She had some nerve damage.

- And I gather that he was, somehow, in my mind, he was lying on a bed that was made.

In other words, he hadn't gotten into the bed or under the covers.

He had maybe just kinda cruised back for a moment.

- I was shocked.

I mean, I called him that morning, to find out if he had had success or failure with Elizabeth and how the party was going.

And some strange person answered the phone, and it was, you know, Berkeley police.

After his death, it was my responsibility to get rid of that laboratory.

I mean, there were things in that house that I had to call hazardous waste.

And when they found this stuff, they like evacuated the neighborhood for like two or three city blocks.

- [Donna] Are you kidding?

- No.

(chuckles) - [Donna] What would be in that house that- - Ether.

And ether, when it expires, becomes explosive.

(explosion booming) It never made sense to me that he would have intentionally taken methadone himself or given methadone to Elizabeth.

That's not a drug that you give to a date when you're expecting to have sex.

You know, ecstasy, he had ecstasy, LSD, you know, psychedelics and stuff, but not methadone, not an opiate.

So it never all made sense.

Maybe he got a vial mixed up, I don't know.

- [Donna] Sounds like it.

- But, I mean, you can tell from that photograph, he did not appear depressed in any way.

You know, I think they used the hot tub.

They took whatever they took.

And then the story that I got was that he went upstairs at one point, she was downstairs.

He went upstairs, laid down on his bed.

And because of the fact that he had this high level of opiate, when he laid down, he passed out, had difficulty breathing and suffocated.

(solemn music) (solemn music continues) - [Donna] I started looking for Michael before Michael died.

He was still alive and I had no way of finding him.

So that to me is, in a way, tragic.

- Yeah.

That may be the greatest tragedy.

- [Donna] I wish I could have met him.

- That may be the greatest tragedy.

He would've loved to meet you.

(solemn music continues) (energetic music) (energetic music continues) - I did the Ancestry DNA test and sure enough we came up as very close relatives, indicating really that we have a sisterhood.

- [Donna] When you found out the truth, did that explain anything to you?

- Yes, it makes me look back and say, you know, I always kind of felt like that fifth wheel.

I felt like my mother preferred my sister.

I felt like they were more similar.

I was the the little messy kid getting into trouble and getting dirty and not keeping my room clean.

And they were so neat and organized and they would team up against me for things like that.

And I feel like my sister and I have just had difficulties being close over the years.

And it explains some of that as well.

- My daughter came down, it was for Passover, and my daughter and my father went out to the supermarket and I pulled my mother aside and I said, "Mom, were you artificially inseminated?"

And she looked at me and she said, "Your father is sterile."

And she said, "But never tell him."

And she told me that she never told anyone, even her sister, the only person she told was her mother.

They had heard about this place where they could get artificially inseminated for Jewish, specifically Jewish babies.

And after trying five years to have a child, So one of the things that was interesting was growing up I always wondered why my sister was so much taller.

And now I have siblings that are all short, and you and I are pretty much the same height.

So it's kind of cool.

- So I do recall, it was Memorial Day weekend.

My husband and I had done 23 and Me a couple years before that.

I didn't have any close relatives, but everyone Jewish on 23 and Me was somehow related to me.

So that was it.

That was like the end of the story.

And then I got an email from 23 and Me that said, I had a message there, and I think it was from you, saying that you were my half-sister.

My first reaction was, well, this is some kind of scam.

I'm gonna call 23 and Me in the morning, I'll say, some random person is contacting me and claims they're my half-sister.

'Cause there's no way I can have a half sister.

And then I think I ended up calling you and you explained that our mothers had been artificially inseminated and that you had already been in contact with two other women that were also half-sisters, both named Marian, which was a hoot.

(laughs) And then, so I just, you know, I remember getting off the phone and telling my husband like, oh my gosh, like I think this is a thing.

You know, we just kept going, like, "puff, my mind's blown," you know, I couldn't believe it.

And so he's like, "What are you gonna do?"

And I'm like, "Well, I have to ask my mom."

I called her early in the morning and I said, "Are you alone?"

