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.

This is, I have since learned, a documented category of medical crime with a clinical-sounding name, and there are more of us out here than anyone wants to count. Knowing it's a category doesn't help at 3 a.m. The man who is half of me is a man who violated my mother in a way she never got to refuse, and who I share a jaw and a stubborn cowlick with, and who is on the golf-club wall of a practice that still bears his name.

The half-sibling group is up to fourteen. We are careful with each other. We are also, several of us, exploring what recourse exists, in jurisdictions still catching up to the crime.

My parents are horrified in the specific way of people who trusted an authority completely. My mother said one thing that I carry: 'I chose everything about you except that. And I'd still choose you.' She's the parent in this. He's just the diagnosis I share.