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On Donor Conception, Identity, and the Stories We Were Handed About Where We Come From

A conversation with Dr. Alissa Beuerlein on donor conception, the right to identity, and what it costs to unwrite the story you were handed about where you come from.

Summary

A whole industry exists to help people become parents. Clinics, sperm banks, egg donor agencies, IVF protocols — a multi-billion-dollar apparatus built around the question of whether recipient parents can have a child. What gets considerably less attention is the child. Specifically, what happens to the person who arrives on the other end of that apparatus and eventually has to figure out who they are.

Dr. Alissa Beuerlein has been asking that question for a long time — first as a donor-conceived person herself, then as a licensed professional counselor working with the donor-conceived community. She found out she was donor-conceived as a teenager (just in case the teen years weren’t challenging enough on their own).

The immediate response from the adults around her was essentially: you shouldn’t be that upset about this.

As a result, she spent years listening to that instruction. But then, she stopped. This episode is about what she found when she did.

Focus of the Episode

The question at the center of this conversation is not a clinical one, though it has clinical implications. It is an existential one: what does it mean to have an intentional blank built into your origin story?

Every person arrives in the world without consent. No one chooses their parents, their DNA, their entry point into the human situation. That is the shared condition. What is specific to donor conception, and to adoption in overlapping ways, is that the blank is not incidental.

It is structural.

Someone decided, in advance, that this person would not know… would not know until adulthood… or might never know — a whole dimension of where they came from. The industry that made this possible largely didn’t stop to think about what that would do to the person it was creating.

It was focused, as Dr. Alissa puts it, on the recipient parents.

The Meaning of Our Origin

Rollo May wrote in Love and Will about what happens to a person — and a culture, for that matter — when the questions of origin and meaning get buried under the infrastructure of getting what we want.

While I didn’t think of the donor conception industry in this manner before meeting Dr. Alissa or even before this particular conversation, I do now. On closer examination, the donor conception industry — miracle though it may be for recipient parents– is a precise, contemporary instance of exactly that problem of getting what we want.

The science is sophisticated. But I don’t believe we’ve paid enough attention to considering the impact on the human being at the center of it all.

Dr. Alissa’s Clinical Pursuits

Dr. Alissa came to this clinical work through her own story. Her parents were early donor recipients, back when the whole process was still under research. The hospital told Dr. Alissa’s parents (same as many other parents of that early IVF era), go home and never speak of it. Don’t tell the child. This is your child. Same as if you’d had her by yourselves.

The donor was anonymous.

“You will never know who it was. You don’t need to know.”

She found out anyway. And as you’ll hear in the episode, that wasn’t her choice either. And then, the adults told her, “You shouldn’t be so upset. Your parents are still your parents, even if one of them didn’t use their sperm.”

It’s a story that many adoptees can related to.

And underneath story, there’s another implied: You should be grateful you got to exist at all.

Gratitude for Existence?

The gratitude narrative is worth pausing on. It runs through donor conception the same way it runs through adoption:

• You should be grateful to the people who chose to have you…
• …grateful to the people who paid for the process that created you
• …grateful to the people who wanted you enough to go through all of that.

The problem with that narrative, according to Dr. Alissa, is two-fold.

First, the donor industry organizes around the adults. It centers their desire, their investment, their sacrifice.

Second, the child — the actual person whose life came into being– becomes the object of the story rather than the subject of it.

We covered a lot of ground

In this episode, we have the opportunity to sit inside this problem and turn it around from several directions.

We talk about what identity formation looks like for donor-conceived people, which can range from playful curiosity at one end to profound experiences of betrayal at the other. And Dr. Alissa explains why both responses, and everything between them, are legitimate.

We talk about what it means to carry the awareness that you might have dozens of biological siblings walking around in the world, and what a strange thing it is to clock a stranger’s face and wonder.

And about grief — specifically the grief of reaching toward a biological connection that does not reach back — and why “You’ve contacted the donor three times, perhaps you should respect his privacy” is not a clinically neutral statement.

Also about what therapists need to know, absent from most counselor education programs, and how adoptee-centered training is often the closest proxy for donor-conceived competency. Or at least it was. And true to form, Dr. Alissa didn’t just raise awareness, she did something about it. You can access her donor conceived person competency training for clinicians by clicking on the link.

We also talked about the parallel between deconstructing an origin story and deconstructing a religion, which, for Dr. Alissa, were not separate projects. Both involved inheriting a story about where you come from and who you are within it. Both involved, eventually, the slow work of refusing to perform belief in a story that no longer held.

Moments Worth Noting

“We’ve totally de-centered the people that end up being impacted the most by those choices and experiences.”

“That is a really painful identity to hold — a sense of like, I was purchased. I was made and purchased for these people or this person to make them happy.”

“If you want to keep opening this space up and risk that disappointment, I will be here with you every time. If you need to do that twenty times, okay. I’ll be here with you in it.”

“The immediate response from everybody was like, ‘Well, he’s still your dad.’ You shouldn’t be so upset about this. So I was like, I shouldn’t be upset about this. Stuff it down.”

“What’s waiting there is grief.”

Chapters

• 00:20 — Introduction to Dr. Alissa Beuerlein
• 03:20 — The Journey of a Therapist
• 06:10 — Understanding Donor Conception
• 09:23 — The Impact of Family Dynamics
• 12:09 — Therapeutic Approaches for Donor-Conceived Individuals
• 15:22 — Identity and Meaning in Donor Conception
• 18:14 — Societal Perspectives on Donor Conception
• 21:33 — The Impact of Intentional Blank Spaces in Origin Stories
• 24:20 — Navigating Relationships and Identity
• 26:14 — The Role of Validation in Therapy
• 28:09 — Grief and the Search for Biological Connections
• 30:21 — The Complexities of Known vs. Anonymous Donorship
• 32:15 — Financial and Emotional Impacts of Donorship
• 34:09 — Revising the Donorship Framework
• 37:50 — Social Media and Mental Health Influencers

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The Receipts

If you love when things get EXTRA nerdy, this section of the show notes is for you!

Podcast Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/theintimatephilosopherpodcast/

Dr. Alissa Beuerlein’s training for therapists:Donor-Conceived Counseling Training — the only training of its kind, built from the lived expertise of the donor-conceived community. If you are a therapist, this is required.

Dr. Alissa Beuerlein’s professional website: alissabeuerlein.com

Instagram / Threads: @dralissaphd

Rollo May, Love and Will — the predecessor text for understanding what happens to the human questions of origin and meaning when they get buried under the machinery of getting what we want.

Keywords: relationships, curiosity, intimacy, dating, connection, late-in-life virginity, vulnerability, desire, communication