And she said, "Yeah."

So I said, "So," you know, and I started telling her the story, and she paused for a minute and she said, "Well, your father and I had trouble getting pregnant and your father through the service had this friend who knew a doctor in New York, and so we went to see him."

I said, "Well, did you tell your parents?"

She didn't tell her parents.

They had never told anyone and they never were gonna tell anybody.

- It was kind of shocking.

It was like, oh my god, there's this giant family secret and they were going to take it to the grave.

- [Donna] How many times did she deny it?

- [Marian] I don't remember.

But she adamantly denied it.

- [Donna] And then it wasn't until, I guess I showed you the insemination papers that- - It wasn't, well, it wasn't until we took another test and while we were waiting for the other test, Marian came up still on My Heritage.

And then it was like, wait a minute.

There's something to this.

- I'm convinced that both my parents don't know a whole lot about conception, you know, in terms of how sperm works and all that kind of stuff.

A doctor assured them that he would mix the sperm together, that, you know, if my father had like low sperm count or low motility or something like that, that adding this other donor sperm would somehow like activate it, so that it would work, or you would be a mixture from your father and the donor.

And so growing up, my parents would always say, "You got that from your father," like physical characteristics.

Knowing that now it does explain some things to me that I didn't understand before.

- My brother used to say, "You're from another planet."

- [Donna] That's how I always felt.

I felt like I was dropped from the sky and I didn't belong.

- Yeah, I felt like my parents didn't understand me, that I didn't belong in the family.

My mother said she didn't know how to deal with me.

You know, I had pretty wicked mood swings, you know, I was really sort of moody and I was depressed.

My parents were like, "We don't know what to do with her".

Like, "Who are you?"

- When you found out that you biologically came from somebody else, did that make sense to you then?

- Oh yeah, especially once I started hearing about, you know, what he was like and what his interests were.

I was like, oh my God, there's a lot more, I think, based on DNA than there is based on your upbringing or astrology or any of those things.

Like as soon as I could stand up, I started dancing, and nobody in my family dances, you know, nobody can sing and make up songs and sing on key.

(laughs) - [Donna] Well, Michael turns out he also played the violin.

- Yeah, I play the violin.

- [Donna] Which I never knew I found that out that he played, he was really good at playing the violin.

- I was good.

It's interesting because I studied with a shaman and she told us like, all of us are healers and it's a lineage, and it goes from generation to generation.

I said, "Well, nobody in my family is a healer."

And now I know where the lineage is.

- Well I told you I have a medical marijuana license.

And I know that he tried that substance.

- [Donna] He grew marijuana.

- He grew it.

- [Donna] In his garden.

- Awesome.

- It was so wonderful to find these new sisters.

As I mentioned, my sister and I never got along very well and we didn't connect.

She was very mean to me.

She was taller than me.

Even though she was four years younger than me, she used to beat me up.

(laughs) - No, I was really excited because I mean, I have just one brother and no nieces and nephews, and then suddenly it's like, wow, I got all these sisters, I got nieces, I got nephews, I got a big family.

You know, I was really excited.

- I wanted to ask you what it felt like to find out that you had sisters.

- Oh my God.

(laughs) Well, when I talked to you on the phone, you know, I told my husband, "Oh, you know, I don't know," I said, "She sounds a lot like me."

You know, we have a lot of things in common and that sort of thing.

And then meeting you and Marian and Marian was like, I don't know, it was sort of like, we're already connected even though we were complete strangers.

- Like we already felt like we were sisters.

- [Donna] You just feel that Something.

It's something.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're not strangers, for sure.

Marian and I were talking about how when I walked into her house and I was like, oh my god, your dining room table is just as chaotic as mine.

- My dining room table was always a mess and stuff piled on top of it.

And Marian took a picture of my dining room table, went home, took a picture of her dining room table and sent me the juxtaposition of the two dining room tables with the stuff piled on them.

- I saw immediately how we all have the ADHD, 'cause we were all like chickens with our heads cut off in Florida trying to decide where are we going, what are we doing, when is it happening?

