My Dad, The Sperm Donor” - Inside The Murky World Of Donor Conception

Donated sperm has allowed thousands of families in Australia to have the babies they always dreamt of. But the unregulated origins of the industry, combined with the rise of online sperm swapping and secrecy, means the process is anything but perfect, reports Alexandra Carlton

- Alexandra Carlton

Journalist Sarah Dingle was having dinner with her mother in a Sydney restaurant when she braced herself to ask a personal question. “Mum, I know you had me late. Did you have any problems conceiving me?” she asked. At 27, Dingle wasn’t considering having her own children right away but wanted to know if there might be any genetic reasons why she should be cautious about leaving things too late. Her mother hesitated. “Maybe this isn’t the right moment to tell you,” she said. “But your father is not your father. We had … problems conceiving, and it turned out your father couldn’t,” Dingle’s mother continued. “So we used a donor.”

“I wanted to scream, to rip the tablecloth off, to smash something, to go to the bathroom and cry,” Dingle writes in her new book, Brave New Humans: The Dirty Reality of Donor Conception, a documentation of her own journey to unpack the secrets and lies around her own conception, but also an examination of the ethics and complexities of donor conception in Australia generally. Her mother tried to reassure her that the most important thing was to know that she was loved and that the man she had known as her father (who had died 12 years earlier) had considered her his own. Dingle found herself numbly agreeing, to make her mother feel better more than anything else. “This,” she explains, “was my first lesson in what it’s like to be donor-conceived: your feelings about the whole business come last.”