This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the show the co-founder and director of the donor sibling

registry. Let me welcome Wendy Kramer. Hi. Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for coming in.

I introduce you to Tyler Merritt, my co-host for the day.

So I was saying off my, you know, 20 years ago, we probably would not be talking about, you know, this topic and I said we've come a long way and you were like, we've come a long way in some areas and not in others.

Explain.

Oh boy, that's a big question.

Well, back when I had my son in 1990, things were very different. It was mostly heterosexual

infertile couples who were utilizing sperm donation and egg donation.

And over the years, that landscape has changed

to where now about 50% of the people

using sperm donation are single mothers by choice, about a third are LGBTQIA, and now less than about 20% are actually infertile couples. So that landscape has changed. And another big change is that, you know, the donor sibling registry, so we were formed in 2000 we're a nonprofit and we are all

about allowing donor conceived people in their families to make mutual consent

contact with their genetic relatives.

So their half brothers and sisters

and the biological parents, the formerly anonymous donors.

And what we've learned over the years is that it's very important for donor conceive people to know about their ancestry, their medical backgrounds, and their close genetic relatives.

And this is something that the reproductive medicine industry has been very slow to acknowledge.

So we're helping these families connect, but the industry itself, the reproductive

medicine industry, is still working very, very hard to keep donor-conceived people from their genetic relatives,

specifically their biological parents, the egg and sperm donors.

As we, you know, I was talking you off Mike, a lot of women, they, you know, they're in their careers, they never find the mate that they want and they want to have a child.

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