A potential framework for processing donor-conceived identity across the life course
Identity experiences of adults conceived via anonymous sperm donation: A qualitative study. (Drewniak, 2026)
Drewniak, D., Thorn, P., & Krones, T. (2026). Identity experiences of adults conceived via anonymous sperm donation: A qualitative study. SSM – Qualitative Research in Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmqr.2026.100763
Geographic Region: Switzerland, Germany, and Austria
Research Question: How do adults who were conceived through anonymous sperm donation experience and integrate their donor-conceived status into their sense of identity across the life course?
Design: Qualitative, theory-building study using semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted between January and July 2022, either in person (at participants’ homes or in public spaces) or via video call. An interview guide was developed by the research team and refined through a citizen science workshop and a pre-fieldwork workshop involving people with lived experience of infertility, same-sex families, and sperm donation. The guide covered: biographical background; family dynamics and communication about conception; social and genetic origins; how and when participants learned about their conception; emotional responses to disclosure; interactions with donors; and relationships with same-donor siblings. The researchers analyzed transcripts in four stages: open coding, team review and refinement, pattern identification, and finally synthesizing everything into a broader theoretical framework cross-checked against adoption research and other relevant studies.
Sample: Twenty adults conceived through anonymous sperm donation participated, from Switzerland (9), Germany (10), and Austria (1). They were between 25 and 49 years old (average 37.5). Fifteen identified as female, four as male, and one as gender-diverse. All were raised by heterosexual parents; nearly half (7) had experienced parental divorce or separation. The sample included some sibling pairs and one set of twins. Participants found out about their conception anywhere from age 10 to 42. Most learned later in life — only six found out between ages 10 and 15, while the majority learned as adults. At the time of the interview, 14 had not yet met their donor; six had. How they found out varied considerably: six learned through consumer DNA testing, five through a deliberate parental disclosure, three through medical or genetic circumstances, two following their father’s death, and the rest through a range of other situations. Participants were recruited through online forums, social media, interest groups, and personal referrals.
Editor’s Note: All three countries in this study now prohibit anonymous sperm donation. However, because many participants were conceived in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, they grew up in a context where anonymity was promised and secrecy was recommended by medical professionals.
Key Findings
The study’s main contribution is a proposed framework for understanding how donor-conceived adults make sense of their identity over time.
Editor’s Note: What the data seem to be capturing is a sequence of responses to learning significant information about oneself: orienting to what it means, actively exploring it, and eventually finding some way to hold it. That sequence can begin at any point in life. The authors present this as a developmental framework because they borrowed the architecture from adoption research where the sequence tends to track with age, but in this sample it mostly doesn't.
The Theoretical Framework
The framework organizes identity development across three phases.
Identity Formation (Childhood): When the individual finds out about their donor conception, and the circumstances under which they find out, shape everything that follows. This is where the groundwork is laid. The individual begins to develop a sense of self. How open the family is shapes how the individual first makes sense of their origins.
Identity Exploration (Adolescence): Active exploration begins. Curiosity about the donor and same-donor siblings intensifies, personal narratives about being donor-conceived start to form, and peers and social contacts play a growing role.
Identity Integration (Adulthood): People work to integrate what they know into a coherent sense of self, a process that can be revisited repeatedly as life circumstances change.
The framework is grounded in Grotevant and colleagues’ theory of adoptive identity formation, which describes identity as a dynamic, ongoing process shaped by three interacting forces: psychological factors (experiences of rupture or disruption in one’s life story); sociological factors (shifts in how kinship and family are understood); and biological factors (the absence of knowledge about genetic origins). The authors adapt this theory to donor conception, where the genetic link to one parent, the possibility of same-donor siblings, and the growing role of at-home DNA testing all add dimensions that adoption research doesn’t fully account for.
The authors identify three dimensions that shape identity throughout life: the social dimension (the family someone grows up in, regardless of genetic ties); the genetic dimension (questions about biological origins, the donor, and same-donor siblings); and the personal narrative dimension (the ongoing process of building a life story that makes sense of all of this).
How people experience being donor-conceived varies considerably. Some people integrated it without major upheaval; others were deeply and lastingly affected, particularly when they found out late or in unexpected circumstances. The study frames this as a spectrum, not a hierarchy.