So I see much more similarities with you girls than with the sister that I grew up with.

- I know we both have an interest in psychic phenomenon and that there was one time, you said a while back, when you spoke to somebody, a psychic that told you you had a sister.

Can you talk about that a little?

- Oh yeah.

That was a long time ago.

I was studying Dr. Michael Newton, "Destiny of the Soul" and "Journey of the Soul"- - [Donna] Which I love.

I've read those books as well, and I love that stuff.

- Yeah.

So I met with one of his... What would you say?

A protege?

Somebody who studied with him.

And outta nowhere, we went through this hypnosis and she was also a psychic and she told me, "You have an older sister?"

And I said, "No, I don't.

I don't."

She's like, "No, you have an older sister."

And I was like, that's totally wrong, but I'll go with it.

"And she's gonna find you, so don't worry about looking for her.

She's gonna find you."

And I didn't remember this, this was like over 20 years ago and I didn't remember for years.

And then, I met you and then suddenly like ding, a little bell went off in my head.

I was like, oh my God!

Now, I remember that.

This is the older sister that's gonna find me.

- Isn't that amazing?

I think that's cool.

- Yeah.

- Do you wish that you would've had the opportunity to meet Michael?

- Absolutely.

Oh yeah.

- Yeah, it would've been really cool to meet my biological father.

- If I had known earlier, and if he was still around, I would have definitely gone to meet him.

- I mean, he sounds like he was a fascinating, he was complicated, you know, he was troubled, but he was brilliant and funny and warm and loving and creative.

And so I would've wanted to meet him.

- Honestly.

I'm angry at him.

- [Donna] Are you?

- Because I mean, look, he lived so close to me, and I could have like hung out with him, and he just made a stupid mistake.

And so that makes me angry.

You know, like he wasted it on a stupid mistake and he should have known the consequences, the risks.

And I'm sure he knew the risks because he's a professional.

I mean, he was a chemist and a doctor, and it's like, dude, I could have learned so much, I could have learned about acupressure.

I could have like learned more about, you know, medicine.

I could've learned more about myself.

I could have hung out, I could have had somebody I could have related to who was a lot more like me.

And he made this really stupid error that was careless, and didn't get a chance to have that experience.

So it makes me angry.

There were so many things that I didn't...never really got a chance to do with my immediate family, because, you know, they kind of shut me out and I could have had a real... We could have really bonded, and he had to go risk his life for what?

For one high?

I mean, that's so stupid.

I mean, why not just smoke a joint, you know?

(laughs) - I couldn't help but wonder if this painting was a haunting depiction of his potential offspring.

Was he thinking about us more than anybody realized?

I wanted to get a donor's perspective on all of this.

- For me it was more a, here's how I could help.

It wasn't a, I want to have children.

I wanted my genetic code to sort of pass on.

It was that sense of wanting to help.

I say in retrospect, and I've heard this too from a number of other donors, that I didn't really understand the consequence of what I was doing.

- Now, so when did it hit you and how did it hit you that all of a sudden, like, "I have children out there"?

Like when did that hit you?

- Yeah, I was a donor in the mid-1980s.

I got married a year or so later.

And at the time when we were getting ready to be married, I told my now wife that I'd been a donor.

And she said, "Yeah, okay, but I'd rather you didn't continue doing that."

So I stopped doing that.

I put it out of my mind.

I didn't think about it.

15 years later, by which time I had two children from my marriage, completely out of the blue, I got a letter from the clinic that said, "We're just contacting you to tell you that we're still holding vials of your frozen semen, and they will be only used to create further pregnancies in existing families."

And, I can remember still really clearly that bombshell moment when I read that.

Then I could see the implications of what I had done.

And the thought then, and it remains with me is, oh, okay, so there's those two who I know really well.

There's others who I know nothing about.

So I wrote back to the clinic and said, "Look, could you tell me how many children have been born?

What can you tell me?"

When you're a donor, when you don't have children, you don't really fully understand the implications of what you're doing.

It seems easy.

And it wasn't until I, at this point, I had the two children from my marriage who I knew really well.

