Sharing Health Information with Donor Half-Siblings

I have ulcerative colitis.  It's one of the two diseases under the Inflammatory Bowel Disease umbrella (Crohn's is the other).  I have to take pills twice a day to keep the inflammation down, and I have to have a colonoscopy every couple years to screen for colon cancer since IBD increases my risk.  Mine is a very mild case that doesn't otherwise interfere with my day-to-day life.  Most people aren't so lucky.  Some need medications with significant side effects, or need surgery, or never get the inflammation quite under control. 

IBD is largely considered to be a heritable illness.  Every gastroenterologist I've met since the time of my diagnosis over a decade ago has asked if I had a family history and, when I said I didn't but that my father was an anonymous sperm donor, the doctor assured me bowel disease ran in my father's family.  Therefore I was unsurprised when I learned that my paternal grandmother had colon cancer when she died.  It did mean, however, that I should probably stop avoiding my regular colonoscopies the way I have been for the last several years because now I knew of two increased risk factors:  the IBD and the family history of colon cancer.

My half-siblings probably know about the cancer.  Our father talks to them, after all, and they actually met our grandmother, who died nearly fifteen years before I learned of her existence.  But I don't know if I should tell them about my IBD.  It seems awkward to bring up, but I do know if they ever go to gastroenterologists themselves for whatever reason, the intake paperwork will ask if they have any family with ulcerative colitis, among other things, and having a sibling with a disease does count as an increased risk for developing the disease yourself.

If I develop cancer, I will tell them.  If they told me about their own health information, or that they were having some kind of health problems, I would be comfortable bringing it up then too.  But for now, I think I will keep the IBD to myself.  I'm afraid they'd think I'm weird for bringing it up.  We just aren't that close.

I'd be interested to hear what other people -- donor conceived or adopted or not -- think on this topic.  What would you do with this relevant-but-not-necessarily-critical information?

An Open Letter to My Father

I found you.  I did the thing I thought I'd never be able to do and I found you.  I wrote you a letter, and you wrote back.  You answered my questions and told me never to contact you again because your wife doesn't like it, and that is where we stand now.  I am so fortunate to have gotten this far.  I know your name and your favorite book and where you grew up.  I know how my grandparents died and I've seen their wedding photo.  I have photos of more of your extended family than of my mother's, thanks to Ancestry.com.  More photos of you than of the parents who raised me.  There used to be more photos of my family, but a lot got lost when my mother fell apart.

I don't know if you meant for your letter to sound condescending or if I read that tone into it.  It doesn't matter really.  I never expected you to want a relationship with me.  Lunch someday would have been nice, just to hear your voice and have a conversation, but if I'm being honest, I never expected it to happen.  My friends didn't even think you'd respond.  In hindsight, I wonder if you told your wife about my letter because you're so open with her or if she opened it herself because she reads your mail.  It doesn't matter really.  Just curious.  I know so little about you and your family dynamic.

Thank you for telling my brother and sister about me.  In hindsight, I realize you were probably up against a wall.  After your brother saw me on a DNA database, he had to contact your son to get a hold of your current phone number to ask you if you had any illegitimate children he should know about, so a dangerous number of people already knew something was up.  You probably thought you couldn't keep me a secret if you'd wanted to.  Regardless, thank you for telling my brother and sister about me, even if you did forbid me to contact them myself, as though forbidding me is a thing you have the power to do.  They both reached out to me before I even received your letter, so that took some of the sting out of it.  Did you ever consider they might want to know their donor conceived siblings?  They do, and it seems like it didn't occur to you.  I'm glad you told them though.  I know you aren't close with them and they're not close with each other, but they seem like good people and they welcomed me. 

