After years of desperately searching for their sperm-donor fathers, Queenslanders Kate Drysdale and Kerri Favarato used an ancestry DNA database and turned detective to find them.
But as a Queensland Parliamentary committee prepares to investigate law reform around donor conception, both women hope the journey for others in their position — those conceived when sperm donation was cloaked in secrecy — is not as fraught.
The women were conceived in different decades but with help from the same Brisbane fertility clinic.
During multiple contacts with the clinic to request information about their biological fathers, they were separately told by different people at different times medical records may have been damaged by smoke and floods, or lost, or destroyed.
"I don't mean to be facetious but so many donor-conceived people have been told that."
Having children of their own has intensified their desire to learn more about their biological heritage.
Both women turned to science — and an American direct-to-consumer DNA testing company and database — to continue the search.
So-called ancestry databases allow people to compare their own DNA against other publicly available genetic profiles to help them find blood relatives and to build a family tree.
In the cases of Ms Drysdale, 30, and Ms Favarato, 39, it allowed them to identify their biological fathers even though neither man had registered a DNA sample on a consumer database at that time.
Soon after giving birth to her daughter, Brisbane-based Ms Favarato spent five months of painstaking work piecing together her family tree after finding on a database a fourth cousin — a woman she shared great, great, great grandparents with.
"It was exhausting and really hard work but I needed it to be done," she said.
"I was so sick of going through the process of trying to find information and getting the door slammed in my face.
"I just went: 'This is my chance, I have to do this'."
By this stage, Ms Favarato had already spent about two decades looking.
'Are you my donor?'
As a teenager, after learning her biological father had probably been a medical student, Ms Favarato accessed University of Queensland medical graduate records for the relevant years of the 1980s, making a list of potential candidates.
"I crossed out anyone that had an Asian or Indian sounding name and I crossed out all of the females," she said.
"Then I started writing letters to doctors, going: 'Are you my donor?'."
It came to nought.
Years later, in February 2017, through DNA searches for blood relatives and hundreds of hours of detective work to develop her family tree, she finally had a match to a Brisbane doctor — Donald 'Digger' Whittaker.
Impatient to speak to him, rather than write an email, she picked up the phone and dialled his clinic, leaving a message for him to return her call about "a private family matter".
Within minutes, he called back.
"How do I know you?" Dr Whittaker asked.
"Did you donate sperm in the 80s? I think you're my biological father," Ms Favarato replied.
"Oh my goodness. Hello darling. How are you? Tell me about yourself," Dr Whittaker answered.
Five years on, they have what Ms Favarato describes as an "undefinable" relationship with "reasonably regular" contact.
They visit each other's homes and she introduces him to people as "my biological father".
"He doesn't call me his daughter or anything like that," Ms Favarato said.
"We don't have the same relationship that I have with the dad who raised me. It's not like that, but it's an undeniable connection.
"We just don't bother labelling anything. It is what it is."
Kate's search took years of trauma and heartache
Kate Drysdale, who lives in Atherton, in Queensland's far north, with partner Andrew and their young son, has known she was donor-conceived since the age of seven.
By then, her mother Carol and her non-biological father had divorced and he was no longer in their lives.
"My legal father and my mother disagreed as to whether or not I should be told. She'd always wanted me to know," Ms Drysdale said.
"She has a social work background. She understood the importance of knowing one's identity."
Before having her own child, Ms Drysdale had "essentially given up" on the idea of ever finding her biological father, given he had donated his sperm anonymously in the 1990s.
She grew up knowing only that he had brown hair and green eyes and was a university student, based on information her mother had been provided by the clinic.
But Ms Drysdale's desire to learn more about her genetic background grew after she gave birth to a son five years ago.
Her son was still a baby when a television news story on donor conception triggered a renewed interest in her origins.
With the support of her mother and after repeated phone calls and emails to the fertility clinic, she was able to obtain scant details about her biological father.
100yo relative found in same state
Ms Drysdale's biological father had been a humanities student, his blood type was O-positive, he had three brothers and he was 21 years old at the time of his donation.
After continuing to "harass" the clinic, she also learned of at least one donor-conceived half sibling, but the clinic could not tell her a gender or a birth date.
"Parents were not required to inform clinics whether the procedures had been successful and resulted in a child," Ms Drysdale said.
"Even if they had been recording information correctly, they weren't being provided it."
Finding contact with the fertility clinic tortuous, Ms Drysdale had her DNA tested and her genetic profile uploaded onto an online database.
A couple of matches with distant cousins, including a 100-year-old woman living in Brisbane, who had already built an "extensive family tree", and another living in the United Kingdom, allowed her to trace her biological father's identity, using the small amount of information she was able to glean from the fertility clinic.
It took her just three weeks.
"To be honest … If you get the matches through the DNA testing, it's not that hard to work out who the donor is," Ms Drysdale said.
"I knew nothing when I started."
As she contemplated her next step, the fertility clinic contacted her unexpectedly, telling her they had managed to track down her biological father and would organise mandatory counselling sessions before a potential meeting.
Although she already knew his name, and how to contact him, Ms Drysdale chose to go down the clinic path fearing he may view being approached directly as "disrespectful or invasive".
It would take a year before she finally had email contact with him and about two years before they finally met in Atherton in late 2020 along with his wife and their two children.
"The first question his wife asked me was: 'Do you have an overlapping tooth, too?'," Ms Drysdale recalled.
"And I do.