I thought, okay, there's another seven people out here who are, they're as much a half of me as are these two people who I know really well.

I thought on it a lot, and I would find myself, if I was traveling, you know, on a bus or on the subway, I would look at people, 'cause I knew what age they were, and I'd look at somebody and I'd think, oh wow, you know, I wonder could you be one of them?

It was...

I dunno how to describe it.

It just was this sort of, I couldn't put aside the thought, well, they're there and what have their lives been?

Are they happy?

Are they healthy?

Are they... And at times it sort of, it actually quite troubled me.

I thought, well, really what I did here with very good motivations is I gave away seven of my children.

And if I think about that, and I think now what in the world would one never give away?

You know, what would you protect with your life if you had to?

It's your children.

If you're a parent, you know.

And here I am, as I say, with really good motivations, I've given away seven of my children, and I know nothing of their lives.

- [Donna] So perhaps later in life he was curious about us.

I was certainly curious about him.

But there was no way we could find each other.

- [Receptionist] We are the fertility clinic for Mount Sinai, correct.

- [Donna] I was just wondering if there might be any records, maybe he tried to reach out.

- [Receptionist] Well, the form that folks sign for donation does not allow for any contact.

- [Donna] Who decided that this was the way it should be?

I reached out to more people from the donor conception community.

- My son, Ryan, was the first donor-conceived person to find his donor through a DNA test.

And that was in 2005.

I ended up having a very curious child.

By the time he was six, he looked at me and said, "I want to know who my biological father is."

And at that point I'm thinking, holy cow, what do I do?

What did I do?

Of course he wants to know the other half of who he is.

The day that we figured it out, I was freaked out and so scared for my child.

His heart was wide open.

And what if this guy was like, "Get the hell outta here"?

You know?

So the day that we figured out who he was, I said to Ryan, I'm like, okay, we need to regroup.

Let's sleep on it.

Tomorrow we'll figure out what to do.

I went to bed.

One in the morning, Ryan comes and wakes me up.

Mom, mom, I just sent him an email.

I'm like, oh my God, so much for collaboration!

And then literally for 48 hours, my mantra was, Please be kind.

Please be kind.

Please be kind.

Because I thought this guy has the ability right now to completely emotionally destroy my child.

48 hours later, again, it's one in the morning, 'cause nothing can happen in daytime, I'm sleeping, Ryan comes in, "Mom, mom!

He just wrote me back!"

And all I could do, I dropped outta bed.

I was on my knees on the floor.

I looked at him and I said, "Was he kind?"

And Ryan's shaking his head up and down and tears are streaming down his face.

- Well, it was 1995, I was a CEO in Boston.

And it came to be that my mom had open heart surgery.

She was 75 years old and a post-surgical stroke.

So all the gates that guarded her secret just no longer worked.

And it came out while she was in rehab, she had lost a little bit of her memory and she was recounting some things to help her restore her memory.

And her story came out that they were married for five years with my dad and no children.

And she went to this unknown Dr. Sims, discovered that my dad was sterile, and they had a few choices, remain childless, adopt a child or do this newfangled thing through artificial insemination with an anonymous donor.

You know, when I was in psychology classes in college, I studied this genealogical bewilderment.

This is just a condition, if you will, it was initially studied in the '60s around adoptees who had a sense of not belonging and a quest for finding their origins.

And I had genealogical bewilderment raging inside of me.

I wasn't adopted, I was semi-adopted.

This is how they termed it back in the '30s and '40s as well.

There were no records kept at this period of time either.

So I was just scratching on doors that wouldn't open.

So by 2017, I went ahead and I did the ancestry.com test.

And that gave me a paternal relative.

She was listed as a close relative, cousin with a question mark.

I was fortunate because she embraced me and said, "Oh, I'm gonna champion finding the source of your seed in my family tree.

He's there, we'll find him," not realizing that she was going to find her father was the sperm donor.

- Which is unbelievable.

- I went on this odyssey to try to find, I mean, it's not just my biological father, it's like, it's my own identity.

