Truth, lies and donor deception
How do parents and donor conceived people manage when what they thought was true turns out not to be the case?
Prospective parents often spend a lot of time working out whether donor conception is the right route for them, investigating their options on where and when to have treatment and choosing their donor. If treatment is successful, the next challenge can be building the confidence to be open with their children and others who might need to know. It can take time for parents to find the right words and the right moment to start that process. Once they’ve ‘told’, the next step is continuing the conversation, adding more information as appropriate, building the family story based on what they presume are the facts of the situation.
So what happens when the story needs to be unpicked or reframed based on new information?
Unfortunately, donor conception has a history of secrecy, half truths and lies. There have been cases of misrepresentation and outright fraud, some of which persist today. These falsehoods when discovered ripple not only through the lives of parents, but also through the experiences and identities of their donor conceived children. The truth has a habit of coming out, even many decades later, and the prevalence of DNA testing, social media and the interest many people have in exploring their family history only makes family secrets more likely to be exposed.
But this leaves it to families – to parents and their children – to try to make sense of what has happened and work out how to manage the revelation.
As an example, historically, we know there are cases where fertility doctors used donor sperm or their own sperm without the parents’ knowledge. Sometimes, a different donor to the one that had been expected was used.
These kinds of deceptions often only come to light decades after the fact. For parents discovering the truth years later, it can feel like a violation of bodily autonomy and informed consent. Whether they had already been open with their children or they were considering telling them as adults, they now need to rethink their story and consider whether to include this new information and potentially the uncomfortable feelings the discovery brings up.
For donor conceived adults, finding out that their parents were deceived or misled adds an extra layer of complexity to their own story. It can feel like their foundation was built dishonestly and can reshape their understanding of who they are and where they come from.
How do you create a positive story of the creation of your family whilst also integrating a serious breach of trust as part of that story?
Another scenario is where people use private sperm donors and have to work totally on trust, relying on the donor being truthful. There have been several stories recently about prolific private sperm donors creating hundreds of children all the while telling interested prospective parents that they have helped perhaps just two or three other families.
Private donors may also be giving incorrect information about their identity, their medical history and their intentions. They may present themselves attractively, while concealing critical information. If prospective parents were aware of the full details they may have rejected that individual as a donor. These situations illustrate how vulnerable intended parents can be when donor arrangements fall outside regulated systems. Where do you go to seek redress? And when the truth is discovered, how does that impact the story parents are sharing with their child?
Even in a clinic setting, there are scenarios where hundreds of children have been created with the same sperm donor, sometimes the fertility doctor himself, with parents kept in the dark. This happened in the past but we know it still continues. Clinics and sperm banks are not always up front with patients about how national and international limits are set and managed. Patients may discover later that information was either withheld or not clarified. They weren’t explicitly lied to, perhaps, but they certainly weren’t given the full facts.
Amid all these complexities, parents face an emotional balancing act. They may feel profound gratitude for the child they love, and yet they also recognise that something unintended or wrong happened along the way. Parents may worry that acknowledging that will somehow cast a shadow over their child’s conception story or imply regret, something they absolutely want to avoid. They want to build a story that is honest and affirms the child’s worth and belonging.
In some of these situations, although some of the new facts have been exposed there may still be unknowns. Parents may not know the total number of potential half-siblings, or the donor’s true background or what might be uncovered in the future. Those uncertainties can make it difficult for parents to know what the full family story is and how to explain that to their child. It’s not an easy situation to navigate, and often it’s an on-going process as information comes to light or questions are raised that can’t be answered, or at least, not yet.
Perhaps, being able to hold and explain a level of uncertainty is one of the implications of this route to parenthood. Even in the most traditional of families, unexpected family members can appear, whether because of an affair, through adoption or just a secret that was never shared. We all need to be able to hold a certain level of uncertainty and be comfortable with accepting we may not know all there is to know.
But that doesn’t mean that deliberate lies are an acceptable part of fertility treatment and we should keep pushing for more transparency. Luckily, these situations are rare and times are changing. People are more aware of how secrets undermine trust and that truth, transparency and accurate record-keeping are important. This is obviously particularly true in the context of creating children, where we would hope that those values go without saying.
Nina Barnsley
1st February 2026
