Anonymous sperm donors: "You are your mother's son"

When they learned the truth, a world collapsed: That it was the donation of sperm from an anonymous stranger that they were conceived with. A group of half-siblings are fighting for what they are legally entitled to for a long time: To know who their real father is.

Wolfgang Büscher Stand: 3:47 pm

Perhaps the most ardent longing human beings are capable of is those for truth. For the truth about yourself. And sometimes the search for it takes a crooked path. A boy grows up with his older brother in an intact family, his mother is a high school teacher, the father a physicist, both love their jobs and their children. And yet the boy sometimes has the feeling that something is not what it should be.

Just a faint doubt - is something really wrong, or am I just imagining it? What the boy sees is not just imagination: father and older brother get on well, they share a soft spot for science. He, Alexander, loves languages.

There are similar differences in other families as well. And yet it depresses him to hear father and brother talk shop about chemistry for hours, for example on long Christmas days, and he's out. He then, says Alexander B. today, threw something in to draw attention to himself, so that he could appear. And at school he chose subjects that weren't really his thing. "I wanted to make father proud."

Something else feeds his irritation - when he sees his father instinctively drawn to his older son. “We went to the fair, on the roller coaster, I asked father to sit in the front row with me, I was six and screamed with fear, but he sat down with my brother, who was four years older and wasn't that scared . “He then did not climb a roller coaster for years.

Then it was said, you come more after your mother

And then this sentence came up when father was disappointed in the younger son, lost to the natural sciences: You are your mother's son. And your brother is just my son. A sentence, a millimeter short of the truth that it was supposed to obliterate.

Decades go by. Alexander B. is 34 and married when he asked his mother at Easter 2017 the question that has been on his mind for so long: Is father really his father? She answers with an evasive counter-question: How did he get that? "I noticed she reacted strangely."

Left alone in his search for truth, a light dawns on him when he rummages through old family photos. A will-o'-the-wisp, as will be shown, and yet it lights the way for him. “Father's ancestors looked so southern, or maybe Jewish?” Is that what makes him different - is he Jewish? A fascinating idea for him.

Because that's what worries him, his wife gives him a genetic test for Christmas. Such tests are popular, and some people hope that they will give their existence a whole new color. Do I have Italian, even Indian or even Indian ancestors?

Alexander B. sends his DNA sample to the gene database in the USA. The search for ancestors is even more popular there than in Europe; it is carried out commercially. It is very easy. Pay a fee, send in a saliva sample, read weeks later where you come from and who in the world you are closely related to.

Critics warn that such information can only be fragmentary, because the dataset of these banks is limited. But the amount of genetic data from the leading banks is growing; there are many millions. And everyone who adds their sample increases the pool. Alexander B.

The genetic test shakes his life. Some people find relatives all over the world, provided that they have given their data to the bank. Often they are minimally related with a little bit of genetic closeness. That doesn't mean anything. Palpitations triggers the test result in those who encounter an overwhelmingly high degree of kinship.

Alexander B. is like that. For him, the genetic test finally answers the question that his parents never wanted to answer. Direct hit. A name flickers on the screen, he has a real half-sister. And with her a common father. But that means that his sometimes irritating father is not his father.

"My first thought: Then mother had an affair"

He contacts the half-sister immediately, a young woman his age, she studied like him and now, like him, has a demanding job. He works as an engineer, she as a research assistant at the university. At that time she was way ahead of him in father research. Anne Meier-Credner has long been one of the faces of the Spenderkinder association. Now she leads her newly found half-brother from his last wrong track.

“My first thought,” recalls Alexander B., “then my mother probably had an affair. Anne enlightened me. ”The revelation that I was conceived by a sperm donation, he says,“ was so surreal for me. I stared blankly at the screen for 15 minutes. For me it was science fiction, somehow possible, but not for me. Why me?"

