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.
She has a lot of genetic relatives — more than 30 half-siblings — not to mention their children, her aunts and uncles, a twin brother, cousins. The list goes on.
Comstock and some of those folks are exploring what it means to be — in their words — a “gene family.” It’s a way to describe the bonds that people connected by assisted reproduction are forming, in a real-life social experiment that’s gaining speed in the U.S. and many parts of the world.
“A natural family has a script for what it means to be a sister, cousin or uncle — even if people don’t follow it,” said Rachel Arocho, an associate professor at Utah Valley University who has studied the relationships formed by donor conception. “These new families don’t have that.”
Comstock’s story goes back to 1994, a decade after the first baby conceived using a donor egg was born. In this case a Brookline resident, Pam McColl, answered an ad in The Boston Globe requesting egg donors. McColl already had a husband and two young sons.
“I loved being a mother and having my kids,” McColl said more than 30 years later. “I thought if I could help somebody else be a mother, which I think is so wonderful, I wanted to do that.”
McColl didn’t tell anyone except her husband, who gave her the injections needed to stimulate her ovaries.
“There was a lot of stigma to it back then,” she said, “and I didn’t want anybody to know.”
“I thought if I could help somebody else be a mother, which I think is so wonderful, I wanted to do that.”Pam McColl
McColl requested and received assurances from the company that extracted nine of her eggs that she would remain anonymous. A couple months later, and a few miles away, four of her eggs helped a single woman in Newton, Ruth Comstock, get pregnant.
“It worked the first time, so I was very lucky,” Ruth Comstock said. “And I had twins.”
She told her twins they were conceived with donated eggs and sperm when the girl and boy were young — around 5 years old. Experts agree that sharing this information early is important to help avoid an identity crisis later in life.
Daughter Jacqui Comstock grew up asking a lot of questions about her donors, but her mom had agreed not to look for them. Then in 2021, she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder.
“It’s a thyroid thing that’s genetically linked,” she explained, “and it got me thinking more about my family history, for medical reasons.”
Comstock decided to seek more information about her background, so she spit into a tube and sent her DNA sample to the company 23andMe.
A few years later, McColl’s brother announced he planned to do the same thing, and McColl realized it was time to reveal her 30-year-old secret. She warned her brother he might get matched to some strangers. Sure enough, Comstock popped up.
Comstock was at work when she saw the email that McColl’s brother wanted to connect. She responded with a carefully worded message, explaining why they might be related.
“He wrote back almost immediately. I think he signed off as ‘Uncle Marc.’ It was actually really cute,” said Comstock. “And then he was like, ‘Do you want to FaceTime today?’ ”
McColl didn’t know any of this was happening until she got home later that day. It was April Fool’s Day, 2025, but this was no joke. Her brother had scheduled an evening call with one of her donor offspring.
“I was surprised,” said McColl, “but I don’t know, I just went with it.”
McColl remembers a long conversation layered with anxiety, wonder, laughter and tears. Comstock shared what she knew about the people three of McColl’s eggs had produced: one man who didn’t want to connect to his donor or egg siblings, then Comstock and her twin brother. It was overwhelming.
“I did this because I wanted a mother to exist that wouldn’t have been otherwise,” McColl said, tears catching in her throat. “To look at what Ruth did is beyond what I hoped for.”
“I can say the same. It’s a gift from God,” said Ruth Comstock.
When her daughter first made contact with McColl, Ruth Comstock admits she felt threatened.
“But Jacqui keeps saying you’re my mother, so I’m not feeling so threatened anymore,” she said.
On a summer afternoon, McColl sat down with Jacqui and Ruth Comstock at McColl’s home in Roslindale to knit their stories together. In the last year, these three women have become close, but they still aren’t sure how to describe each other.
Jacqui Comstock calls herself the “egg donee.” She calls Ruth Comstock her mother, and McColl her egg donor, which is fine with McColl.