Your son and I look a lot alike.  You'll know that if you've looked me up online.  I guess we both look like you.  We have the same sense of humor too.  Yours?  Your daughter tagged me as her sister on Facebook, much to the shock of some people who thought they knew the entirety of your immediate family.  I think that's what she was going for though -- shock factor.  She does that a lot, doesn't she?  It was exactly what you forbid me to do in your letter -- exactly what I wouldn't dare to post online myself -- so I got a kick out of it too.  I hope to get to know them better.

If I find more siblings, I'm going to give them your name and the information you gave me.  You know that, right?  They might contact you, just like I did.  Prepare yourself for that. 

I don't really talk to my parents anymore.  I could never actually tell you this, but you brought them up in your letter as Paragons of Child Wanting, so I want you to know.  I don't tell most people about my parents because it's not their business and I don't want them marking me as damaged goods or a terrible person, but the people who know my parents -- my best friend and my husband and my extended family -- they understand.  If I wanted you to know about my parents, I could post one of my wedding photos to Facebook where your kids would see it and wonder what's wrong with my mother.  They might be shocked enough to mention it to you, though the more I learn about your relationship with them, the more I doubt they tell you much.  That's how severely mentally ill my mother is -- it's obvious even in still photos.  Just thought you ought to know.  The things wrong with my dad don't come through in a photo.  They'd just see his wheelchair.

I don't know what I still want from you.  I wrote to you in the hopes that you'd tell your kids about me and tell me about yourself and maybe someday agree to meet me for lunch.  You gave me most of that and I still want more.  I realize I'm in a place of privilege to be able to want so much.  I didn't think I'd ever know who you are and here I am wanting to hear your voice and wanting to know what kind of jokes make you laugh.  I've already found everything about you I could online.  I wish you'd start a blog or something.

I think what I really want, at least what I really want for now, is for you to feel something for me.  Even if it's regret for the actions that led to my existence.  I'd settle for regret, you know.  I want you to lay awake at least once thinking about me, even if what you're thinking is how much you hate me for finding you and writing to you and getting your wife all "irrationally angry," as your son put it.  I want to be something to you, and I will never tell you these things.  Even if we were in contact and you wanted to get to know me, I could never tell you these things.  I would be always on my guard, always showing my best self, never taking my mask off because I know that I have always been nothing to you, just as I have spent the last thirty years being nothing to my half-siblings, and I have to constantly be earning the privilege of their inclusion.  One slip up and they can write me off forever because, while people say you can't choose your family, we both know that isn't true.  If my mother can say you're "just a donor" and you "don't count," that's a choice, even if you both made it for me.  My parents adopted another child -- that was a choice that was made for him.  And when I decided I didn't want to see any of them ever again, that was my choice.  You can indeed choose your family.  I want your children to continue choosing me, and I am afraid they won't, and you won't, no matter what I do. 

I'm glad I reached out to you.  I don't know if I ever want to hear from you again.  It's not a secret wish I hold onto or anything.  Mostly, when one of us dies, I just want the regrets to be on your end.

Father's Day for the Donor Conceived

Father's Day hits a lot of donor conceived people hard.  This will be my first Father's Day knowing who my biological father is.  We aren't in touch.  There is no question of if I should reach out to him or send him something -- he said he wants nothing to do with me, so he will never hear from me again.  I wonder if his Real Children will say anything about him on Facebook that day.  We're Facebook friends, my younger half-siblings and I.  I'd like to see more old photos of him, hear facts about what he's like as a person, but I don't expect them to say anything about him to me or on social media.  They post a lot, but the last time either of them posted photos of our father to social media was close to a decade ago.  I can't believe Facebook has been around for so long.

I won't be reaching out to my dad -- my non-biological social father -- on Father's Day either.  I made a decision not to spend more on that relationship than I get out of it, and not to do anything that will make me feel resentful of the fact that he seems mostly indifferent toward me.  Initially that meant I wouldn't manage his finances anymore or do him favors unless he occasionally prefaced his requests with "how are you?" or acknowledged my daughter's existence.  I told him I wanted him to ask after me and my daughter.  He said okay, but he never did it.  His messages were about doing things for him, so they could have been to anyone. 