Anne Meier-Credner had heard the truth about herself unusually early. “I found out about how I came about when I was ten, I wanted to know immediately who it was, my birth father.” At the time, her parents would have told her: “It was anonymous, the practice knows him, we don't. We had to promise not to investigate. "

This strictly guarded anonymity of the sperm donors - Meier-Credner calls it a contract to the detriment of third parties, namely the children, from whom half of their origin is unlawfully withheld. For over ten years she has been fighting for the right to know where you come from. She has not yet found her genetic father, but she has half a dozen half-siblings. Because it is not about marginal individual cases.

The Novum practice in Essen alone, in which they were all conceived, one of the leading and oldest in the country, advertises on its homepage with “over 70,000” people born there, a medical and economic success story unparalleled. Tens of thousands of lives, created with anonymously "donated" semen, initially rather raw with a cup and syringe, but the methods have become more refined. "We know of several men," says Meier-Credner, "who donated over many years and could easily have fathered several hundred children."

The Novum practice does not comment on details. Its founder, Professor Dr. Thomas Katzorke did not answer in detail.

Exact information on the number is not possible, he wrote - and went on: “At the end of my professional career, I have been looking at more than 40 years and I have to say that I am happy and grateful to have helped many couples who want to have children in a variety of ways . "

The discussion of this topic has "become more intense and differentiated over the decades. I am glad that the Donor Sperm Register Act has existed since 2018, so that it is ensured that every donor child can inquire about their genetic producer. What then emerges in detail will hopefully help the donor children to cope with the way they are produced. "

Sperm donor data must be kept for 110 years

This is often where the problem lies. The nationwide sperm donor register has only existed since 2018. Only now do the practices have to keep records of testimonies for 110 years. Before that, the deadlines were much shorter. For the 1980s, doctors rely on the mere ten-year period for medical records according to their professional code. This dispute is also carried out in court, also by Anne Meier-Credner and her half-siblings.

Praxis Novum then argues that documents from the 1980s had long been destroyed - the plaintiffs, however, distrust it. They argue that the doctors only want to keep their word to their donors, whom they had promised anonymity at the time.

That couldn't go well. Because the human being is not one who just storms unconsciously into the future. At some point he pauses and turns around: Where do I come from, who am I, what lives on in me?

As far as written memory goes back, mankind has told itself in gender sequences like in the Old Testament. A begat B, B begat C, and so on through the centuries. To see one's own finitude embedded in this almost infinite succession of generations is what makes life narrative in the first place and soothes fear of death.

Young couple wanting to have children - young doctors proud of their skills

The meeting point with Alexander B.'s mother is also conceivably anonymous. Last guests at Starbucks in Düsseldorf Central Station. She agreed when her son asked if she would speak to the reporter. It will be a lifetime conversation, the world around this table will sink for an hour.

“I was an only child,” she begins, an elegant figure, “my husband and I wanted several children.” Their first son was born, but afterwards the doctors told them that further pregnancies were hardly possible, it was up to them both . “Hospital stays followed. We were running out of time, we didn't want too much distance from the first child. "

At some point someone recommended this new Essen practice to them. They made an appointment there. “Nonchalant” is how she describes the atmosphere in practice. "It was like drinking coffee." Neither the doctors nor they themselves had any legal or other concerns. It's a scene from those pioneering days. A young married couple who want children. Young doctors, proud of their skills, their creativity.

They all had one goal in common - a successful pregnancy. And a kind of innocence. Where there are so many taboos, so many limits, why not these too: Medicine makes people.

“We paid 200 D-Marks for the donor. They chose a phenotype similar to us. ”It was part of the pact that the origin of the semen remained uncertain. Nobody was interested in disclosing them, not the donor, and neither were the parents. After all, they weren't here to bring a co-father into the family, they wanted to keep this strange, perhaps also unpleasant and embarrassing situation as short as possible and hopefully go home pregnant.

Nobody thought that the child conceived in this way would one day be an adult who would ask questions about its origin.

