New research on donor conception disclosure and young adult wellbeing
Associations between parental disclosure, social disclosure and wellbeing among donor conceived young adults (Zadeh, 2026)
Zadeh, S., Jones, C., Jadva, V., Frost, D. M., & Fink, E. (2026). Associations between parental disclosure, social disclosure and wellbeing among donor conceived young adults. Reproductive BioMedicine Online. Advance online publication. https://www.rbmojournal.com/article/S1472-6483(26)00346-9/abstract
Geographic Region: United Kingdom
Research Question: What are the motivations, experiences, and psychological correlates of social disclosure among donor-conceived young adults? Does the minority stress model help explain the relationship between social disclosure, mental wellbeing, and resilience?
Editor’s Note: The minority stress model is a framework that explains mental health distress in sexual and gender minorities. The authors hypothesized: 1) that the concealment of donor conception would be negatively associated with wellbeing, 2) that those who were told or learned about being donor conceived later in life would report greater stigma concealment, less pride about being donor conceived, and poorer wellbeing, and 3) that higher levels of pride and community connection would protect against poorer wellbeing.
Design: A cross-sectional, multi-method (quantitative and qualitative) online survey study, conducted between January and August 2022. This study is part of the Young Adults Study, a UK-based project focused on the lived experiences and wellbeing of donor-conceived young adults (ages 18–32). The survey was developed in consultation with staff and volunteers from the UK’s two largest donor conception community networks (the Donor Conception Network and the Donor Conceived Register Registrants’ Panel, now Donor Conceived UK). The survey was piloted with five donor-conceived people before launch. Recruitment occurred through these community networks’ mailing lists and social media, the research team’s own networks, university mailing lists, and snowball sampling. Participants completed sociodemographic questions; questions about the age and circumstances under which they learned they were donor conceived; closed and open-ended questions about social disclosure (who they had told, how often they discussed it, and their motivations and experiences); and four standardized psychometric measures: the Mental Health Continuum Short Form (wellbeing in the last month), an adapted Disclosure Concerns subscale of the HIV Stigma Scale (stigma concealment), and adapted Pride (pride in being donor conceived) and Community Connectedness (affiliation to a community of others who are donor conceived) subscales of the Gender Minority Stress and Resilience Measure. The latter three scales were originally developed for other stigmatized populations (people living with HIV; transgender and non-binary people) and were reworded by the research team for relevance to donor conception; all three showed good internal consistency in this sample. The authors used a conservative threshold (p < 0.01) to guard against false positives from multiple comparisons.
Editor’s Note: The Pride and Community Connectedness subscales are from the Gender Minority Stress and Resilience Measure, a tool built to measure pride in gender identity as an inherent, embodied trait. The authors adapted the items, so “My gender identity... makes me feel special and unique” became “Being donor conceived makes me feel special and unique”. This could subtley embed an assumption that a person’s relationship to their genetic origins works the same way, psychologically, as a person’s relationship to their gender. Is knowledge about genetic origins useful information or a load-bearing pillar of identity in the same vein as gender?
Sample: 41 donor-conceived young adults, aged 18–30 years (mean = 25.34), drawn from a larger study of 139 participants. Participants were mostly female (73%), straight/heterosexual (61%), and not religious (78%). The sample was entirely white. Most participants were conceived via sperm donation (78%), followed by egg donation (17%) and embryo donation (5%). The majority (76%) had been conceived within a heterosexual two-parent family, 15% within a same-sex female couple family, and nearly 10% by a single mother. Educational attainment was relatively high (61% held an undergraduate or postgraduate degree), and 76% were members of a donor conception organization. No participant was conceived using a known donor, and because the UK’s 2005 shift to donor identifiability was not applied retroactively, none of the participants in this study has the legal right to identifying information about their donor.
Editor’s Note: The sample here is small, so the findings should be read with some caution. Even when a finding technically passes the statistical bar for “significant,” small samples can produce numbers that would look quite different with a bigger group. It’s a bit like flipping a coin 10 times versus 1,000 times: you can get a lopsided-looking result from a small number of flips just by chance. In addition, this kind of study can only show that two things tend to be correlated, not that one causes the other.
Key Findings
Most participants (71%) were told about their donor conception by a parent. Among those who learned in another way, this occurred through DNA testing (7%), official documentation (7%), or their own inference based on parental age or infertility history (5%).
Nearly 44% learned in early childhood (before age 8), 27% in middle childhood/adolescence (ages 8–17), and 29% in adulthood (ages 18+).