Like, well who am I?

I was half asleep going to bed one night, and it was going on midnight, and then an email came in and said, like, "Your ancestry DNA results are in," and all of a sudden I'm wide awake.

My heart pounding outta my chest.

I knew I was gonna be disappointed, because I had been disappointed so many times.

So I logged on and, okay, it says I'm half Jewish.

That's what all the other sites said.

And all of a sudden I looked at my relatives and there was like a username, and it said, "Is your father.

Confidence extremely high."

And I called up, I just called up my friends here in Vienna.

They couldn't believe it.

And then I asked, "Okay, I wanna write to him like, how should I do this?"

So this was the message that I sent.

I wrote, "You can imagine my astonishment when I saw my Ancestry DNA results.

I never expected to find you.

When I was 30, I learned I was conceived via a sperm donation, and that the donor was presumably a medical doctor.

That's all I knew.

I've long wondered about the other half of me, about nature and nurture and where my traits and interests might have come from.

I hardly know how to introduce myself to my father after 43 years.

I'm a pianist originally from the Philadelphia area and live in Vienna.

I would love to learn more.

Please know that I completely respect your time and your family.

It would mean the world to me to hear from you.

Yours, Albert."

The next day I had been invited months before to... 'cause I started speaking out on this issue of identity as a human right particularly in the context of donor conception and adoption.

And right before I left to give a talk on this very subject, I heard from my father for the first time in my life.

And I shared this with the audience.

Like they couldn't believe, like this just happened an hour ago.

Like, I can't believe it, right?

- The weekend that my son, he was 15, when he met his biological father for the first time, and his new grandparents, he got two grandparents out of the deal, the whole weekend he kind of looked at me like a deer in the headlights.

And he kept saying to me, "I know who my donor is.

I know who my donor is."

Like it was so profound for him.

And when we were in the plane flying home, he turned to me and he said, "You know, if I never see those people again, I'll be okay.

Because now I know where I come from."

- When Roxanne introduced me to her sons, It was first one son who embraced me and hugged me and was happy to meet me, and the other one who was a little standoffish, and in a private moment, he said to me, "I hope you don't expect me to treat you like an uncle or anything."

"You can just treat me like I'm a friend of your mom, and your mom and I have an interesting connection.'

And he said, "Well, I can do that, I can do that."

So last summer they stopped at my house on Cape Cod when one of the kids had a Zoom meeting that was going to take place.

So we did it upstairs and we could hear some of the activity that was going on, and he took this camera and turned it into the ocean view that I have in the back of my house.

"Oh wow.

Where are you?"

And what did he say?

"Well, I'm at my uncle's."

- [Donna] Aw.

- One of the half siblings got married in October of 2019.

And she invited the half siblings to come to her wedding.

She invited me 'cause I'm kind of like the den mother of our group, right?

And this was in Portland, I rented this huge big Victorian house.

The biological father came with me in the house and the half siblings.

So we all walked in the front door of that meeting, many of us as strangers.

Some of us knew each other already, most not.

And by the end of that weekend, the sharing and the tears and the hugging and the love, we all left as family.

- I don't think people realized the penetration of biology.

You know, it's more than just a bunch of genes what you inherit in terms of personality and values, and I mean, you know, it's so much.

- What research has uncovered is that children who are separated from the biological parents and have never met them, don't even know necessarily that they exist, they have as much in common in terms of all psychological traits as their full siblings who grow up with those parents.

I mean, that's mind blowing.

And this is exactly what I discovered in my case.

Now that I know my biological father's side of the family, it is so clear that I'm one of them and I could not be more like them if he had raised me.

- I've found it extraordinary, the number of donor conceived people who I know who've met their biological father, exactly what you described, all these pieces fall into place.

- There was all of this like excitement and joy, but at the same time, this sadness.

But the whole while I just felt so much more grounded as a human being.

I always felt disconnected.

And then just learning the whole story and who I was, everything made sense and came together and then I just felt like, okay, this is who I am, and no shame.

And I think that a part of, one of the biggest problems with all of this being donor conceived, it's the shame.