It took time and effort to turn the reins of his finances over to him, but it saved me a lot of time and effort soon thereafter.  I also appreciate not having to watch him squander his new savings on tens of thousands of dollars of music equipment and a car he can't drive and -- for some unknown reason -- a collection of over one hundred pipes.  Hoarders need their collections, I guess.

A year or two ago, I decided I could afford mentally and emotionally to send greetings on holidays and his birthday.  Email only, and never more than a line of text because that was how much I could do without having to think about it.  That was how much I could do without starting to feel bad.  But even that much started to feel like a drain.  Last Thanksgiving I realized I didn't even want to expend that minimal amount of energy trying to stay in contact.  I would respond to anything he sent me, but I wasn't going to struggle to keep this relationship alive.  The 2014 holiday season passed with not a word between us.  Surprisingly, it felt good to me.  I had more energy to spend with friends and family who are pleasant and seem to love me.

Father's Day has never been particularly hard for me.  I've been lucky that way.  My dad always accepted gifts from me with a smile, so the holiday never held the stress or looming threat of Mother's Day.  This year my daughter is old enough to color a card and help make plans.  I mentioned the possibility of taking her dad out for ice cream, and she hasn't stopped talking about it.  Maybe we'll make pizza or go out for lunch too.  My husband never has expectations for holidays, so we'll do something simple and have fun together, like we do for Mother's Day.  I expect my brother Hans will have similar traditions.  He's a father too now.  I expect I'll see a photo of him and his son on Facebook this Sunday.  I wonder what my sister will do.  I wonder if they'll call our father privately, or send him a card or a gift.  I wonder how he responds to cards and gifts and phone calls.  I wonder what he's like.

I hope he thinks of me.  He is my father, after all, regardless of how he looks at the situation.  I don't recall thinking of my biological father much on Father's Day in the past, but this is the first year my father has been a specific person, rather than some nebulous idea.  He's Joseph Von Trapp now, rather than "a doctor with blue eyes who is a probably good at math."  It's strangely new and real, having a person for a father, and I think of him.  I don't expect him ever to care for me, but I want him to think of me occasionally too, even if it's with regret.  Regret would be better than nothing.  Regret would mean I'm real to him too.

The Kid Left Behind

My dad emailed me a few days ago to say that he is out of the hospital and living in his own house again.  My older brother Dante moved back home years ago, shortly after my mother moved out.  He told my dad he was being evicted for failing to pay rent.  He has always been against paying rent.  He brought his girlfriend and her son with him.  He has apparently broken up with his girlfriend since then, but her son, Aiden, still lives at the house.

It's a bachelor pad now, my dad said, just the three of them.  He also said Aiden missed his last year of high school because his mother didn't enroll him before she left and Dante "didn't have the right paperwork."  He's spent the last year alone in his room (my old room, by deductive reasoning) playing video games.  This angers my dad, who says he needs to get a job or at least enroll at a trade school.  It reminded me of the way he used to talk about Dante.  He didn't like Dante. 

Dante at least had parents who made him go to school. 

I only met Aiden once, at my wedding when he was about ten.  He seemed like a sweet kid, ginger hair and a shy smile and a lisp.  Dante was the father figure in his life from the time he was four.  That thought scares me.  I have known Dante since he was six, and we lived in adjacent bedrooms for 18 years.  My bedroom door -- now Aiden's bedroom door -- has a knee-shaped splintering from one of Dante's rages when he tried to break it down to get to me.  Another time he wrapped his hands around my neck and simultaneously choked me while lifting me off the ground.  These events happened when he was in his twenties and I was a teenage girl.  These are not the worst things he did, but I don't want to talk about those.  I believe he is a psychopath. 