All 41 participants (100%) had disclosed being donor conceived to a friend; most had also told a spouse/partner (68%), family members (66%), and other donor-conceived people (63%).
Frequency of talking about being donor conceived varied: 42% discussed it several times a month, 34% a few times a year.
Concerning the experience of social disclosure: Half of the participants described mixed experiences of telling others, varying by audience (other donor-conceived people versus not; close friends versus acquaintances) or by life stage (as a child versus as an adult). 24% described predominantly positive experiences, 13% described predominantly negative experiences, and 11% described neutral experiences.
The most common motivations for disclosure were: it being part of one’s identity or story (9 participants), seeking support (8), and relevance to the conversation at hand (7). The most common reasons for not disclosing were: no perceived reason to tell / not relevant (6 participants) and following a parent’s advice or respecting a parent’s feelings about the topic (5).
When considering all respondents, stigma concealment was significantly and negatively associated with wellbeing and with pride. In other words, participants who reported concealing their donor conception more also reported less pride and poorer wellbeing. Community connectedness was not significantly correlated with pride, stigma concealment, or wellbeing.
The authors ran a test to determine if the timing of disclosure (told in early childhood, told in middle childhood/adolescence, or told/found out as adults) related to differences in all four outcomes (stigma concealment, pride, community connectedness, and general wellbeing). This came back significant, meaning that as a group, these four variables did differ depending on when someone was told. When they looked at each variable separately to see which ones were driving that overall effect, only stigma concealment differed significantly across the three age groups. The finding that remained statistically significant was that people told in early childhood reported less stigma concealment than those told in middle childhood/adolescence.
The authors ran a test to see if stigma concealment, pride, and/or community connectedness predicted wellbeing in donor-conceived people and whether pride or community connectedness might soften the negative effect of stigma concealment on wellbeing. The three factors together predicted wellbeing (this finding was statistically significant). When they looked at each factor individually, only stigma concealment maintained statistical significance. More concealment was linked to worse wellbeing. When they tested to see if pride or community connectedness changed how strongly concealment affects wellbeing, neither appeared to be protective.
Limitations: The sample was small and demographically homogeneous, limiting the ability to examine intersectional experiences or generalize to other donor-conceived populations. The relative homogeneity of family type (mostly heterosexual two-parent families) may explain why community connectedness and pride did not function as protective resources in this sample the way they might in more diverse family contexts, such as LGBTQ+-headed families, where identity affirmation and community socialization have been found to matter more. The adapted psychometric scales have not been independently validated for the donor-conceived population. Every one of the 41 participants had told at least one persion about being donor conceived. The study cannot describe the experiences, motivations, or wellbeing of donor-conceived young adults who have disclosed to no one. The stigma concealment measure was adapted from a tool built to capture people managing a secret they may never disclose. Applied here, the scale is likely picking up selective disclosure (who you tell, how freely) rather than concealment. Future studies should aim for more diversity in "outness" about being donor conceived.
Applications: In general, more concealment was linked to worse wellbeing. Participants told between ages 8–17 reported more stigma concealment than those told earlier or as adults, but wellbeing itself showed no significant difference by disclosure age at all. Researchers could treat this as a hypothesis worth testing further. Given the study’s demographic narrowness, its findings should be considered as illustrative of one slice of the donor-conceived population (predominantly White, heterosexual-family-raised, sperm-donor-conceived) rather than representative of donor-conceived people’s experiences broadly. The qualitative findings normalize the experience of having mixed, evolving feelings about telling others.
Funding Source: UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) New Investigator Award, grant ES/S015426/1.
Lead Author: Sophie Zadeh is a Reader in Family Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex, and previously an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, University College London; she is the Principal Investigator of the Young Adults Study and has published extensively on donor conception, disclosure, and family psychology. The author disclosed that she is not donor conceived.
Regulatory Context
This study was conducted in the UK, where the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is the independent regulator overseeing fertility treatment and donor conception.
In 2005, the UK moved from anonymous to identifiable gamete donation; donor-conceived people conceived on or after April 1, 2005, can request identifying information about their donor (and about donor siblings who have also opted into contact) once they turn 18. This change was not retroactive: those conceived before April 2005 have no legal right to their donor’s identity, though a voluntary Donor Conceived Register allows pre-2005 donors and donor-conceived people to register and potentially match.
Since 2023, the HFEA’s Code of Practice has made it a mandatory requirement for all UK licensed fertility clinics to inform prospective parents using donor gametes about the importance of early disclosure to any resulting child and to provide guidance on suitable methods of doing so.
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