Factors that shape someone’s donor-conceived identity include: when and how they found out; how open their family was; how much access they have to information about their donor; the legal and cultural context they grew up in; and increasingly, whether and how DNA testing has entered their life.
Being donor-conceived does not produce a single, predictable experience. The same person may find it central to their sense of self at one point in life and largely irrelevant at another. The framework treats identity as something that shifts over time rather than something that gets resolved once and stays that way.
Identity Formation (“Childhood”)
How participants learned about their donor conception varied widely. Six found out through at-home DNA testing, either their own or a family member’s. Five were told through a deliberate parental decision. Three found out through a medical or genetic event. Two found out after their father died. Others learned through a parent’s remarriage, a difficult relationship with their social father, a therapist’s recommendation to the mother, or a disclosure by a third party. Only five described something that might be called a planned, parent-led disclosure.
Finding out late, especially through DNA testing, a parent’s death, or another crisis, was consistently harder than finding out earlier through a planned conversation. Participants who found out this way often described the experience as destabilizing in a way that went beyond the information itself: suddenly feeling like a stranger to their own life, or like half of what they thought they knew about themselves was no longer true. Several described the days and weeks after as some of the hardest of their lives.
Several participants described their parents treating their doctors’ medical advice about disclosure almost as a vow, something they felt bound to keep for decades. The impact of that advice is visible throughout the study: it shaped when and how people found out, and the conditions under which they did.
Participants generally understood their parents’ choices in the context of the time, a period when secrecy around donor conception was the norm, infertility (especially male infertility) carried significant social stigma, and the idea that a secret could be kept forever was not unreasonable. Most expressed some generosity toward their parents while still being clear about the harm the secrecy caused.
Family warmth and stability made a meaningful difference. When relationships at home were close and secure, finding out—even late—was something people could work through without the family relationship itself being called into question. When the relationship with the social father had been strained or distant, the news often landed harder, and some participants connected those earlier difficulties to questions about genetic relatedness.
Identity Exploration (“Adolescence”)
Nearly everyone in the study wanted to know something about their donor. Most were looking for information, not a father figure or hoping for ongoing contact. What they wanted to know was basic: what did he look like, how old was he, what did he do for work, why did he donate? And underneath those questions, for many: was he a good person? Several participants described anxiety not about the absence of the donor but about what kind of person he might be.
For participants who hadn’t identified their donor, one way of managing that uncertainty was to imagine him. One participant described painting a picture of the donor at age 15, naming him, and writing down what she imagined his traits to be—not because she wanted a relationship, but because having a concrete image of him, even an invented one, helped her feel less unsettled.
For those who did identify their donor, the process often felt like something that came to a natural close once they had a photo or a few basic details. The curiosity was satisfied by less than many might expect. Where meetings happened, they were often described as meaningful, but without the expectation of anything ongoing.
Same-donor siblings played a different role than donors did. When the donor was unknown or unreachable, same-donor siblings offered something the donor couldn’t: a real person who shared part of your genetic background and could be known. Participants described looking to same-donor siblings for clues about what the donor might have been like, and sometimes for a sense of what traits or abilities might have come from that side of their origins.
What these donor sibling relationships meant varied considerably. Some participants described them as carrying a sense of shared fate—something that felt like genuine kinship. Others described brief connections that didn’t develop into ongoing relationships. For most, it was too early to know what these connections would become.
DNA testing revealed same-donor sibling networks that were often much larger than participants had anticipated. People reported knowing between 0 and 14 confirmed same-donor siblings at the time of their interview, with many uncertain about the real total.
Identity Integration (“Adulthood”)
Some participants reached a place where donor conception had become one part of their story rather than the defining part. Other aspects of life, like being a parent, a partner, a professional, moved to the center, and being donor-conceived moved to the background. This part of their identity found its place alongside everything else. One participant described it this way: “I am no longer primarily a donor child, I can now primarily be the father of my children.”
For others, the process was ongoing and not straightforward. Major life events, like becoming a parent, entering a new relationship, and encountering DNA testing, brought questions back up even for people who had felt settled.
