My Father Was My Parents' Doctor

I found out I was donor-conceived the way a lot of us do now — an ancestry test that failed to match me to my father's side and matched me instead to a scatter of half-siblings I'd never met, all of us confused, all of us doing the same maths in different cities.

My parents, gently confronted, confirmed it without much distress; they'd used a clinic decades ago, been told the donor was an anonymous medical student, and had simply decided, in the culture of the time, never to mention it. Fine. Painful, but a known genre. I joined the half-sibling group — there were nine of us and counting — and we did what these groups do: pooled our data, built a shared tree, and worked to triangulate the anonymous donor everyone had been promised was a nameless student.

He was not a nameless student. The shared DNA, cross-referenced with public records and one half-sibling's inherited paperwork, pointed with increasing and sickening clarity to one man: the fertility doctor himself. The physician who had treated my parents — and the parents of my eight-and-counting half-siblings — had used his own genetic material, without disclosure or consent, on his own patients. My mother went to a doctor for help having a baby. The doctor was, unbeknownst to her, the father.