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A few years ago, when he was in his early 30s, Tyler Levy Sniff took a home DNA test he received as a gift. The results revealed a staggering truth: His father wasn’t biologically related to him. Levy Sniff confronted his parents, who explained that after years of trying and failing to have a baby, they turned to a sperm donor. Following the standard advice at the time, they decided not to tell him for fear of driving a wedge into their family.
Levy Sniff felt as if he’d found a key to his identity that he was looking for. “It made sense of why I felt different from my family,” he said recently. He wanted more information about the person he called his “bio father” to understand his genetic heritage. “It was so important to me to know my bio father’s life story, his personality and talents and struggles,” Levy Sniff says.
But by the time he found his donor, through relatives on two genealogy websites, the man had died — another revelation that shattered him, he says. To Levy Sniff, the value of knowing where you come from is self-evident. “A lot of influence comes from your biology,” he says.
There’s plenty of support for this way of thinking. Recent findings in behavioral science show the role of genetics in shaping certain individual characteristics. Questionnaires from doctors routinely ask for generations of family medical history. And learning about your genetic ancestry can be emotionally powerful — one reason millions of people buy inexpensive at-home DNA tests and sign up for genealogy websites.
Levy Sniff has helped found the U.S. Donor Conceived Council, a group that advocates for more transparency when it comes to donor anonymity. In a sense, it’s a battle that has already been won: For earlier generations of donor-conceived children, secrecy was commonplace, but today the widespread use of DNA technology has ended any guarantee of anonymity for donors. As a result, major sperm banks in the United States are requiring donors to agree to disclose their medical histories up front and reveal their identities when a child turns 18.
Activists like Levy Sniff are pushing for a further step, however, beyond the practices of sperm banks in the private market. They want the government to ban anonymous donation. A year ago, they succeeded in making Colorado the first state to mandate that sperm and egg banks disclose donors’ identities to children who ask for the information once they turn 18. A bill introduced in the New York Senate last month would impose a similar requirement and also give parents of donor-conceived children access to a donor’s identifying information at birth.
But in the view of other donor-conceived people and L.G.B.T.Q. groups, laws that require the end of anonymity pose an unanticipated threat. Lesbian couples and single parents make up 70 percent of the people who now use sperm donors, according to a 2022 study of an assisted-reproduction clinic. Some of these families fear that disclosure laws will open the door to recognizing biological donors in some way as parents — possibly granting them parental rights and more broadly undermining the legitimacy of L.G.B.T.Q. families.
In sperm and egg donation, secrecy was the old-school choice — the one that seemed easier to many heterosexual couples as they raised their children. But now it’s nontraditional families who are most nervous about ending the practice of anonymous donation. It’s one thing for parents to choose transparency, but it’s quite another for the state to mandate it — enshrining into law, some fear, the notion that genetics are an essential part of being a family.
‘A Real Legal Risk’
It’s easy to understand why nontraditional families feel threatened. Only seven states have language in their laws that fully protects families formed through nongenetic bonds, according to a report by several L.G.B.T.Q. groups. In a recent case in Oklahoma, a lesbian couple divorced after having a donor-conceived baby. A judge ruled that the nonbiological mother lacked parental rights because she hadn’t adopted the child — and granted the sperm donor parental rights alongside the biological mother.
In many states, if you are part of a couple raising a child, and you never marry or you get a divorce, and your partner wants to sever the connection, you can be deemed a legal stranger to a child you helped raise but with whom you don’t share a genetic tie. “I worry that people may be acting in good faith but don’t understand the situations of these families,” says Douglas NeJaime, a Yale law professor who is working with L.G.B.T.Q. organizations and other academics on a joint statement of principles about access to a donor’s identifying information. “There’s a real legal risk in many places. And then there’s the idea these laws express, which is that biological ties are more important than other ties.”