A smaller group experienced finding out as something that shook the ground beneath them. These participants described having to rebuild a sense of who they were from the ground up, sometimes accompanied by real psychological distress. One described it as “a nuclear bomb,” the sense of being literally a different person, with parents who had lied for an entire lifetime. Another described feeling like “science fiction,” someone who, given the particular circumstances of how her gametes came together, felt she shouldn’t exist in the way she does.
DNA testing also sometimes revealed that a sibling raised in the same home (someone they had grown up thinking of as a full sibling) was actually a half-sibling through the same donor. In nearly every case, this made no difference to the relationship.
DNA testing continued to reshape things even for people who had felt they’d worked through it. Finding new genetic relatives, or having information arrive unexpectedly, reopened questions for people who thought they were settled.
Cross-Cutting Findings
Participants consistently noted that discussions of donor conception in public, in research, and in media disproportionately feature people who struggle. Several pointed out the absence of voices from donor-conceived people who feel neutral, positive, or simply unaffected and expressed concern that this skew creates a distorted picture of donor-conceived experience.
The study found that what matters to donor-conceived people is not uniformly about genetics. Most participants were not seeking a substitute father figure, even when relationships with social fathers were difficult. The desire was primarily for information—traits, medical history, basic facts—not for a parental relationship with the donor.
Limitations: As a qualitative, exploratory study, findings cannot be generalized or used to make claims about the frequency or distribution of different identity experiences among donor-conceived people. The study cannot tell us how common any given response is. Recruitment through support networks and online communities may overrepresent people who are more engaged, more critical of secrecy, or more motivated to share their experiences. The entire sample was conceived under conditions of legally mandated anonymity and most discovered their donor-conceived status in adulthood, often under crisis conditions (DTCGT, a parent’s death, a parent’s remarriage). The framework developed here may not apply—or may apply very differently—to people conceived under open-identity regimes, disclosed to in early childhood, or who grew up in families where openness was the norm from the beginning. The all-heterosexual-parent sample is a significant limitation, as single parents and same-sex couples are major recipients of donor sperm and tend to have very different disclosure practices and family communication patterns. The framework cannot be assumed to apply the same way to these populations.
Applications: The framework validates that the experience of identity disruption after late disclosure is not pathological but a predictable response to a significant autobiographical revision. Clinicians should avoid assuming that all adult donor-conceived clients need to work through their genetic origins. The study’s own data show substantial variation. Some people find donor conception genuinely unimportant; forcing or implying that genetic exploration is necessary for wellbeing may be harmful. Future research should test this framework with populations that do not resemble this sample: people disclosed to in early childhood, people raised by same-sex or single parents, people with access to open-identity donors, and people from non-Western contexts where donor conception carries very different social meanings.
Funding Source: University Research Priority Program “Human Reproduction Reloaded” (URPP H2R) at the University of Zurich
Lead Author: Daniel Drewniak is a research fellow and post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, where he is also affiliated with the URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded (H2R) program; his research focuses on empirical bioethics, medical decision-making, and qualitative research methods, with current work on reproductive care services from the perspectives of patients, clinicians, and researchers.
Regulatory Context
Switzerland
Switzerland ended anonymous sperm donation in 2001 under the Federal Act on Medically Assisted Reproduction. Donor-conceived individuals have the right to access identifying information about their sperm donor at age 18, or earlier upon application if they can demonstrate good reasons.
A national donor registry is maintained by the Federal Office of Civil Status. Egg donation remains illegal in Switzerland.
Germany
Germany passed the Sperm Donor Registry Act in 2018, which requires that the identity of sperm donors be registered in a central national registry and made available to donor-conceived individuals upon request. The Act applies prospectively and does not cover donations made before 2018.
Oocyte (egg) donation remains prohibited in Germany. Embryo donation has a legally ambiguous status.
Prior to 2018, donor anonymity was standard practice and parents were routinely advised not to disclose donor conception to their children—a practice documented directly by participants in this study.
German court rulings since 2013 have established that donor-conceived people have the legal right to know the identity of their donor, independent of age.
Austria
Austria ended anonymous sperm donation in 1992 under the Reproductive Medicine Act (FMedG). Donor-conceived individuals have the right to access donor identity information at age 14.
Egg donation became legal in Austria in 2015 with strict conditions, including the requirement that donors be identifiable.
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