Featured in the AllPaths Magazine, 2024 Volume 1
By Max Tang
Growing up biracial in an all-Chinese American family, I often felt like an oddity. I wasn’t the only mixed kid in my world – I didn’t know anyone else who was mixed like my twin brother and I. My parents had conceived us with the help of an anonymous white egg donor, and the arrangement meant no one would give me more information about my heritage than a guess of “probably Italian.” It wasn’t until adulthood that racial dysphoria and repressed curiosity finally drove me to seek out people like me: multiracial and donor-conceived.
My search led me to donor-conceived support forums, where I realized that I’d have to build the community I wanted. I invited every BIPOC and multiracial donor-conceived person I came across to a chat group, where we swapped stories. Soon, I got the opportunity to develop a virtual peer support group for BIPOC and multiracial donor-conceived adults through Donor Conceived Community, a national nonprofit dedicated to the wellbeing of donor conceived people (DCP). Over eight six-week groups (and counting!), our community has grown to include people who learned that they were donor-conceived as kids or adults; come from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds; and belong to families of many types, including different-sex, same-sex, and single parents. Story after story has taught me that there are more of us out there than we know – and our numbers grow every year.
Of course, the fact that many DCP are multiracial is no surprise to BIPOC family-builders. Media reports and the rise of specialty services like Asian Egg Bank and Reproductive Village testify to the fact that, even as more people become parents through donor conception every year, the options for donors of color haven’t risen to match. In fact, a 2021 analysis of eight US sperm banks showed that non-Hispanic white men represented 70% of nearly 1,750 donors. Meanwhile, out of over 1,500 egg donors across thirteen egg banks, 43% were white, 16% multiracial, 8% Asian, 24% Hispanic, and 9% Black; just 1% or less were Alaska Native, Middle Eastern, or Pacific Islander.
As a result of this parent-donor race gap, many intended parents have to (or choose to) conceive through a donor of another race. As a result, our community of multiracial donor-conceived kids, teens, and adults is ever-expanding. Mixed America in general grew by 276% from 2010 to 2020; today, 1 in 10 Americans are multiracial.
Yet, while much has been written about intended parents who struggle to find same-race donors, there’s little out there about multiracial donor-conceived people ourselves. How have we built our identities in a world where non-identified donation was the norm? What do we have in common? And, most importantly, how can parents, professionals, and the industry support the children growing up after us?
Whether you’re a professional, intended or recipient parent, donor, donor conceived person, or ally, here are a few lessons from our community of multiracial adult DCP.