FROM SPERM DONOR TO DAD OF 37

Peter Ellenstein's life took an unexpected turn when a message from a daughter he never knew he had led to him meeting dozens of his children and exploring what it means to be a father without ever having raised them

IT WAS a young woman named Rachel who changed my life forever. I still remember the moment – 10.55am on 6 October 2017.

I was sitting in the café of the Ritz Hotel in San Francisco when a Facebook message pinged on my cellphone. “Hi Peter,” it said. “I am messaging you under very strange circumstances.

“This is a very sensitive subject . . . but to give you a bit of my background, I was born in 1994 due to in vitro fertilisation. The reason I am messaging you is that I believe you may have been the donor.” 

The first thing I felt was shock – mixed with an undercurrent of pleasure that the message was grammatically correct. Then I freaked out. Rushing back to my hotel room, I forwarded the message to my wife and siblings.

“Could this be a scam?” replied my sister, echoing my own thoughts.

But even in this early panic, I knew it could very well be true. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, while I was trying to make it as a theatre producer and artistic director in Los Angeles, my hometown, I had been a frequent visitor to two sperm banks. It was a good way to raise money: I was given at least $45 per donation, up to five times a week.

Over five or six years, I must have made hundreds of donations, which afforded me my dream of starting a theatre company.

There are few regulations governing who can donate sperm in the US. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine guidelines limit a donor to 25 live births per population area of 850 000, although this is not enforced by law. To my knowledge there’s no central tracking.