Malina Simard-Halm, 27, the donor-conceived daughter of a pair of gay fathers, is a former board member of Family Equality and Colage, two groups for L.G.B.T.Q. families that are part of a coalition calling to pause the passage of more disclosure laws. Simard-Halm is sympathetic to Levy Sniff, but she doesn’t want the state to suggest that it’s vital to seek out one’s donor. Not knowing who that person is doesn’t necessarily create a void, she says. Her fathers were frank about how she and her brothers were conceived — an approach that tends to strengthen parent-child relationships, research shows — and she didn’t experience a sense of loss.
Simard-Halm remembers having to withstand the judgment of outsiders, who forced on her the assumption that nature counts more than nurture. “People would ask: ‘Who’s your mother? Where is she?’” Simard-Halm says. “Sometimes they would say flat out: ‘She’s your real parent. You need to be with her.’”
This framing was used in the past in the fight against same-sex marriage. A 2010 survey, called “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor” and funded by the Institute for American Values, a conservative group, claimed that many donor-conceived children felt hurt and isolated by their origins. The study wasn’t peer reviewed, and other research has showed that donor-conceived children generally do as well as their peers. But for years in court, opponents of same-sex marriage argued that the children of gay couples would grow up worse off, feeling fatherless or motherless.
L.G.B.T.Q. families are also concerned that some people who advocate for ending anonymity, including Levy Sniff, think children should be able to know their donor’s identity earlier than age 18 — at 16 or 14. They say this creates the possibility of conflicts between how teenagers define their families and how their parents do. Lowering the age “leaves family more legally vulnerable,” says Courtney Joslin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “And it impacts both the social perception of the family and maybe how kids and parents see each other.”
Birth certificates have also become a battleground. In Britain, one of several countries that mandates disclosure at a child’s request at 18, the agency that regulates fertility treatments last month proposed including the name of every sperm or egg donor on a child’s birth certificate and allowing families to access the information beginning at birth. Birth certificates record legal parentage, which does not always accord with genetic parentage. (For example, when a woman has an affair and becomes pregnant while she’s married, her husband’s name routinely appears on the child’s birth certificate.)
“Birth certificates have not been a system of biologically-based birth registration,” NeJaime says. “The idea that the state should use birth certificates to record genetic rather than legal parentage has been an argument of the right.”
‘Family-Lite’
For the L.G.B.T.Q. groups, the solution isn’t a return to secrecy but rather equal legal protection for families created through interpersonal bonds rather than genetic ones. They want states to pass the 2017 version of a model bill, the Uniform Parentage Act, which makes clear that a person who uses sperm or egg donation with the intent to be a parent is a parent, regardless of factors including genetic ties and marital status. The act also specifies that sperm and egg donors have no parental rights or responsibilities. (The provision makes explicit a distinction between donation and adoption, where birth parents have rights they choose to relinquish.) The L.G.B.T.Q. coalition supported Colorado’s disclosure law last year because the state had in place the legal protections they sought. That approach balances the importance of genetic ties with the security that equal status brings.
Apart from the concerns about disclosure laws, some L.G.B.T.Q. parents and their children welcome the expanded sense of family that transparency can bring. If everyone involved consents, sperm banks can facilitate matches among “diblings” — the other offspring with whom a child shares a donor’s genes. And online, the Donor Sibling Registry matches almost 1,700 people a year.
Estee Simmons, the 11-year-old daughter of a lesbian mother in Massachusetts, met one of her diblings for the first time a few years ago. The girls were astonished by how alike their hands looked. They grew close by discovering a shared sense of personal style and building social bonds over text messages and periodic visits. “It’s like having cousins, but more real,” Estee says. Her mother, who has her own friendship with the mother of Estee’s dibling, calls the relationships “family-lite.”
Estee has nine diblings in all. Eight of them are in touch. They’ve decided together to wait until they’re all 18 to learn their donor’s identity and ask to meet him.
For Estee, that will mean extra years of delay. That’s OK with her. She’s curious about her donor — but “he’s not that important,” she says.