Similarities found
Ms Drysdale and her biological father are both employed in the social science field, but more important to her is his personality.
"I had a negative view of what a father was growing up," she said.
"It's just really nice to find out that he is a positive, empathetic, kind human being that thinks about the world and wants to have a positive influence on it.
"So it's nice that that's the personality that I come from."
Meeting her biological father took years of trauma and heartache.
'Open to contact' nor relayed
The distress was only compounded when he told her he had given his details to the fertility clinic years earlier, making it clear he was open to contact, before she began her search for him.
"They either had no record of that, or … they just didn't bother to say anything," Ms Drysdale said.
"The clinic should have been able to simply consult their records, advise that he was open to contact and connect us.
"Instead, I experienced many months living in a state of near panic that I would not get any information or would ultimately be rejected by the person I had been searching for for so long."
What laws could be changed
Ms Drysdale is one of about 70 people who have made submissions to the Queensland parliament's Legal Affairs and Safety Committee's inquiry into matters relating to donor conception information, which will hear evidence on Friday.
Her detailed 11-page submission calls for the establishment of a donor conception register, mandating clinics to provide "full and accurate" information in a timely manner, with penalties for non-compliance.
She wants all donor-conceived people to also be able to access identifying information relating to donors and donor-conceived siblings, regardless of when they were conceived.
Ms Drysdale would also like to see the birth certificates of donor-conceived people include a notation indicating they are donor conceived, with contact details for how to access further information.
Given that some people source donor sperm, eggs or embryos from overseas, she is also calling for a ban on the importation of reproductive tissue if the international clinics involved cannot be held to Queensland standards.
Her calls echo those of Donor Conceived Australia (DCA), an advocacy and support group for people conceived via assisted reproductive treatments, which has more than 500 members.
DCA's 27-page submission to the parliamentary inquiry requests opt-in counselling for donor-conceived individuals, donors and their families as "an essential aspect of managing information relating to donor conception".
"Currently, there are no Queensland-based counselling services providing specialised support in the donor-conception sphere," the submission stated.
It called for counselling to be provided by professionals not involved or affiliated with the fertility industry to ensure confidence they are "independent, objective and focused on the interests of that client".
DCA director Aimee Shackleton said her Queensland members often reported seeking help from local psychologists with "absolutely no idea" how to support them through the complex issues involved with donor conception.
"Donor Conceived Australia is hoping to be involved in creating competency-based accreditation courses for mental health professionals and calls for government-funded counselling to support donor-conceived people when they need it most," she said.
Ms Shackleton said donor-conceived adults often turned to her organisation after years of searching for donors and after frequently being turned away by fertility clinics.
"They find there are no government agencies to help them," she said.
"They often realise they need to spend hundreds of dollars to send their genetic material to an American-based DNA company.
"Many also turn to paying professional genealogists or private investigators to do the work for them."
Six half-siblings found
Since Kerri Favarato found her biological father, with her encouragement, Dr Whittaker has also supplied his own DNA profile to the same database that helped her find him.
That resulted in Ms Favarato discovering six donor-conceived half siblings, all of them previously unaware they were conceived using donor sperm.
"Two of them I speak with very regularly. We've become almost like very close friends. We speak quite often," Ms Favarato said.
As a young medical student, Dr Whittaker donated sperm two or three times a week for five years.
It's impossible to know how many children he may have fathered, leaving Ms Favarato concerned about the unknown number of cousins her own children may have and the future potential for them to end up in a relationship with one of them.
"I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old. They've got lots of cousins floating around," she said.
"When you talk about the numbers, it could be anywhere from 30 to 300, maybe more than that. Who knows? We don't know for sure. We'll never know.
Cap on 'donor families'
Queensland fertility clinics are subject to National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines, which have required since September 2004 that donations of sperm, eggs and embryos can only take place if donors first consent to their information being made available, on request, once any conceived children turn 18.
Under the guidelines, clinics must also take all reasonable steps to reduce the numbers of genetic relatives created through their donor programs.
The Fertility Society of Australia's reproductive technology accreditation committee advises that "a maximum of 10 donor families" per sperm donor is acceptable, regardless of where those families are.
University of Western Sydney law professor Sonia Allan, who has been studying legal issues surrounding donor conception for 20 years, described the accreditation committee system as "self regulatory".
"It is important to recognise that while advice or guidelines play an important role in setting standards, they do not have the force of the law," Professor Allan said.
"You should have the law behind it. What happens is that if it doesn't have legal force, the risk is, and this is certainly a risk in Queensland, that you have individuals or clinics who don't follow the guidance, as there is no enforceable obligation to do so.
"That can result in people having many more donor-conceived siblings than perhaps they should.
"Combined with a lack of information about their donor-conceived status and/or their biological relatives, this leads to an increased chance of them forming relationships with each other, meaning sexual relationships, because they don't know who their first-degree relatives are.
"You also create a situation where donor-conceived people live in fear or constant uncertainty. The impact on some people's lives is really unacceptable."
Report due later this year
The Queensland parliamentary committee is due to hand down its report on donor conception law reform in August.
As she awaits the outcome, Kate Drysdale will continue to build a relationship with her biological father.
"We will never have a father-daughter relationship because you can't get back 30 years of history," she said.
"I talk to him probably every couple of weeks on the phone, we update each other about what's happening in our lives. I see him as a friend."
Ms Drysdale's hopeful things will be different for her son — her biological father's first grandchild.
For more information: donorconceivedaustralia.com.au