“Being a single mother is the hardest job in the world,” McColl said to Ruth Comstock. “And you did every stitch of the mothering.”
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‘Could there be more of us?’
The egg donor was only one side of Jacqui Comstock’s quest. She found the first sperm donor relative soon after signing up for 23andMe. She emailed the woman, who appeared to be a half-sibling, and asked: Could there be more of us?
“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, there’s 23 of us. We have a WhatsApp group. Do you want to join it?’ ” Comstock said, her eyes growing wide at the memory. “I was like, there’s 23 of them?”
Now, including Comstock and her twin, the tally has risen to 27 “sibs” — as Comstock calls them. Some people also refer to donor siblings as “dibs.” So far, all are within four years of age, which seems to fit the years their sperm donor, now deceased, was working on a Ph.D. Like Comstock, he was a scientist.
“He was in grad school,” she said. “I think he donated for beer money.”
Comstock expects to find more of these people, who she said feel like long lost cousins.
“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, there’s 23 of us. We have a WhatsApp group. Do you want to join it?’ I was like, there’s 23 of them?”Jacqui Comstock
Ten of the sperm donor siblings came to Comstock’s wedding reception last summer. Many meet for yearly reunions. They play games like lining up according to likeness. Roughly half have ADHD, as did their donor. They may not be any more or less alike than any group of young Americans, but they have fun comparing notes on their hobbies, voices and careers.
“If we have a similarity, the first question is, ‘Oh is this because we’re related?’ ” Comstock said. “We make those connections and those jokes all the time.”
Arocho, the Utah Valley University researcher, was also conceived with donor sperm. She calls this feeling “artificial familiarity,” but stresses it can vary a lot from person to person.
Comstock said she never expected to find such rewarding relationships, with people she didn’t know for the first decades of her life. But she’s troubled by the problems that might arise for some donor offspring when they learn they have dozens of genetic relatives — or accidentally marry a half-sibling, a concern among European sperm donor regulators.
“There definitely should be some regulation,” Comstock said.
The ethical implications are unknown. … We don’t know what in the world 50 years from now might bring.”Dr. Wesley Boyd
Many countries, including the United Kingdom, China and Australia, limit how many families, or children, can be created using a single person’s sperm. With egg donation, some countries, like Germany, ban it. The U.S. has no federally enforced caps, although a professional medical group, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, does suggest limits. Some donor-conceived people have discovered they have 100 or more half-siblings.
Dr. Wesley Boyd, a psychiatrist who teaches bioethics at Harvard Medical School, said DNA testing sites should offer more warnings, and he agrees the U.S. needs better regulations. He said no one — not the donors, the recipients, nor their offspring — can anticipate how changes in technology, like cloning, may haunt them in the years ahead.
“The ethical implications are unknown,” said Boyd. “Given what is possible today compared to what you could have imagined 50 years ago, we don’t know what in the world 50 years from now might bring.”
Boyd said he’s not surprised to see donor siblings seek out genetic relatives. In 2021, Boyd and some of his students surveyed more than 100 adults conceived with donated sperm or eggs. Many said they felt deceived when they learned of their origins later in life.
“Six out of seven said finding out shattered their sense of self, and half ended up in psychotherapy,” said Boyd. “It’s money in the bank if you’re a psychiatrist or in the mental health business, but it ain’t money that I want in my bank.”
In McColl’s living room, the three women, and two of their husbands, chat and laugh about the ways McColl’s donation decades ago has brought them together. They’re still figuring out how involved they’ll be in each other’s lives. It was McColl’s husband, Will McColl, who came up with the idea of a “gene family.”
“That’s nice,” said Jacqui Comstock.
“Yeah, I like that too,” said McColl.
“Let’s go with that,” said Ruth Comstock.
The Comstocks, McColl and others linked by egg and sperm donation are writing a new script, as Arocho said, to define the version of family that works for them.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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