But there is one thing that Alexander B.'s mother remembers. Sperm donors, they were told in the practice, are often medical students. She and her husband had undertaken never to investigate who their donor was and excluded any entitlement to alimony. She doesn't remember a regular contract, but that can be deceiving. Then the appointment for treatment. "It worked immediately."

Blood is thicker than water - or is it only social issues that count?

Last order, two more coffees and a confession: “I'm a Brechtian.” The elegant high school teacher, who shares a love of languages ??with her son and doesn't quite fit into this inhospitable station set, alludes to Bertolt Brecht's play from the “Caucasian Chalk Circle”. To the judge who awards the disputed child to the good, social mother instead of the cold, natural mother.

Blood is thicker than water, says life experience, the old conservative. The progressive Brecht turns it around: The water of the social breaks blood ties. Alexander B.'s mother puts it this way: “The social was always very important to me.” And today, after your son had been worried about his origins for so long and now everything is out?

“Of course I knew that there were genetic characteristics. But I underestimated what was going on with these children. I always said that if I had a donor heart, I didn't want to know who it was from. ”Isn't blood as thin as Brecht thought, and after all, father more than a donor organ?

The big questions don't need to be resolved at this table, but they did arise early on. She says, “when Alexander was bigger and more sensible, she talked long and often with a gynecologist friend about whether he should know everything”.

When she then sees how existential it is for her son to find the answer to the question of his life, she touches his groping wandering search. "This idea that he was Jewish - yes, he wanted to know."

Then the explosive Christmas present, the genetic test. "I was amazed, I was very unhappy and feared our relationship would break down." Yes, she did not answer his questions openly. "Now he accused me of this dishonesty."

The truth was "an absolute taboo"

She explains her attitude at the time, it is a quiet reflection on it. “My husband and I always agreed not to say anything to Alexander. We would have held out until death, it was an absolute taboo. "

There is this number, an estimate: Ten percent of all children are not from a social father anyway. The old blurring of origin, it was already familiar to antiquity. Mater semper certa est, was the name of a rule in ancient Rome. The mother is always certain. And complementary: Pater semper incertus est. The father, however, never. “Our conclusion was”, says Alexander B.'s mother, “you don't always have to know everything”.

The waitress hopes that the last table will finally pay, but we're not that far, the conversation just gets to the heart of the matter. “I asked his forgiveness, I can say that with this strong word.” And for what? “For the untruth - not for the fact that it exists.” Not “I'm sorry” she told him, that's what you say with a little faux pas. The strong word forgiveness is one from confession, the answer is then: Ego te absolvo.

Such a language-conscious woman and baptized Catholic as she knows it. But it was not a confession, it was the long-awaited, long-feared conversation between mother and son. Has he forgiven her?

Another train station area, a café on Berlin's Ostkreuz. Alexander B. speaks again about the long wrong path to truth. He has not yet reached his goal, he still does not know his genetic father. The Novum practice in Essen declares that they no longer have any documents about him.

He doubts it. With his half-brother Stefano M. he is suing the practice for information. The trial date should be in January, now it has been postponed to April. It lasts and lasts. He doesn't know whether he will ever find his father. But he has already found something, he says, something perhaps even more beautiful. "My half-siblings."

He says about his mother and seems relaxed, perhaps even reconciled, that he is at least happy that he has not come from an affair, as he long thought. Not just to exist by accident. "At least the parents made a positive decision for me." Time to pay. He has to go and pick up the son from daycare. His son.

Anyone who doesn't know the three who are sitting in the Düsseldorf Volksgarten on a sunny late summer Sunday, two men and a woman in their mid-thirties, would probably think they were friends, perhaps from their student days. They are not. What connects them - more precisely: what they know about it so far - fits on a piece of paper, it is on the beer garden table. "Facts" is written above it. It's a timeline.

