AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There are no firm numbers, but there could be a million or more Americans conceived with a donated egg or sperm. Jacqui Comstock, an oceanographer on Cape Cod, is the product of both. From member station WBUR, reporter Martha Bebinger takes us on Comstock's search for her genetic relatives.
MARTHA BEBINGER, BYLINE: This story starts in 1994, during the early years of egg donation. A woman named Pam McColl saw a newspaper ad requesting egg donors. Pam and her husband had two young sons.
PAM MCCOLL: I loved being a mother and having my kids, and I thought, if I could help somebody else be a mother, I wanted to do that.
BEBINGER: Pam did not tell anyone except her husband.
MCCOLL: There was a lot of stigma to it back then, and I didn't want anybody to know about it.
BEBINGER: She told the company that extracted nine of her eggs to make sure she could not be traced. A couple of months later and a few miles away, four of those eggs helped a single woman, Ruth Comstock, get pregnant.
RUTH COMSTOCK: I had four embryos implanted, and it was the first time, so I was very lucky. And I had twins.
BEBINGER: Ruth told the twins - a son and a daughter - that she had conceived with donated eggs and sperm. Her daughter, Jacqui, grew up asking lots of questions about those donors, but her mom had agreed not to look for them. So Jacqui held off. Then in 2021, when Jacqui was 27, she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
JACQUI COMSTOCK: It's a thyroid thing, and it is genetically linked. And it got me thinking more about my family history.
BEBINGER: So Jacqui spit into a tube and mailed her DNA sample to 23andMe. A relative Jacqui did not know about sent her a message. It was the brother of her egg donor, Pam McColl.
J COMSTOCK: It was actually really cute.
(LAUGHTER)
BEBINGER: And that's how Jacqui and Ruth Comstock came to be sitting on Pam's living room couch in Boston today. It's not their first meeting, but they still aren't sure how to describe each other. Here's Jacqui.
J COMSTOCK: I would introduce myself as the egg donee (ph).
MCCOLL: Yeah. This is hard to put labels on this.
BEBINGER: That was Pam. Now Ruth turns to Jacqui.
R COMSTOCK: How would you introduce us?
J COMSTOCK: I would introduce my mother, Ruth, as my mother, and I would introduce Pam as my egg donor.
BEBINGER: In the last year, they've grown close, which can be overwhelming for Pam.
MCCOLL: I did this because I wanted a mother to exist that wouldn't have been otherwise. And to look at what Ruth did is beyond what I had hoped for.
BEBINGER: Ruth nods.
R COMSTOCK: So I can say the same. It's a gift from God. You know, at first, I was threatened. I'll admit, I was threatened, but Jacqui keeps saying, you're my mother. And so I'm not feeling so threatened anymore.
BEBINGER: That's the egg donor side of Jacqui's quest. She found the first sperm donor relative also via 23andMe, soon after she signed up. Jacqui emailed a woman who turned out to be a half sibling and asked, could there be more of us?
J COMSTOCK: And she wrote back, and she was like, yeah, there's 23 of us, we have a WhatsApp group, do you want to join it? And I was like, there's 23 of them?
BEBINGER: Now, the group has grown to 27 sibs (ph), as Jacqui calls them. They're all within four years of age, which seems to fit the years their donor - now deceased - was working on a PhD. He, like Jacqui, was a scientist.
J COMSTOCK: He was in grad school.
BEBINGER: In grad school.
J COMSTOCK: I think he donated for beer money.
BEBINGER: Many of the sibs meet for yearly reunions. They play games like lining up according to likeness. Roughly half have ADHD, as did their donor. They have fun comparing notes on hobbies, voices and careers.
J COMSTOCK: If we have a similarity, the first question is, like, oh, is this because we're related? We make those connections and those jokes all the time.
BEBINGER: Jacqui says she never expected to find such rewarding relationships. But she's troubled by the problems that could arise for someone learning they have dozens of donor relatives.
J COMSTOCK: There definitely should be some degree of regulation. Obviously, having one donor have a hundred children shouldn't happen, right?
BEBINGER: Even finding out that your donor conceived can be unnerving, depending on when it happens. In a survey of donor-conceived adults, 6 out of 7 said the revelation shattered their sense of self. Jacqui and reproductive medicine experts say it's important to tell children when they're young.
J COMSTOCK: From what I can tell, there's a huge number of parents that use donations that do not tell their kids, and I am staunchly against that.
BEBINGER: This story has rocked the lives of the three women here in Pam's living room, but despite it all, they've embraced their, well...
PAM MCCOLL, RUTH COMSTOCK AND JACQUI COMSTOCK: Gene family.
J COMSTOCK: Yeah.
R COMSTOCK: I like gene family.
J COMSTOCK: It does. Yeah.
MCCOLL: Yeah I like that, too.
R COMSTOCK: Let's go with that.
BEBINGER: As a name for whomever this family will include whenever they see each other and however deep their connections become.
For NPR News, I'm Martha Bebinger in Boston.
(SOUNDBITE OF KENDRICK LAMAR SONG, "SING ABOUT ME, I'M DYING OF THIRST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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