The Case of Locating a Sperm Donor

Here at BirthParentFinder.com we have a general rule that we do not locate anonymous sperm donors. An anonymous sperm donor should always remain anonymous. A sperm donor is not a birth father. A birth father is someone involved with the birth mother at one time. In a sperm donor case, that person is donating his sperm to either make money to support himself or to help women who would like to get pregnant without having to partner with someone in order to conceive. There is no relationship factor with a sperm donor.

We finally broke our rule. This past week we decided to accept one case for this very simple reason: Our client did not know that she was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. She found out when she was a teenager. Now, years later, our client is a medical doctor with children. She has no information on her paternal side's medical history. The agency that provided sperm donation is no longer in business. Obtaining vital medical history information is critical when going to the doctor to determine if there are any genetic diseases. After careful consideration, our team here at birthparentfinder.com decided we would help this woman. She showed us her Ancestry DNA results and there were close relatives! All we knew about the sperm donor was that he lived in a southern state and was also a medical doctor.

Once research began, the pieces fell into place quite easily. The client was lucky, in that she had strong matches to the lines of her paternal family and they were easy to track through marriage and census records. Once the family was narrowed down, it was easy to see who the donor was, as he was the only medical doctor in a group of siblings.

After confirming the identity of the sperm donor, we obtained several phone numbers for him, including his work number. We were very discreet in our attempted communication with the sperm donor. We left several messages for him, but they were not returned. We even tried contacting him at his work and those messages were not returned. Taking it to the next level, without sending a letter to the sperm donor, we dug a bit into his history. We found that he had an ex-wife, who he was married to for many years. We contacted the ex-wife and explained to her that we were attempting to get ahold of her ex-husband regarding the fact that he is connected to our client through an Ancestry DNA test. Immediately, his ex-wife said “I know what this is about. My ex-husband donated his sperm when he was in medical school so he could make extra money.” She was extremely forthcoming and understood what our client's needs were. She provided us with everything about her ex-husband’s medical history. She knew what our client needed to worry about. She was married to this man for over 40 years. She also said that it would be okay for our client to call her so she could discuss this in detail. We notified our client and she was amazed that we were able to get cooperation from the family and she was able to get all the answers she would need for herself and for her children regarding the paternal side's medical history. There was some information that we were told that would be crucial moving forward medical wise.

So our gambling in accepting this case really paid off. We try to be as discreet as possible without contacting the sperm donors' children. The ex-wife was the perfect person to contact to get all this information. She also told us that her ex-husband would never have responded to us.

We are firm believers that anonymous sperm donors should always remain anonymous. However, in this case we broke the rules because our client, who was born over 40 years ago, was never provided with her family medical history. Today, agencies make sure sperm donors provide details about the family medical history of at least two previous generations that include the presence of a hereditary disease and also mental illness.