A sperm donor and recipient fell in love
This story lit up the press. Six years on…
5 minute read
This story starts in 1994, when a man decided to sell his sperm twice a week to a sperm bank. Aaron had just come back from a stint abroad, had moved back in with his mom, and was stitching together an income from writing and music and driving a cab, when he saw an ad.
But the part of the story I'm focusing on starts a little later. Maybe it starts in 2016, when 11-year-old Alice asked for a DNA test kit for Christmas. The test turned up Aaron as her biological father. It also connected her with Bryce, a half-sibling, who told her that there were now eight of them known to have been born from Aaron's donations.
Or maybe this particular story really begins in 2017. That was when Aaron hosted a get-together that he decided to call the "Meet My Kids Party" — a shocker, really, because as far as his friends and colleagues knew, he didn't have any. Alice and a few of her half-siblings were there, and everyone had a hoot.
Alice's mother, Jessica, was there too. And as it happened, Jessica and Aaron hit it off right away.
That's right: a donor and a recipient met, after the fact, and fell in love.
"We were fascinated by our situation," Aaron told me when we spoke by phone recently. "We're both intellectuals who like to explore ideas. And so, you know, we just went down the rabbit hole of our unique situation and really bonded."
Jessica would later write that it was as though Aaron was already family. As though she'd been living with his various traits for years, and she already loved them.
Not long after meeting, Jessica and Alice moved in with Aaron — sort of. He lived in a co-op where residents had their own rooms but shared kitchens and bathrooms and common areas. He and his elderly mother lived in one unit, and Jessica and Alice moved into another. For awhile, another of the half-siblings, Madi, moved in as well. Bryce visited. Another half-sibling joined a girl scout troop with Alice. "We were all one family, kind of," recalls Aaron, "and it was really fun."
*
There was a lot of press around their romance when they first got together. All the major print and broadcast outlets seemed to carry the story. Aaron wrote a really great Modern Love item for the New York Times, with the title, "First I met my children, then my girlfriend. They're related." Jessica wrote a lovely essay for the BBC, called "I met my boyfriend 12 years after giving birth to his child."
All stories are complex, though, and this one is no exception.
Back when Jessica had used Aaron's sperm to create Alice, she was married to another woman. Jessica's wife also used Aaron's sperm; she gave birth to Alice's younger sister. The marriage broke down when the girls were just three and one, but the two women continued to co-parent. Then, seven years later, suddenly and inexplicably, according to Jessica, the other mother left the family — and took the younger daughter with her. Against all of Jessica's and Alice's wishes and efforts, they have had no contact since.
It was just a year after this traumatic rift when Alice did her DNA test. She already knew she'd been donor-conceived but didn't think she'd find the donor. In any case, she wasn't that interested. Nor was she testing to find donor siblings — she already had a sibling whose absence she was mourning. All she wanted was to know a bit more about her ethnic background.
Alice got more than she bargained for. Her biological parents met and fell in love. She ended up living with them both in a shared home. And while Aaron and Jessica may have been fascinated by this situation, admits Aaron, Alice never really was.
"Alice, and I get along well," he says. "We're friends. But she in no way considers me a parent. She doesn't refer to me that way." She calls him "Aaron" and describes him as her mother's boyfriend.
As far as she was concerned, she already had two parents.
In fact, says Aaron, she gets a bit irritated by people who call her his daughter. She does not consider herself "his" child. So he tries not to use that wording anymore, opting for "step-daughter" instead. Even though that's not quite right either, it gets closer to describing the relationship they have: he's more than just a biological father, but less than a full parent. He's a "positive adult role model," he says, and "a fine person for her mother to be involved with." She is definitely "family" to him.
But nothing is straightforward in donor conception. There are other offspring. Madi, for instance, who knows Aaron much less well than Alice does, just calls him her dad.
*
Six years on, Aaron and Jessica are still happily together. They've moved out of the co-op and into their own home. Alice has grown up and gone away to university.
Aaron's spreadsheet indicates there are now 21 offspring in 13 families known to be the result of his donations. The first birth he knows of was in 1995, and the most recent in 2011. He has made some kind of contact with all of them. He's Facebook friends with ten of the families. He's met four in person and one on Zoom. He's traded a few messages with some older offspring who ultimately weren't all that interested. One of his biological children has made it clear she does not want to know him.
"I have to admit, other than the first four I met, the other ones have not seemed all that interested in engaging for whatever reason," he says. Every so often you see a news story about a donor with a hundred offspring who have all bonded, he says, and they have a big family reunion every year. "That hasn't happened with my passel of children."
He knows Alice best, of course. And then Madi, who lives in town. Another girl, Emily, lives fairly close and has become a friend. He hasn't been communicating as much recently with Bryce, the very first offspring who ever made contact. "We're in touch a little bit, but it just kind of dropped off," he says.
"I mean, they're young people in their twenties. They've got lots of other things going on in their lives. I'm not really their parent. I'm just someone they kind of know."
Aaron Long. "First I met my children, then my girlfriend. They're related." The New York Times. 28 Sep 2018.
Jessica Share. "I met my boyfriend 12 years after giving birth to his child." BBC.com. 02 Jan 2019.
Documentary film project: "Forty Dollars A Pop."