The Doctor | Chapter 3

I'm just gonna put on my phone. I will preface by saying that like, I love you very much for being my mom, obviously, and in, you know, in reality. And then just going above and beyond my mom for the last 40 years and two months. And I have a couple questions and there's no judgment whatsoever. And my like search for my ancestry is not about, like, replacing you or dad at all. I'm just like trying to figure out, like, you know, where I kind of came from.

My parents were staying over in our guest room Thanksgiving weekend 2018.

And as my mom was going to the bathroom to brush her teeth before bed, I asked if I could talk to her. Downstairs. Away from my dad, Richard, and my wife and my kids, everyone.

I needed to figure out how I could possibly have two half-sisters, how I was half-Irish, and how all of that was connected to what my new half-sister, Helena had just told me. That she was conceived via sperm donor, that our father, she said, was a sperm donor.

My mother had to have some answers, I mean, she was there at the time of conception, after all, she was definitely my mom. The Ancestry..com test we had both taken had proven that, but she didn't know I had taken a second DNA test and that I had connected with Helena and that. I had been spending nights messaging distant cousins and digging through decades-old medical journals, trying to understand how I even existed at all.

We sat side by side on the couch, our knees touching.

This is my question for you, Did you and Warren get any fertility help?

From Waveland and Rococo Punch. This is inconceivable truth. I'm Matt Katz.

Episode 3 The Doctor.

This is my question for you, Did you and Warren get any fertility help? Yeah, we.

We had trouble, I had to have what was? my ovaries were blocked, I had to.

Is it possible there was a sperm donor not to my?

You were inseminated. Sounds kind of strange, not to my knowledge. I mean, we had sex and and but we, you know, we had a we had trouble becoming pregnant, let's put it that way.

I don't think, I don't think he's my father. Oh, he should.

If that's the case, I honestly.

I believe you have no clue.

Oh my god, oh my God.

So that seemed to mean he's not my father and never was.

This guy who caused like, so much emotional kind of angst was a fucking stranger to me.

I didn't look like him, right? You have no qualities of him.

Other than I just always thought, maybe, you know, I'm like a little shadier than you are, right? Like, I play poker and I like smoked cigarettes in college, and I like, you know, but I don't, so maybe that was. Do you ever wonder why I didn't look?

Because no, never did so, do you?

I know so he, he was infertile. Mom, that's why you.

Sterile and fertile either word works, actually. But it was clear I'd been doing my research in the week since I made contact with Helena. Learning about how infertility was addressed through donor conception back in the 70s, when we were born, sperm banks were not a big thing at the time. This all happened in doctor's offices.

There were no regulations, no transparency and total anonymity between sperm donors and receivers. Most doctors didn't even keep records.

I'd already found evidence of some shady, medically dubious practices that might have explained why my mother thought she was being inseminated with Warren's sperm. You want more information? Yeah, no, I do so that what they would do often then is mix the father's sperm with other sperm, really.

Yes, this is like.

Without my knowledge, without my knowledge, you know, there's been with the mother's knowledge generally, but I believe there's also cases where the mother was not clear about it.

There's also times when doctors talk in like medical ways. I can just imagine, yeah, absolutely, I was very emotional. Yeah, the condition you're in.

Yeah, yeah.

So that I know that they, historically speaking. Now I know this woman, Helena, whose picture I'll show you, who's also 40, just turned 41.

The other sister was also 40.

She's two weeks.

This mixing thing, I learned, that doctors would sometimes mix the husband's sperm, which the doctor would have known didn't work very well with the sperm of a donor. They did it this way because they worried that a husband might not view a child of a sperm donor as belonging to him, might leave the mother. After the child was born, mixing created enough uncertainty that he could believe he could be the biological father.

Doctors came up with more ways to amp up this idea. They'd tell parents that this donor semen would just boost the father's semen, or treat it, help it work, even though that made no sense even back then. But it did help to convince the couple, these hopeful parents, that they might have their own 100 biological child, even if that wasn't necessarily true. Doctors even told couples to go home after the procedure and have sex right away. Which cemented this idea that it was the father's sperm at work, not the donors.

I told my mom all of this. I also explained how I'd found my half-sister Helena, who told me what she knew. And I had started to do all of this research to figure out who my actual father is or was. So this is what I know about my family, right, right?

So I'm Irish.

Family was called Lynch. Last name is Lynch. they're from the county, County Cook, actually, it's County Cork. Give me a break.

I just turned Irish. My mom had a bunch of questions for one, was it even possible that a doctor could inseminate her with a stranger's sperm without telling her? Now, yeah?

Was that legal? So this was like, in the way I've been able to understand it, this is like the in the beginning of new science, right? There's not like rules or ethics to it yet. So I've been doing a lot of research. And there's websites where you can try to track down your siblings because I, mom, I could have fucking dozens of siblings.

Honestly, seriously, I never wanted you to be an only child God. I showed her pictures of my new half-sisters.

Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm okay, it's um.

When I found out, yeah.

What? No. I was just like, nervous about talking to you about it. I just didn't know. I mean, because if you like, I didn't know if you like, maybe had a thought all these years and like, didn't.

No, I never had a thought and I didn't want.

What if I married him? To begin with? How that ever happened is beyond me.

No.

You know what I mean from all those years where I didn't know where he was right, right, and the curiosity about him is so familiar. But now it's like, I'm just reliving a different version of the story.

You know what I mean? It's really weird. Like, in both cases, they're absent fathers, right for wildly different circumstances.

And then it's just the fucking.

I mean, who had no clue? Just think ahead. What happens if you do find him?

And then you.

A He wants nothing to do with you. Yeah, that's possible, although I'd be familiar with that, too, exactly.

Exactly which would be a real blunt, or he turns out to be.

