'I'M THE BIOLOGICAL FATHER OF 97 KIDS'

A 33-YEAR-OLD SPERM DONOR'S SHOCKING JOURNEY

- JOHNNY DODD

Back in 2020, just minutes into his new job at a software engineering firm in Atlanta, Dylan Stone-Miller read a direct message on Instagram that left him stunned. A woman who had conceived a daughter with the sperm he first donated to a sperm bank nine years earlier while attending college had managed to track him down—and wanted to thank him. Soon Stone-Miller found himself clicking through the woman’s Instagram profile, staring at hundreds of photos of his biological daughter. “Seeing this little girl’s beautiful face just filled me with so much joy, love and gratitude,” he recalls. “I had to fight to hold back the tears.”

In the months that followed, Stone-Miller began hearing from dozens of parents—all of whom welcomed children with his sperm. Using his donor number, they had found their way to one another online and formed a Facebook group to stay in touch. At last count Stone-Miller estimates that he has at least 97 biological children in six countries— but says the true number could be more than 250.

The revelation altered the trajectory of his life and eventually inspired him to become a passionate advocate for donors and families. Now he’s calling for legal limits on the number of pregnancies that result from one sperm donor, as well as changes to the ways that the multibillion-dollar industry treats people like him and recipient families. “As soon as I saw the face of this little girl who looked just like me, there was no going back,” says Stone-Miller, who spent four months last year driving across the nation meeting some of his biological children. “I knew it was going to be important to show up in whatever ways she and her family, along with all the other families, wanted me to.”