My mother told me Dante had grown up and changed once he was in his thirties, that he was so great with Aiden that the kid was the only reason he hadn't broken up with his girlfriend.  That Aiden loved him so much that he'd suggested as a very young child that they could both leave his mother and live together, just the two of them.  None of this seemed weird to her, just complimentary.

I am ashamed to admit it didn't even occur to me until Aiden was 17 that my brother might have abused him.  It only occurred to me when I was talking to my therapist about him and she gave me a look and asked how old he was, so basically it occurred to my therapist.  She was a mandated reporter and wanted to know if she needed to contact the local Child Protective Services.  Apparently the things I said would have warranted a call if he'd been younger.  He's at an age where no one cares about him now.

The times I've met Dante since moving out, I saw no change in him.  He's very good with strangers, very personable, and we're effectively strangers now, so we're cordial.  The last time I talked to him was three or four years ago.  We exchanged pleasantries -- he congratulated me on my new baby he would never meet and I asked about his garden I would never see -- but only because I'd called my dad at home and Dante had answered.  It's the sort of relationship I would expect to have with a neighbor I saw commit a murder.  The goal is to keep my distance and not to seem like a threat.

I don't know what to do about Aiden.  I don't think there is anything I can do.  He's still young.  He could still get out and do things, but he's 18 so no one will help him.  He still seems like a sweet, albeit mostly grown, kid, at least based on my skulking quietly on his Facebook page.  He has some local family on social media, but they haven't taken him in.  He posts regularly about anime and being lonely.  I don't know where his mother went.  I know it's unlikely, but I'm not 100% certain my brother didn't murder her.  She has no internet presence, and I don't know anyone who would have seen her.  I don't want to turn up on Dante's radar.  I don't know what to do.

Divide & Conquer: How I Got My Parents Divorced

When I was young, I remember my mother telling me that she would divorce my dad if I wanted her to, but that we'd have to move out of the house and be poor and she was leaving the decision entirely up to me whether these things happened or not.  It turns out she was right.  I take credit for making their divorce finally happen.

After my mother stopped paying the mortgage and sold my dad's prized possessions, I finally convinced my dad to file for divorce.  She was calling ambulances and visiting the ER on a semi-regular basis for her imagined ailments, and their joint debt increased, if not exponentially, at least very very quickly.  As I saw it, they never should have been married, so there was no reason for him to stay tied to someone who was so clearly trying to drown them both.  It reminded me of the dilemma people like to pose in which two people are drowning.  Which one do you save?  The one who isn't trying to drown all of us.

I was in my early 20s and had no idea what I was doing, but I knew my dad's sister had won an important court case a number of years earlier.  I called her, and she gave me her lawyer's name and phone number.  He wasn't a divorce attorney, but he knew a good one, and he gave me that lawyer's name and number.  I called the divorce attorney and arranged for a free consultation between him and my dad.  He sounded like he knew what he was doing, so we hired him.  I would pay the attorney fees through my joint account with my dad.  The first step was to get my parents legally separated.

The legal separation was important because of how quickly my mother accrued debt.  She had recently maxed out a credit card she found in my dad's name, and when my dad called the bank to say it was identity theft on the part of his wife, they canceled it and issued a new card, which she found in the mail and maxed out as well.  She called herself an ambulance every time she fell down, and she had no medical insurance.  She could rack up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills in the course of 24 hours and sometimes did.  As long as my parents remained married, it was joint debt.  When they became separated, any new debt she acquired would be hers alone.  It was a band-aid on a gaping wound, but it was something. 

When my mother received the divorce papers, she called me in tears.  She said it was a shock, completely unexpected.  She had been threatening divorce repeatedly, but it hadn't occurred to her that anyone might actually want the divorce to happen.  She sobbed and bargained that she would even be willing to live on a budget if this would just go away.  It hadn't occurred to me until then that she had genuinely never kept track of any of the money that passed through her hands.  She'd spat out "live on a budget" like it meant "eat cat food and live outside."  She found herself a lawyer who didn't require money upfront but would ask the court to make my dad pay her fees instead.  It appeared to be her only qualification. 