The triumphant advance of sperm donation

First entry: "Sept. 81: Conception Stefano ”. Second entry: "Dec. 82 / Jan. 83: Conception Alexander ”. The fourth: “16./18. July 83: Conception Anne ”. And the youngest: "23. July 85 “the one conceived on this day would just like to be called Nina. The list documents a total of seven generations in the Novum practice in Essen from 1981 to 1985, as technically succinct as it was. Seven people created by doctors through semen agency.

All half-siblings know about each other, four are in close contact: the three at the table, Alexander B., Stefano M., Anne Meier-Credner, and Nina, who is missing from this meeting, her second at all. A fifth half-sister lives too far away, in the USA. Her parents were stationed in Germany at the time and used the services of the Essen practice.

A sixth half-sister currently has other worries. The seventh thinks the information from America is nonsense and forbids any contact. But the three at the table are fighting for their right to ancestry. They have two powerful allies, genetics and the law.

They are children of the light-footed eighties, the triumphant advance of sperm donation began in the revolutionary seventies. It had been taboo for a long time. The 62nd German Medical Association had rejected heterologous insemination, that is, artificial conception with the semen of a strange man who was not known to the intended parents, for moral reasons and declared it to be contrary to class.

This taboo was shaken until the 73rd Doctors' Conference in 1970 lifted the professionalism. He allowed sperm donation, but formulated a long list of restrictive criteria. They couldn't stop their increasing popularity.

In the pioneering days of the art of making people, the euphoria drowned out the thought that those conceived in this way might one day stand at the door and ask about their fathers - even if not everyone.

The German Medical Association pointed out the consequences, German case law recognized the child's right to knowledge of parentage. But feasibility is young and strong. Doctors assured their sperm donors anonymity that, strictly speaking, could never exist. That worked as long as the new humans were unquestionable children.

When they grew up, the trouble started. There were more and more reports of young people looking for their fathers. The hour struck in 2013. In a precedent, the Hamm Higher Regional Court confirmed to the first donor child to file a complaint that the doctor had to give the name of the biological father. And in 2015 the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled that donor children have the right to know their true parentage from the beginning and not just as adults.

As early as 1989 the Federal Constitutional Court (BVG) ruled that the right to know one's parentage is part of the general right of personality and is a constitutionally guaranteed and protected human right. The BGH then declined this in its 26-page judgment in 2015 in all facets and formulated something like a human right to know one's own origin:

"One of the elements that can be of decisive importance for the development of personality is knowledge of one's own parentage." The federal judges also weighed the rights of the biological father against those of the child and named a condition for the right to information:

"If the conception by means of donor sperm is undisputed, there is nothing that speaks against the provision of information." Which is clearly the case with Alexander B. and his half-siblings. Several times they sued the Essen practice for information.

The 2013 precedent judgment had already been issued against them. In the first instance she had argued that the patient's file had been destroyed - she brought it to the court at the Hamm Higher Regional Court when asked to do so. It resulted in two donor numbers.

Without US gene banks, they would never have found each other

And an employee of the practice, invited as a witness, had found index cards on which the blood groups of the donors were noted. So one of the two was omitted. And the witness knew the first name of the only remaining number. In the end, the applicant found her father. That is the reason for the hope of the half-siblings, that is what they want too.

They owe it to their other ally, modern genetics, for having found each other in the first place. They would never have achieved that without the collective genetic knowledge of American DNA banks with their eloquent names: Family Tree. My Heritage. 23andMe. Ancestry. Genesis embraces genetics, biblical generational thinking modern life science.

The genes, the genes. Anne Meier-Credner believes that there are often contradicting arguments towards donor children who want information about their fathers. “They tell us that genes are not that important, that the social is important.” You, they are doctors, and sometimes parents.

"On the other hand, producing children is always about genes - the practice selects the genetic father according to eye color, hair color and other characteristics so that it is not noticed that the child has a different father." , confirms this. All of these genetic characteristics are queried from potential sperm donors. And also whether they are homosexual or bisexual.

