Yahoo Lifestyle The Conservative War on IVF Means More Stigma for People Like Me
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Shortly after I graduated high school in June 2018, my parents told my brother, my sister, and me—we’re triplets—that we were conceived using an egg donor.
In an instant, our older sister became our half sister. My mother’s best friend, a woman I’d considered an aunt, was now my biological mom and her children were my half siblings. I wasn’t 100 percent Filipino, as I’d always believed. I was half white.
My life felt like a soap opera. For two months, I stared at my ceiling. I didn’t brush my teeth. I barely ate. I just wanted answers.
“Why did you wait so long to tell us?” I asked my mom. Her replies—“I didn’t think you’d understand,” “You weren’t ready,” “Life got too busy”—were never satisfying.
Looking back now, I don’t know what she could have said to help me accept my new reality. Family does not equal genetics―I knew that then, and I'm even more certain of it today. But even so, confusion and shame around egg donation persists. The more questions I asked my mom about her fertility treatment, the tenser our relationship became. She accused me of being overly dramatic. We started arguing. She told me I wasn’t getting over the news fast enough.
It's true that, among my triplet siblings, the shock hit me the hardest. I'd always been sensitive—and my mother’s favorite. I'd also trusted her the most. My triplet sister told me she’d long felt like something was off, so when she learned the truth, “it just clicked,” she said. “My identity finally made sense.” My triplet brother was mostly bothered that my parents had concealed the truth for so long. My life, however, suddenly felt like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It would take me years to embrace the reality of being a donor-conceived person.
Today, it can feel like everyone is having (or contemplating having) fertility treatment. Women are starting families later, reproductive technology is constantly improving. Tabloids are full of stories about celebrity pregnancy struggles. Procedures like in vitro fertilization, also known as IVF, where an egg is fertilized outside of the body (in a test tube or petri dish), intrauterine insemination (also known as IUI, where sperm is put directly into the uterus during ovulation), egg or sperm donation, and even surrogates are more popular than ever before.
But growing alongside this technology is a movement by the very children it helps create. Adopted and donor-conceived children have started to speak out more and more about the importance of knowing their biological origins from an early age.
I am one of those children. Because I know that the consequences of keeping a child’s identity a secret—mistrust, depression, anxiety, a feeling of betrayal—can be devastating. My mom waited too long to tell me I was donor-conceived and, after she broke the news, she didn't want to talk about it. After a couple months of fighting, my mom declared that she had “done her job” raising me, and she kicked me out of her house.
Twenty-five 25 years ago, when my mother was trying to get pregnant, public awareness around infertility was limited and biological parents were considered real parents. But my mom’s reaction, and my time speaking and writing about my experience as a donor-conceived person, have taught me that though IVF may have advanced, the stigma lingers. Paternity tests on talk shows and millions of users who build family trees on Ancestry.com all operate under the presumption that some major part of your identity originates in your DNA. And so it can seem like children born of donors—not to mention those brought into families through adoption—will never be true family members.
It doesn’t help that procedures like the one my mother had have become conservative targets. Republicans have blocked legislation that would expand access to IVF. They’ve argued that these reproductive technologies are immoral, encourage women to wait to have children, and result in the destruction of “unborn life.” While the procedures are still legal, this smear campaign—supported by Vice President-elect JD Vance among other high-profile Republicans—fuels the suspicion that in vitro fertilization is unnatural or unhealthy and disparages parents who seek help conceiving.
In this light, I can see why my questions about my conception and birth might have felt like a rejection to my mom. Her first child was born with a life-threatening disability and, according to her doctors, any future biological children were at risk of the same condition. So she used her best friend’s eggs to have triplets. Then she lived with this secret for the next 18 years.
My mother was—and is—tough. She wanted me and my triplet siblings badly enough to fight through an extremely high-risk pregnancy at 39 years old. As much as my life changed the day she’d told me, so did hers.
I wanted information, but I felt like all those years of dealing with stigma and disappointment made it hard for her to hear me.
Though conservatives may try to shame, discourage, and criminalize nontraditional families, we’re everywhere. I can only imagine what it felt like for my mother to be bombarded with messages about “traditional family.” When she kicked me out four days before my 18th birthday, my last tearful words to her were, “I still love you. Always will.”
She didn’t even look at me as I walked out the door.
After learning the truth about my origin, I lost the ability to trust my perceptions. If my parents could conceal this information for years, what else could people hide from me? I was sure that if I knew every minute detail of my conception, I could restabilize my life.
So I decided to see her doctor.
It was a chilly October day last year when I entered the lobby of Michigan Center for Fertility & Women’s Health looking for a Dr. Carole Kowalczyk. The receptionists had heard that the child of one of Dr. Kowalczyk’s former patients was coming to visit and they promised she’d be out shortly.
A few minutes later, Dr. Kowalczyk entered the room. We hugged. I said I was honored to meet her.
“This is just as exciting to me,” she replied. “It’s not every day you get to see what happened.”
Her office was decorated with ceramic angels and photos of family. She took a seat at a large wooden desk and I perched awkwardly on one of the two wingback chairs across from her. I imagined my parents in an office like this one 24 years ago. I wondered what small talk they had made.
“So, remind me. Who’s your mom and dad?”
I told her their names.
“Oh my gosh, I know those names. How are they?”
I shifted in my seat. I told the doctor I’d learned about the egg donor a little over five years ago. She wanted to know if I was angry they’d waited so long.
I was angry, yes. But more than that, I was grieving. Nobody had ever looked at my face and seen my mother’s features in it. If I have children, they won’t resemble their grandmother. When I believed I was “full” Filipino, I felt superior to half-Filipino people. I’m humbled and humiliated about that now. I am darker than my younger triplet sister and, growing up, we joked that my mom ran out of ink when she was printing us. Now, the old family joke lands differently.
Dr. Kowalczyk asked if I had any recommendations for her in her role as a fertility doctor. I told her that shame over infertility doesn’t end when the baby arrives. Nor did my mother’s issues start when she told me I was donor-conceived. As far as I can tell, they started before I was born, when my mother was seeking treatment. Her patients need to be in therapy or actively dealing with the stigma and emotional fallout before they get pregnant.
At the end of our meeting, Dr. Kowalczyk paused and looked at me. “Well, I can tell that your mother really loves you.”
I wanted to say that she had no idea what happened after my mom left her office. But then I imagined my mother back in 2000. My parents were still married. My mom was seeking a procedure that would lead to a dangerous pregnancy. The woman Dr. Kowalczyk met was very different from the one who kicked me out of her house.
Donor-conceived people often go searching for answers about who they are. We look for donor numbers, medical records, and ancestral charts. We take DNA tests and dig up distant relatives online. When I asked my mother questions about how I was conceived, she yelled at me to “go to your real mother!”
Sitting across from the doctor who helped my mother have me, I realized that I didn’t actually want any of that information. It wasn’t going to help me understand my identity, my life, or my family. What I wanted was for my mother—and the world—to see me as her “real” daughter.
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