My mother asked for $1,500 in monthly spousal support payments during the separation, which the court granted.  I had previously deposited the entirety of my dad's monthly check into her account after paying the mortgage -- some $7,200 per month for her personal discretionary use -- so I had to stop doing that in order to be able to pay her the requested $1,500.  My dad put the other household bills -- electricity, gas, phone, cable and satellite (they couldn't agree on just one so they had both), trash collection, the works -- on auto-pay from our joint account.  The only things my mother would need to pay for regularly from her $1,500 per month were food, toiletries, and anything else she chose to buy for herself.  I set up a savings account for my dad where I socked away all the money that she was no longer receiving.  The money compounded quickly. 

My parents had to go through mediation, which involved filling out forms where they each listed what they owned jointly and what they felt each of them should receive.  My mother's forms made no sense.  She felt they should each get the washer and dryer.  They should each get the stove.  Her suggestions were mathematically impossible.

They agreed that my dad should get the house, which was a relief to me.  I had spoken with the mortgage company already and determined that, while one of them could be removed from the deed to the house, neither could be removed from the mortgage.  Had my mother received the house, run down as it was, my dad would have had to pay her enough to keep up with the mortgage -- which cost more than her monthly spousal support checks totaled -- which she would have still likely chosen not to pay.  The mortgage company would then go after my dad for even more money, and his already paltry credit score would get worse.  I told him to ask for the house to avoid any of that happening.  The house had been custom built to be handicapped accessible for him, so I said he should argue that point.  It turned out not to be necessary.  My mother has a history of refusing to ask for what she wants or needs, wanting instead for people to simply know and give it to her.  I believe she made this mistake when she offered him the house.

My mother had a rough time with the divorce.  She went through phases in which she wouldn't even respond to her own lawyer.  I believe she was in a depression during these times since that was generally the only thing that kept her silent.  She sometimes missed court dates, even though they were conducted via phone for my bedridden dad's benefit.  Her behavior annoyed the judge, which did not go well for her.  She drew out the divorce proceedings for years.

First she tried to have the divorce thrown out by arguing that she had cared for my dad when he was disabled and that he was discarding her now that she was disabled and mentally ill (she had never admitted to the possibility of being mentally ill before this point, and now it was in court documents).  I found a court case of a woman in their state who had tried this same tack to no avail.  My parents lived in a "no fault" state.  The only cause for divorce was "irreconcilable differences."  None of her arguments helped her.  She couldn't force him to stay married to her.

When my mother finally asked for more money as spousal support -- she was currently receiving $1,500 per month of my dad's almost $10k monthly income -- the judge told her if she wanted more money she should get a job.  He said he saw no evidence that she had any kind of disability that should prevent her from working.

She asked the court to require my dad to buy her a new car.  Denied.

My mother asked the court to require my dad to keep her as primary beneficiary on his life insurance policy, including all the new life insurance policies she had taken out against him in recent months.  He and I had both worried for his physical safety during his last stay at home from the hospital.  My mother doesn't have a history of violence, but she was not the same person who had raised me.  I didn't know her anymore.  She rarely seemed lucid, and she sometimes seemed psychotic.  Even if she never became violent herself, I could see her promising someone else money to cause harm to someone she hates, like my dad.  No one had to mention this seemingly ridiculous concern to the court.  The judge just told my mother no, and my dad canceled all the new life insurance policies she had taken out against him.  He still had a small one that the VA paid for, and he made me the primary beneficiary.  The understanding was that I would use it to pay for his cremation and then split any leftover money 50/50 with Dante.  I think he knew as well as I did that any money given to Dante would disappear as quickly as it would with my mother.