- Well, it's the silence that makes you feel shameful.

You're brought up with the secret.

It must be something that you don't want to talk about.

- The shame of infertility is all too often passed along as the shame of donor conception, because secrecy implies shame.

So when you keep this as a secret and when the secret comes out, there's this inherent shame within this secret.

And so when you pass that along to the child, they're carrying along this shame, that really isn't theirs to carry.

- You know, the donor conceived people who are reaching out to their biological parents are often very frightened of either being rejected, which happens, or the other one is that they find their donor and they actually find, "Actually, I'm not sure that I like that person."

- Well, I got lucky with Roxanne because she embraced this as opposed to was standoffish.

I was afraid that I would be treated as a bastard stepchild seeking a seat in king's court.

- If Michael was still alive, could you go up to him or would you go up to him and say, "Gee, I think you could help me out.

You know, I'm trying to get ahead and I've got kids, your descendants, so I think you should help me out," 'cause I think a lot of people, and has nothing to do with us, might be fearsome of that.

- I think a lot of people who say they're not interested, there's a lot of reasons.

Fear.

Fear about the unknown, fear about who these people are, fear about hurting the non-biological parent that raised you, fear that you don't have the emotional bandwidth to reach out to genetic families.

So there's a plethora of reasons why people might not reach out.

- It's different for everybody.

There are a lot of people more like us.

And the thing is, you can't...

It is for nobody else to say how important or unimportant it is to us to meet and to know our own identity and biological family, like immediate biological family and our parents.

- People will say, "Hey, your dad is your dad," and he was my dad and he was a good dad and I love my dad, but I can know my dad and love my dad and want to know my genealogy all at the same time.

It's not mutually exclusive.

- Betty and I have had exactly this conversation of, well, where do you fit?

Where do I fit?

She has her dad.

He was her dad.

He was a good dad, he changed her nappies when she was a baby.

He dealt with her when she was a difficult teenager.

He loved her deeply, deeply, deeply.

And then, we would talked this through and she says, "So where do I fit?

What am I?"

I'm not her dad.

I'm her father, biologically I am her father.

You can't deny that.

But I'm not her dad.

Another way of looking at it is that, well, she has two fathers.

I spoke a couple of years ago at a conference in Edinburgh that was organized by the donor conception network in the UK.

After the session, one of the people who was a parent of a donor conceived child, so she was a recipient parent, she came up to me and said, "You kept referring to them as your kids."

And she said, "They're not your kids."

"Well," I said, "yeah, no, I can see your point, but I can't think of them as anything other than my kids."

And she really struggled with this.

And we had a very polite conversation, and I was just saying to her it is a biological fact that they are my children.

And finally she kind of accepted that, but quite unwillingly.

- You know, when I first started researching this, I found a word that I was unfamiliar with: misattributed.

I knew other mis words, you know, misconceived, misunderstood, misnomer, but never misattributed.

Misattributed means that your birth certificate and your DNA don't connect, there's something out of sync.

You know, how can that be with one or both parents?

The largest reason is closed adoption.

In the old days, they never told anyone they were adopted, or a product of an extramarital affair or a one night stand or unreported sexual assault.

You could be switched at birth or maybe raised by another family member.

Or you could join the over 1 million adults now that are conceived through an anonymous sperm donor or an anonymous donor, sperm, egg, or embryo.

And that's a million people.

That's a 50% increase in the population of donor conceived people in the last decade, and in the last four decades, the research shows that the fertility rate in the Western world has declined another 50%.

So you have 50% down on one hand and 50% up on the other.

- [Donna] Where are we headed?

- Well, if you do the curve on that 50% down, that threatens the longevity of the human race.

And there's a couple of reasons for this.

It's the toxicity of the environment impacting fertility, number one.

And people are just waiting longer to conceive a family, and sometimes the biological clock is not working for them.

All the more reason for a Donor-Conceived Bill of Rights.

- When do you think a child should know that they were donor conceived?

- All the research shows that the earlier, the better.

