I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 40. The doctors asked for my family medical history – but I’m donor-conceived

I’m what you might call a health nerd. Every week I do weights, I swim, I walk. My energy levels are great. I sleep as well as any parent of young kids can.
Unfortunately, serious disease doesn’t respect my efforts. A couple of months ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which seems ridiculous for the reasons above. And – this is the scary thing – there were no warning signs. I cannot stress this enough, as someone who has absorbed all the messaging about breast checks: there were no lumps. If I hadn’t turned 40 and ticked off my first free mammogram like any post-pandemic type (get a Covid booster, get a flu shot coming into winter, hey, may as well check the boobs now while we’re at it) I would never have known. I’ve since been examined by three surgeons, none of whom could feel a lump either. And yet the cancer is already in my lymph nodes.
In the room where they gave me my diagnosis, they also asked for family medical history. This happens at any doctor’s, a lot. If you are donor-conceived, as I am, it is constantly triggering.
As I’ve written in my book, when it comes to donor conception, I am one of the lucky ones – even though my donor code was one of many destroyed in a medical mystery for which no individual has been held to account. This situation is not uncommon for donor-conceived people in Australia. (You might have seen the headlines recently about IVF giant Monash making a $56m settlement with would-be parents, but the products of this industry have never been compensated.) After getting nothing from the public hospital that made me, the private IVF giant that now owns that hospital’s work, the government and individuals in medicine who literally created me and should have known better – I used DNA to find my biological father. Along the way, I found out one of my friends is my sister. So, I know who my biological father is. A basic human right, one would have thought, in a society where we have for-profit baby factories, but at least I managed to wrest answers from the void.
So in that quiet white room where I was told I had cancer, I was simultaneously messaging my biological father to ask about family medical history – an incredible luxury for a donor-conceived person. And he was wonderfully, immediately responsive.
There’s cancer on my mother’s side, but also – as it turns out – my biological father’s. He was diagnosed with the “germ” (as he puts it) of prostate cancer just last year, and is now under intensive monitoring. Prostate cancer is a risk factor for breast cancer in near relatives. When I told him my diagnosis, he felt very guilty. And when he realised it was on my mother’s side too, he sighed. “You had the gun pointed at you from all sides,” he said.
All of which to say: in my opinion you’re not a “good” donor if you give to a “good” clinic. You’re not a “good” donor if you say you’re merely open to a relationship with your kids once they turn 18. You’re not a “good” donor even if you do meet them once and have a chat.
You’re only a “good” donor if you are involved in your kids’ lives right from the start, on an ongoing basis. You need to actively make sure they have your contact details, updated whenever they need to be. You need to make sure that they are aware of any serious changes in your health as those changes happen. You need to make sure their commissioning parents do not lie to your kids about who you really are (I know this is tricky). Draw up a legal agreement from the outset. Whatever it takes. You can’t leave that truthful medical history up to chance. You can’t leave that relationship up to their commissioning parents. You can’t leave that connection up to “the system” – the clinics and state governments, which continue to lie to the babies they make about who they really are. (Ever seen a donor – ie a biological parent – on a birth certificate?)
You are only a good donor if you are always available to the children you make, on their terms, for the rest of their lives. That is what being a parent is. After all, you deliberately chose to make them.
I am so lucky that I can text my biological father to ask if he has cancer. That sentence doesn’t sound lucky at all, but hell – ask any donor-conceived person. Ask any adoptee. That’s as bloody lucky as you get in this game. I’ve won the freaking lottery.
Unless you are on call for the kids you deliberately chose to make – all of them – for the rest of their lives, to answer crucial questions, and update those answers with new information, you have failed. You’re not a good parent, and you’re not a good donor. You’re just source material for an industry.
And if you’re donor-conceived, and you’re reading this, get a mammogram.