My very extended family
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two years ago Julia, a high school student from Ohio, received an email from a woman in New York she had never met, claiming that her daughter and Julia shared the same biological father. The phone call that followed changed her life forever, as she discovered that she had not only one half-sibling, but more than she could ever have anticipated. Julia grew up with her two mums Betsy and Kathleen and her adopted sister Sarah. She always knew she was donor conceived – what she never expected was to discover more than 20 donor half siblings. Julia tells us her own story as she prepares to meet some of her siblings for the very first time
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | What is a family? |
| 0:04.0 | And how do you define it? |
| 0:10.0 | And how do you define it? You know, I think we weren't completely naive that there would be some stigma with like, |
| 0:18.8 | where's your dad and what, you know, what's the deal here? You know, we considered it and we wanted to make sure |
| 0:24.5 | that the kids knew this you know this is who we are and there's a lot of love |
| 0:30.0 | here and that's what helps families stay strong. |
| 0:34.0 | My name's Julia and I was conceived using a sperm donor. |
| 0:38.0 | All I knew about him was that he was donor 1317 from California. But this isn't really the story about that. This is a story about how I discovered my family, all of my family. |
| 0:51.2 | This is my story and sometimes I can hardly believe it myself. |
| 0:55.0 | You're listening to my very extended family on the BBC World Service and in order to protect the identities of some of the people involved in this documentary, we are only going to be using first names. |
| 1:12.0 | I grew up in Cleveland Heights in Ohio with my adopted |
| 1:15.0 | sister Sarah and my two moms, Kathleen and Betsy. We were 23 when we met. We were pretty |
| 1:21.4 | young. |
| 1:22.4 | Kathleen, I consider it both an honor and a privilege to be the one standing with you today. |
| 1:27.0 | Betsy, Kathleen, from this day forward, your lives shall be woven of one design. |
| 1:33.0 | They were kind of trendsetters in terms of being the first lesbians in Cleveland who had two kids. |
| 1:43.0 | We've gone back and forth probably for five years. |
| 1:45.0 | Well, yeah, it would be kind of cool to have kids. |
| 1:47.0 | And you know, it's not like we could have a mistake baby. |
| 1:51.0 | We had to really plan it. We both love kids and Kathleen had no desire |
| 1:56.4 | to birth a baby but was thrilled to be part of the plan so we were on board |
| 2:01.0 | pretty much at the same time. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.