If this child grows up and understands that that's part of his woodwork, there's no trauma to that discovery, unlike you or me.

I was 49 when the rug get pulled out from me, and it took 22 years to discover my truth.

- I know a number of donor conceived people who have either been told actively, or worse, have discovered accidentally in their, say, in their 20s that they're donor-conceived.

And many of them talk about an existential shock of discovering this reality that there is another person who is a part of them, and that knowledge had been kept from them.

And I think it would be very, very disturbing, first of all, to discover that one's parents had, with the best of intentions, maintained that lie.

And secondly, that element of suddenly discovering that when you look in the mirror, you think, okay, there's actually another person there who I can see.

And if you haven't met your biological parent yet, you don't know who that person is.

- There are no counselors who would ever advise parents to lie to their kids that they were adopted.

So why in the reproductive medicine industry does this still go on?

People are still being told by their clinics, by their doctors, "Don't tell" or "Wait till your child's an adult to tell," or all this like, ridiculous information that is so outdated and so antiquated.

- One of the Donor Conceived Bill of Rights is to mandate some counseling for both donor and recipient regarding the needs of the donor-conceived child.

There's nothing mandating that today.

I have a friend that used to breed Rottweilers, and I introduced him to some of the discoveries that I had about the fertility industry in general.

And he listened to me and he scratched his head and he said, "You know, Pete, there are more regulations breeding puppies, there's more legislative oversight to breed puppies than there are for human beings in this field."

So the absence of a donor anonymity, I think, is key to this.

21st century technology has made that obsolete anyway.

Require genetic health testing and the recording of his health history, past and future, there's no sibling registry.

If you have 100 siblings, wouldn't you like to know that you're not dating a sibling or that your son or daughter is not dating a child of your sibling?

Restrict the number of donor conceived children per donor.

There's no regulation for that.

Today, there is only a guideline from the American Society of Reproductive Medicine that's a trade association, provides networking and information and education for their members, but they also provide public policy.

That's a fancy way to say they are a lobbyist.

This is a multi-billion dollar industry.

And the lobbyist doesn't want any changes on this thing, so maintain the status quo.

The ASRM recommends 25 offspring per donor for 800,000 population.

Now that's a guideline, but let's talk about that.

If I lived in Sacramento, I'd have 25 siblings.

Well, how about a larger metropolitan area?

If I'm in metropolitan Boston, I'd have 125 siblings.

Now let's go to Los Angeles or New York City.

Using that guideline, I'd have 250 siblings.

And that's a guideline per, for instance, sperm bank.

If I'm a donor, I can donate to more than one bank.

Let's say I donate to four banks.

Multiply that by four, so I could have a thousand siblings in New York City.

In the sperm bank field, medicine doesn't rule, it's marketing.

These people have merchandising backgrounds from, for crying out loud, Procter and Gamble.

And there's catalog marketing.

In my business experience, I learned about the 80/20 rule.

That's 80% of the people prefer 20% of the inventory.

So using the 25 per 800,000, number one, and going to the 80/20 rule, it's no wonder that people have over 100 siblings per donor.

So restrict the numbers of offspring per donor and put real laws on the books regarding blatant fertility fraud.

Today, if a doctor used his own sperm or if a sperm bank decided to switch the request of the patient or of the recipient, unethical, yes, unlawful, no.

- Whenever in this industry, when you ask, why did they do this or, how come they don't do this, the answer's always the same, one word: money.

If they adequately counsel and educate parents and donors, they're gonna make less money.

If they have accurate record keeping, less money, costs money to have accurate records.

If they update medical information and share it, it's gonna cost money.

So it costs money to run the industry in a more ethical and responsible manner.

And that's why it's run the way that it's run.

And that's why they resist all change, all progress, all acknowledgement of the truth about anonymity at this point.

And it is the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

They are the sperm banks and the egg clinics.

So it's the fox watching the hen house.

They have lobbyists in Washington, they have money, they have power.

And this is why nothing ever changes.

So there it is.

People go, "Why this and why this?"

It's like really easy: money.

Money, money, money.

