Source: 123rf/ Fotogestoeber

The balancing of rewards and risks is an innate part of life—business, career, health, money, and love. Even though marriages have a 50 percent fail rate, every year around 2 million people in the U.S. still take a chance on love, according to The New York Times.

Taking a Chance on Love?

Meeting new genetically related people and incorporating them into your life, can also be tricky. What if it doesn't work out? What if I don't like them or they don't like me? What if we don't have a lot in common? Just because you're biologically related to someone doesn't guarantee that you'll like them or want to spend a lot of time with them. Look around your Thanksgiving table, do you want to hang out with everyone there? Probably not. But, those people are no less your relatives.

Rewards and Risks

If you are considering whether or not to reach out to your own, or your child's unknown genetic-biological parent (donor), it can be an emotional, exciting, and confusing time. The rewards of exploring and establishing new familial relationships can be life-changing and setting realistic expectations for any potential outcomes can help to manage many of the perceived risks.

The Rewards

Understanding your roots: By connecting with your own or your child's biological parent (or parents in the case of embryo donation), you may learn more about your/their ethnic, cultural, and ancestral heritage. This can give you or your child a sense of identity and belonging that you or they might have felt was missing.

Medical history: Knowing your own or your child's biological family's health history can be important for preventative care, screenings, and treating any medical issues that may arise. This is a common and practical reason why donor-conceived people and their parents reach out to sperm and egg providers.

Expanding your family circle: In best-case scenarios, reaching out to your own or your child's biological parents can lead to a lifetime of rewarding relationships and an expansion of your family and support network. If they have been open with their family, and their spouse/partner/children/parents are open to meetings, this can be a time of great excitement about the possibility of growing your friend/family circle on an even larger scale. Being brave and vulnerable enough to allow a biological parent/donor to know you or your child can result in more people to love and more people to love you or your children.

The Risks

Rejection: The fear of rejection is often one of the most significant risks for parents and donor-conceived people reaching out to biological parents. They may not be ready or interested in connecting, or they may not respond to your attempts to reach out. Understanding why a donor declined contact or didn't respond will help as you decide your next steps.

It's crucial to deep dive beforehand and understand and prepare for all the possible outcomes. A "no," or "not now," or no response, has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the donor's emotional bandwidth, family, and life circumstances. Some donors don't yet understand that they have the opportunity to profoundly impact a donor-conceived person's life as well as their own.

Some may be afraid that they're not successful enough, mentally or physically healthy enough, or just don't have the emotional bandwidth, to deal with 10, 25, or more than 100 progeny. Some may falsely believe that they'll be financially liable.

Thousands of donors have taken this step by adding their postings to the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), making themselves available for mutual consent contact. Many donors in the DSR community have educated themselves about why donor-conceived people and their families desire contact, so they're more clear about the intentions (which are not about money or looking for someone to actively parent).

Quite often though, contact is made outside the DSR, (eg., on DNA websites) so the comfort and assurance of a mutually desired connection with a donor, who is familiar with the process, can become something a little less straightforward.

Disruption: Contacting donors (biological parents) can impact the lives of all involved. If donors haven’t yet told their families about the donations, this could be potentially disruptive to any family that they may have formed more traditionally. If they have been open with their family, and their spouse/partner/children/parents are open to meetings, this can be a time of excitement about the possibility of expanding one's family.

Why Wait 18 Years?

Many parents wonder if it's a good idea to contact donors when a child is young. Why not give a donor child the opportunity to grow up knowing their other biological parent and other relatives, like grandparents and possibly other half-siblings that the donor is raising? Nowhere on the planet, or at any time in history has it been medically or psychologically accepted practice to keep a person from their close genetic relatives, ancestry, and family medical history for the first 5, 10, or 18 years of life.

Quite often, it comes down to how you define family: If you acknowledge and honor the connection between your child and their donor relatives, you will be more likely to facilitate these connections. If you're in the camp of "DNA doesn't make a family," then your child is more likely to have to wait to explore these connections until much later.

DNA isn't the only way to make a family, but it is one way that should not be minimized. Many donors are happy to be given the choice of whether to connect or not, as none had a choice but to be anonymous for a minimum of 18 years.

Half-Siblings

Sometimes, families have established half-sibling connections and some of those parents are averse to the idea of contacting a donor. If one family feels that taking steps to reach out to their child's biological parent is in their child's best interests, it can cause unrest within the group.

Some half-sibling groups have shunned the parents who have decided to contact donors. So for some, contacting their donor may include the risk of losing connections with their child's half-siblings. This is an entirely unnecessary risk as each family can be supported to follow their path. Parents who feel uncomfortable or threatened by incorporating a donor into the fold don't need to exclude those who are more open to exploring all of their child's donor family relatives.

Seeking Guidance and Support

It's essential to remember that each situation is unique and these risks and rewards may not apply to everyone. It can be beneficial to seek guidance with the process, including the initial correspondence, to help manage expectations and also for support through the process.

A former donor says:

The interests and well-being of the children—all of them—are paramount. I believe that I do have responsibilities to the children born as a result of my sperm donations. At the very least, those children have a right to know what my part of their genetic heritage is. I will be more than happy to get in touch, if and when they do desire. I think about them often and wonder who, where, and how they are, and what is happening in their lives. The prospect of it actually happening is a little daunting: What if they do not like me, or I them? What if they feel unhappy with my having contributed to their creation, but then taken no responsibility for them—especially if they have had an unhappy life? How will my own family react to and view them? On and on my thinking goes. However, at the base of all of this I am quite clear in my mind, that these wonderful children do have a right to know, what they want to know about me—because in them, there is a part of me.

A former egg donor says:

Egg donation is a part of my life that I hold near and dear to my heart. I'd love to connect with recipients to answer any questions they have about me and to potentially meet if thats what we mutually agree to. I'm passionate about doing this and have taken this responsibility very seriously. I'm excited to potentially open my heart and family to new individuals who I feel a strong connection to without knowing anything about them.