Centers of advanced fertility programs enable a section of population to enjoy being parents in their lifetime. Human sperm donor programs resulted. Modern Science lent a huge part to succeed in this beneficial effort to get the final happiness to the would be parents.
Altruistic persons were kind enough to donate their sperms to the sperm bank in all states in U.S.A.This practice continues successfully today. An unique interesting human story evolved and reported in the news media.
I am reporting such a story and gratefully acknowledge the source to be by Mr.Kyle Swenson, September 7th, 2020 in The Washington Post. Dr. Bruce Cleary 53 is from Corvallis, Oregon, received a message when he logged into his internet account a gift from his wife.
He had just received his genealogical results tracing his Swiss and Irish roots. But now Cleary noticed a note in his accounts inbox. He read the message. “I did not expect to see such a close relation on the site. I apologise if this is uncomfortable with me reaching out to you.”
In March 2018 his office was crowded with the family photos of a man happily anchored in his place, a position carved out deliberately over the past decades. There was Cleary a teenager, with his Corvallis high school foot ball team. There he was a middle-aged doctor, smiling with orphans in Ghana, and at his wedding to his second wife, his arms wrapped around his grown sons.
Almost all of Cleary’s life had played out within a short drive of where he sat. He was ten minutes away from his childhood home.He was five minutes away from the Church when he was a kid. The only significant time away from Corvallis was during medical school in Portland Oregon Health and Science University where at one point he became a sperm donor.
Now three decades later, as he kept reading Cleary realized that Ancestry had identified him to one of the donor kids, in fact to two of them. The message was from a woman in her 20s. She wrote that she and her sister were both Cleary’s. ” I thought for donating I might write to say thanks all those years ago.” she wrote, and then asked about his family’s medical history. “Again I apologize if reaching is too much or overstepping any boundaries.” she added.
Cleary had spent little time about his children. He said at the time he donated, he was told that he would have five and all of them may be in the East Coast. His role would be hidden and be anonymous.
When 23 and Me and Ancestry websites became popular he realized he might be revealed. Technology has given users of genealogical data bases to know more about themselves. In the two years since the first message of gratitude he has learned that there were not two donor children but at least 19 children. All of them lived within two hours of his home.
This donor’s unsettling surprise of 19 kids reveals the promises and perils of genealogical data bases, in the 21st Century.