IVF: Do Children Have the Right to Know if They're the Result of a Stranger’s Sperm or Egg Donation?

Untitled Document Although she has two half-sisters from her dad’s previous marriage, there was nothing in Jess Pearce’s childhood to make her doubt her biological origins. She tanned, her father tanned; he was tall, so was she. Yet when she was 28, her mother dropped a bombshell.

“She sat me down one Sunday afternoon and said she had something she wanted to tell me,” Jess recalls. “She looked quite upset, and I thought, ‘She’s going to die.’” Instead, her mother told her, “Your dad isn’t your real dad.”

Jess’s father had undergone a vasectomy after his first marriage. When he met her mother he tried to get it reversed, but the operation failed and they opted for sperm donation through the NHS. Jess was conceived on the third try at St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner; all her parents knew about the donor was that he was from Middlesex. The clinic advised Jess’s parents to keep the insemination a secret. “No one knew,” says Jess. “It was literally just my mum and my dad and two of their best...