The divorce became final when my mother's lawyer asked the court to excuse her from the case because she wanted her money and my mother wasn't responding to phone calls anymore.  The judge ordered my dad to pay my mother's attorney, which I did from his account, and everything was final.  My mother was given three months to move out of the house, which she mostly spent sleeping in what used to be Dante's bedroom.  She had ordered a portable storage pod, which sat empty in the driveway.  Whenever Dante visited the house, he said she hadn't appeared to have packed anything.  After the three months came and went and my mother had made no attempt to vacate the house, my dad went back to the court, which granted her more time, during which she made still no attempt to pack or move. 

The court eventually ordered her to leave.  She moved in with her parents in a neighboring town, taking almost nothing with her since she never packed.  The storage pod remained empty in the driveway when she left.  Her brothers came by their parents' house each day to care for them, cook, clean, and do laundry.  Since she did nothing to care for herself, they looked after her too.

The Time I Took Over My Parents' Finances

When I was in my early 20s, after my mother went off the deep end and my dad was living in the hospital across the state, my mother decided she was going to ruin my dad's life.  This might sound hyperbolic, and I don't know what she was actually trying to do or even if she knew, but I think "ruining my dad's life" sums it up rather well. 

As part of the deal for refinancing the house, she got a check for $40,000.  It was all gone within three weeks.  No one knows where it went.  She had elaborate plans, such as renting a bus and taking troubled orphans to the movies for a day, but none of it ever happened.  She had previously vowed to fix up her house, buy her parents a house, and pay for my wedding, but unsurprisingly none of that happened either.  The money just disappeared, as money in her possession so often did.

Not long after, my mother called me and told me she wasn't paying the mortgage anymore because she wanted the house to go into foreclosure so that my dad wouldn't have a home anymore when he got out of the hospital.  Please understand that I am not claiming to read her mind -- wanting him to be homeless was the explanation she gave me.  It was her house too, and it was where she lived at the time, so I don't know where she planned to go.  I somehow doubt she had a plan.  I decided to intervene because one or both of my parents becoming homeless could adversely affect me personally even more than intervening in their broken marriage would, and I went about setting up a joint checking account with my dad at a bank in my town, far away from my parents.  

It isn't easy to set up a joint account with someone who is bedridden in a hospital halfway across the country, but with the help of a polite customer service agent at my bank and three-way calling, we did it on my lunch hour.  Then my dad had to put through paperwork to have his veterans benefit checks direct deposited to our new joint account rather than his account with my mother.  This was the start of my managing my parents' finances.  This was how I found out just how much money they had.

When the first check went into my joint account with my dad, I contacted the mortgage company.  It's generally really hard to get people to talk to you about someone else's account, but if they're some kind of debt collectors and you want to give them money, they really don't care who you are.  My mother hadn't paid the mortgage since before the refinance, so they owed more than one payment.  I paid it up to date.  I changed the mailing address on the mortgage statements so that they would come to my apartment, after making sure there was no way I was somehow taking on my parents' debt by doing so.  Then I transferred the remaining money into my parents' joint account for my mother to spend as she saw fit.  This is what I would do on the first of each month.

Soon my mother called my dad in the hospital and told him that, if he didn't give her more money, she was going to sell all of his possessions.  The problem with that was that all of the money that wasn't going toward the mortgage was already going to her every month.  Unless you count his comparatively meager social security checks that my dad set aside to pay the property tax on the house, there was no more. 

My dad had tens of thousands of dollars worth of musical instruments and amps and related equipment.  My mother sold all of it.  She also gave someone his computer in exchange for a second used refrigerator she decided to keep in the garage.  All the while, she called me regularly to complain about her week and make money- and divorce-related threats.  Once she said I had to send her $2k of my own money or else she would spend the money my dad had set aside to pay the property taxes on the house (I sent her nothing).  Another time she threatened to file for divorce unless my dad sent her an extra $2k.  I don't know why the number was so often $2k, but it was. 

That's around the time I convinced my dad to file for divorce.

How Do You Feel About Donor Conception?