- Here in Austria, selling sperm is actually criminalized by up to five years in prison or a 50,000 Euro fine, 60,000 US dollars.

- In the other countries that seemed like they were ahead of the game, acknowledging the rights of donor conceived people, all those countries now import sperm from the US and Denmark, so the local laws are meaningless, you know, when they're importing from a country that is the wild west.

And so now the whole world, because sperm is flying around the world, the whole world is at the effect of our lack of regulation and oversight.

- [Donna] You know, I wonder how my mother must have felt carrying a stranger's baby, or how my father felt knowing he wasn't the man who impregnated her.

It was quite a sacrifice.

Sometimes I've thought, well, who am I to wanna know where I come from?

I should just be grateful to be here.

- Why wouldn't it be a gift- - It is a gift.

- A super gift if a woman and man loved and could not conceive, why would it be anything but a blessing and a mitzvah to make life out of nothingness?

- Ask anybody, ask anybody how they would feel if they didn't know their gene pool.

It's all taken for granted from everybody.

And then all of a sudden you're stripped of a piece of your gene pool, a piece of your identity.

- It's an innate human desire to want to know where we come from and who we come from.

It defines who we are as people.

- So the least that you owe adoptees, and I argue, donor-conceived people as well, is the knowledge of exactly who their biological families are.

And I would say like actually a relationship with them.

- It's not just a donated cell, it's not just a piece of genetic material.

It is one half of your identity, your ancestry and your medical background and your close genetic relatives.

But this is their story.

This is the story they're sticking with.

And this makes it more palatable for people to use the gametes of an unknown person.

If they minimize it, negated it, ignore the significance of those donated gametes in the creation of a child.

- It has suited the clinics to sell a completely different story, to say, "These men don't think about you.

Don't trouble 'em."

From my experience of meeting and talking to and reading about many, many men who are donors, we don't forget.

We don't forget.

- That's unbelievable.

That's so...

I can't tell you what that means to me to hear that.

- We have relationships with people who aren't here anymore.

And I think this is a great tribute and a great way to honor him and that relationship.

So yeah, I just get like, when you were talking, I get the chills all over.

Like, I think you can through this and just through everyday life acknowledge the things that you share with him and the fact that he would've loved to know you.

And I think you're already doing that by getting to know the people that surrounded him and that knew him really well.

What a great tribute to him that a biological daughter cared enough to come along and insert herself in all these places to better know this man.

Like he would be honored and really touched by your efforts.

- I'm like piecing him together so I can just meet him.

(light cheerful music) We get it almost every night When that moon is big and bright It's a supernatural delight Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight Everybody here is out of sight They don't bark, and they don't bite They keep things loose, they keep things light Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight Dancin' in the moonlight Everybody's feelin' warm and bright It's such a fine and natural sight Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight - [Speaker] I cannot begin to tell you, I don't know when he learned about you.

I don't know if it was the moment that he passed that he was shown that he had these kids, but there is no way, there's nothing I can think of that would've given him more joy and it would've meant so much to him.

He really did have grief about not having kids.

- [Speaker] At a supermarket with him, he goes, "Look around, there's someone that looks like me.

I know there is, they're out there."

- [Donna] So it must have been really on his mind a lot.

More than maybe he even said.

- [Speaker] Always.

- [Donna] It's interesting, I think.

- I don't think that he really thought about it, till he was 50, right?

- [Speaker] Well, the frustration of not being able to have his own child and then maybe...

When did he start wanting to have a child, do you know?

- [Speaker] When he was around 50.

And so he needed to meet a girl that was 25, right?

- [Speaker] Good luck with that.

- [Speaker] Yeah, good luck with that.

So he enrolled in art school, he went to his junior year abroad.

- [Donna] Is that why he..?

No, come on.

That's not why he enrolled in art school, is it?

To meet a girl?

- [Speaker] And that's why he hooked up with Lael - [Donna] But he was so committed to painting- - [Speaker] she was childbearing age.

And Liz.

- [Speaker] Couldn't hurt.

Might get lucky.

- [Donna] Okay.

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