You shouldn't think of the three at the beer garden table as unhappy. To say they didn't have a good childhood would be a lie. To say that it was completely normal, but also. What Alexander B. felt as a child, others felt too - quiet tensions that grew into boring questions. They all come from a good family, they all studied.

Stefano M. is now an engineer in the Rhine-Main area, Alexander B. in Berlin, Anne Maier-Credner at the University of Braunschweig and Nina IT project manager in another major German city. Their parents paved the way for them in life. Of course, they were all intended children. Only how far the parents had gone for their wish remained a family secret.

Since everyone has known it, the beautiful word wish-child has an aftertaste for some of them. Was the desire to have children so self-sufficient that the children's desire for truth about themselves did not matter at all?

There is this sentence, children of sperm donors know it well. He falls when the suspicion comes up that something is wrong. Why am I so different from father? Is he my father? Or did mother cheat? The sentence that often comes up is: You just come after your mother, don't worry.

Stefano M. also heard this many times. He tells his story with a smile. God has a sense of humor, they say - but man-made creation is not always deadly serious. Man crosses one genetic phenotype and the result is a completely different one. That's why Stefano M. has to smile. Because with him the phenotypical amazement was particularly great.

His Italian first name would still pass as a little extravaganza, but there is also such a sonorous Italian surname that the contrast could hardly be greater to the tall blond with blue eyes who introduces himself with this name. In any case, the family of the very Apulian father marveled at his very Westphalian son. It just comes after the mother - you had to say this mantra to yourself often to believe in it.

Stefano M. was surprised, but did not doubt his father. He just developed this interest in biology; for dinosaurs, Indians, whales, he read everything about them as a boy, he says. Then the parents separated and the hour of adult biology came. His mother took him aside: “I have to tell you something.” He accepted what she told him. So the father was not his father, well, "but my relationship with him was good".

It wasn't until he was 25 that the question of origin arose. There was no document back home about its creation. In 2007 he asked the practice in Essen, where it also said: No more documents. What drove him to investigate? “The uncertainty of not knowing where you come from.” Thirteen years later, he too sent a sample of saliva in a glass tube to a DNA bank in the USA. What happened next is very much like the report of his half-brother Alexander B.

When he was born, it was clear that the Westphalian genes had triumphed

“The reply e-mail came in the night: A total of 0.1 percent southern European genes. And two hits. That same night I wrote to my half-sisters. "

He too asked his mother, she too is ready to talk about it. She and her husband first went to the Essen clinic, which the doctor Thomas Katzorke then left to set up their own practice with a colleague in mid-1981. He suggested they come there, it would cost 1,000 D-Marks. “We paid them in cash. I must have been almost the first woman in the practice. "

She was there as early as September 1981. In the hall, she remembers, there were baby photos hanging, "that was nice, the treatment room itself was uncomfortably bare, like an operating room." She treated cat cork herself. "Then I lay on the couch for half an hour or an hour, then we drove home, and already in the car I felt that I was pregnant."

She can understand that her son is looking for his father, she says. It was also difficult for her not to know who the father was during pregnancy. The Westphalian-Apulian theme was one of them for them too. “We are all tall and blond in my family. In practice, I was told that they had a student from Spain with black hair. ”When she gave birth to her son, it became clear that the Westphalian genes had prevailed across the board.

A courtroom, once again. Dr. Thomas Katzorke appears in the Essen district court, it is the Monday after the Sunday beer garden meeting. It's no longer a question of whether today. Her right to information about the genetic father was granted to Anne Meier-Credner and other donor children in 2017.

The practice, however, remains that due to a lack of documents from the 1980s, the imposed information cannot be given; the files before 1996 had been destroyed. And so it is today about foreclosure of the duty to provide information. There is a risk of convict and fines.

In fact, there was a 30-year retention period for such documents only in 2007; practice can refer to this. The plaintiffs counter that their right to knowledge of parentage was known beforehand and that the previously only 10-year retention period merely stipulated a minimum period.