When I've written about my experiences being donor conceived -- always anonymously, as I do here -- one of the things people ask is how I feel about donor conception.  Would I donate my gametes?  Would I use donated gametes? 

I am not vocal about my opinions on donor conception.  I am not even vocal about the fact that I am donor conceived.  While I've been happy to shrug off the secrecy imposed on me in my youth and tell anyone who asks about my origins, I don't want just anyone knowing.  My close friends and "family of choice" know.  My donor conceived acquaintances know.  My half-siblings obviously know.  When you look up my name online though, I want you to see the delicately crafted persona that I wear for strangers.  Only flattering photos and self-deprecating humor and benign facts I'd want my boss or my biological father to see.  I admire many people who are outspoken about their beliefs, but I can't do it.  If you want to know my feelings or intimate details of my life, I want you to have to ask me.

When I first tested my DNA with 23andMe, I realized I only knew two surnames in my family tree -- my mother's maiden name and her mother's maiden name -- and I wasn't even sure how the latter one was spelled.  I confided in a maternal cousin about the DNA test and being donor conceived in the hope that she could provide me with more family names.  She was very supportive and very helpful.  She also confided that she was currently in the process of trying to conceive using anonymous donor eggs.  I'm not going to tell her how I feel about donor conception.  I'm not going to warn her that her child -- should she successfully have one -- might have some strong feelings about donor conception too.  She had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on failed fertility treatments.  I do not believe my opinion would change her mind.  Instead, I think it would make it even harder for her to talk to me, and I think it would drive a wedge between me and one of the few "original family" members I have left.  Most importantly, her choice to use anonymous donor eggs does not affect me.  I wished her luck and all good things, and I meant it. 

Personally, I would not donate my eggs, and I would not use donated gametes of any kind.  I told my husband before we tried to conceive that, if we couldn't conceive naturally, I knew I could not use donated gametes.  I don't expect someone who isn't donor conceived to understand or to anticipate the pain, but as someone who is and who has gone through it, I couldn't in good conscience do that to another person.  He understood.  He had thought it went without saying. 

I believe anonymous sperm and egg donation should be banned in the US, as they have been in the UK and several other first world countries.  I believe third party reproduction should be heavily regulated, donor medical information tracked, and number of offspring per donor severely limited, the way many people think it already is.  If we continue to let the free market decide the ethics of third party reproduction, money will continue to do all the talking.  Gamete "donors" will continue selling their sperm and eggs, people who desperately want children will continue buying them, and cryo banks and fertility clinics will continue making enormous sums of money as the wish granters and middle men.  People who haven't been conceived yet don't have money.  They are the goods.  Their rights will continue to be leveraged by their parents and doctors, all decisions on the matter made for them before they are even conceived, let alone born.  This is distasteful to me.

Of course, whether anything or everything is outlawed, people can still go onto Craig's List or have one night stands or recruit family friends and refuse to tell their children who their genetic fathers are (traditional "artificial insemination" can easily be done outside a medical setting), but I think fewer people will be willing to do that who weren't already planning to do that.  I'm aiming for improving the current situation.  I don't believe there is a way to fix it completely.  There will always be children born who don't know who their genetic parents are, for whatever reason.  I just want to limit those numbers as much as possible.

I used to feel much more upset about being donor conceived than I do now.  I used to feel much angrier and sadder and more misunderstood when people challenged me or disagreed with me.  I feel a lot better now that I know who my father is.  Knowing his identity doesn't solve all my problems, but it's all I really wanted, and I got it.  No one can take that knowledge away from me, regardless of how strongly they feel that I should shut up and be grateful to be alive.  I wish for everyone who is donor conceived (or adopted, or unsure of their parentage for whatever reason) to be able to know who their biological parents are.  I think it makes things easier.  On that note, please take an autosomal DNA test.  23andMe and AncestryDNA and Family Tree DNA each do them for about $99 or less, and even if you know who your parents are, you might help someone else find theirs.