The decisive factor is not retention periods, but whether information can still be provided. Whether there are still files. This is where it gets confusing. Right at the beginning of the negotiation, Thomas Katzorke surprises with the statement that there are still around 50 files from before 1996. Previously it was said that only three to four files were left from that time.

Hours of cat and mouse game in court

Yes, says Katzorke, in some cases files have been kept, namely for controversial maintenance issues. But there was nothing left for the cases negotiated here. What, in turn, the plaintiffs do not want to take from him unchecked - for them the handling of files in practice is too opaque.

An hour-long game of cat and mouse unfolds. Katzorke and his lawyers sit on the left, the long-grown donor children and their lawyer on the right, the judge in front. And Katzorke has something else that inspires hope. A folder with donor profiles - but with the best will in the negotiation, no one is able to work through them. He hands it to the front, judges and plaintiffs leaf through it helplessly. Then the judge hands them back to him.

Everyone is as smart as before. At some point the judge says to the plaintiffs: “We're going in circles.” And: “Unfortunately, a lot remains in the dark.” That's how it is. The plaintiffs are still standing together a little. You ask yourself whether - regardless of whether files are there or gone - really nobody in the practice remembers the men who have been donating there for years? So also to your possible father, who does not appear in the files?

Although the law is on their side, they come out of the hall empty-handed. From a legal point of view, there can be nothing new either, because this is a foreclosure procedure and such a procedure does not provide for evidence to be taken. That was a matter of previous proceedings.

And yet, weeks later, it becomes clear that sometimes there is still something where there was nothing left. One of the plaintiffs, whose case was being heard in parallel, was told that the files briefly mentioned in the trial, which were said to be irrelevant to the plaintiffs, had now found his mother's files. So after six years of litigation with the practice, he finally got the names of two men. One of the two died six years ago.

Whatever the reason that the search for a father is almost always so tough and so often fails - opaque file management, file destruction due to the right to information that has expired by law or simply loyalty to the sperm donors of that time: Their children judge harshly about a hardiness that thwarted their knowledge of their origins.

Another train station, the coldest of them all, because winter is here. Because of Corona, the meeting with Nina takes place in the drafty hall of an ICE train station in the middle of Germany. Her story is the same as the others, but she still has a step up. While cleaning out the deceased father's apartment, she and her older sister found papers suggesting his father's inability to conceive - news that shook their existential certainty.

"Mother, did you know?" - "Of course I did."

Then at the dining table the direct question to her mother. “She looked at me, rigidly, and didn't answer.” Then the sentence: “What should I say to that?” The question: “Well, did you know?” - “Of course I knew.” That said everything, the subject was left to rest for now. Then the genetic search. Nina had four hits - and her sister had several too. But not the same.

Both of them suddenly realized that they were not only not father's daughters, but also half-siblings. Two donors, two fathers, two white spots on the card of their origin, different white ones. In the meantime, both sisters have found seven half-siblings - seven each.

The practice in Essen, says Nina, had promised the parents to use semen from the same donor, i.e. to father genetic sisters. That's what her mother told me. “Did they deliberately lie or were they so sloppy with the donations?” Your judgment is harsh: “You can't believe anything anymore. Every dog ??breeder is more careful than these doctors who do humans. "

Alexander B. wants to show his half-siblings something else. On that September day in Düsseldorf's Volksgarten, he pointed to one of the mighty park trees: “The parrots over there, can you see them?” Indeed, the green exotic shines from the foliage, as if the tree were not on the Rhine, but on the Amazon. “At first there were two who escaped from their owner. Everyone thought they wouldn't survive the winter. But they have, and now there are many. "

He's talking about the parrots, but it sounds like he's talking about himself and his half-siblings. Everyone thought they would never find each other. But they have, and now there are many.

The names of some of the protagonists in this text were abbreviated at their request. The full names are known to the editors.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG. We will be happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.

Source: Welt am Sonntag

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