But the other sister, I don't know if I'll have a relationship with her, but I mean, I also we're friends on Facebook now.

Like?

So I think I got something positive out of it, regardless of how he handles it. Yeah, could be married.

Sure, sure, never told anybody, you know?

Oh God, but I did not know it wasn't his sperm, that's for sure. Did not know.

I can't believe.

No, it's okay, I don't think it will, even if he doesn't want to. I mean, knowing a name would be satisfy me. I mean, I might never figure out who he is.

Right, it's totally possible, you know, and you have to.

All right, I'll give you a hug.

My mom and I went upstairs to the guest room where my dad, the dad who raised me and adopted me, Richard, was reading in bed.

Do you want me to talk? Yeah, okay, honey.

You know the definition of a good father, right? you're the definition of a good father.

Not looking for a new father by any stretch of the imagination. I love you, don't worry about it, okay?

I'm dead, but based on that ancestry test that I took just to find out, like, what country I'm from.

I now know with near certainty that Warren was not my father. I had trouble, my mom interjected, telling my dad that she had trouble conceiving.

So this fucking guy who's caused me considerable angst over the last, on and off over the last 40 years, was just a fucking stranger.

I love it, he whispers. This reaction, this realization that Warren was very possibly not my father and was not Richard's grandchildren's grandfather, was perfect.

My grandchildren are my grandchildren, right? Yeah, I know this is a funny thing about this, right? It doesn't matter in reality, right? I have my parents, I have a loving family, it doesn't matter.

But on the other hand, it's sort of the reason why I exist, so in that sense, it matters. You know, it's a weird dichotomy, it's crazy.

Listen, I gotta find it out. I may never find out who he is right, so I gotta find it out. I don't know if I will.

I have an Irish kid.

That's fucking crazy.

Thank you for telling me, of course, thank you for listening.

Come here, son, I want a kiss.

Love you, I love you too.

Oh god.

Where was it? where was this? He was in Manhattan, he was in Manhattan, he might have been at NYU.

I remember very few names.

Right away, I pulled out my phone and started searching. Dr. Charles Dubrovnik, D-b-r-o-v-n-e-r Oh my God.

He's still alive, devoted much of his professional career to helping couples challenged with reproductive difficulties and infertility to achieve their dreams of a family.

So he's still alive.

Then I found mention of Dr. Dubrovnik in an online registry for donor-conceived people, people apparently like me, looking for their biological families. They'd post what year they were born and where they were donor-conceived, and the name of the Obgyn, hoping to find siblings, or the donor himself.

After my mother told me the name of the doctor who inseminated her in an office on the east side of Manhattan. Sometime in the fall of 1977, I scoured the internet for Charles Dubrovnik and for any clue about how sperm donation worked in those early days.

I learned that the first successful artificial insemination happened in 1884.

It was in Philadelphia when a doctor found that the semen of a woman's husband was void of sperm. He inseminated her with a rubber syringe full of the semen of a man. The doctor thought to be the most attractive of his medical students. The mother was never told and thought she gave birth to her husband's baby nearly 100 years later. In the 70s, doctors were still getting donors from the pool of men most available to them medical students and interns, and residents working in their practices or hospitals.

But there were clues that even this was not a hard and fast rule. Doctors never expected the resulting children to ever know the identity of their fathers. They advised that children never be told that a donor was involved in creating them. Of course, a few decades later, we map the human genome, we get the internet, we swab the insides of our cheeks. For DNA samples, send them off to a direct-to-consumer DNA company and find out in a matter of weeks. Where in the world our ancestors came from, and who all of our relatives are. No one could have imagined that.

It was fascinating and kind of amusing to learn the very unusual way in which I was conceived. I'd be up late at night doing this research. I remember lying in bed with the laptop open, while my wife Debra was next to me, scrolling through pictures of Japanese pottery on her phone. I badgered her with each new discovery in my crash course on 1970s infertility treatments. Like when I learned I was born in the so-called fresh era, back when most mothers received fresh, recently discharged sperm, not frozen.

I mean, this sentence is crazy. I was frozen comma 1980, but my social cis was fresh 1982. Like, that is nonsense. Now we can translate that her father's sperm was frozen in 1980, but her social Cis....

Oh, the sister she grew up with got fresh sperm, and she got one D.C. so far, which means daughter conceived. I read a post from a D.C. person who had found 38 siblings born 1945 to 1971. Our estimated numbers are startling.

We're meeting up in New York City next weekend. I love spending time together. What? There must be people, siblings that are 27 years apart.

I was also researching Charles Debrovnair, the doctor who had treated my mom in 1977.

Was he mixing sperm and was he using his own sperm?

You hear a lot of stories these days about doctors who use their own sperm to impregnate their patients without their knowledge or consent. DNA tests in recent years have revealed this happened across the globe. But I soon found a YouTube video where Dr. Debrovnair talks about his life.

In it, he explains how he grew up as an Orthodox Jew, so he was Ashkenazi Jewish, not Irish, therefore he was not my father.

Eventually, I found this tiny private Facebook group made up of people whose mothers went to Dr. Debrovnair's office for fertility issues. All had recently discovered that they were donor-conceived. Just like me, I was not the only one in this situation. All of these people in the Facebook group were looking for biological fathers and siblings.

I shared my story, It was nice to have this larger community of people who knew exactly what I was going through.

Some of them said they'd actually spoken to Dr. Debrovnair. They said he'd take my call and then they gave me his phone number.

Wow, I am uh.

All right, I'm just gonna do this, I'm nervous as hell.

My heart is beating out of my chest.

And I just learned I was likely conceived in your office back in 1977.

And I have. I'm just learning this now 40 years old, and I would love to just chat with you for a couple of minutes to find out more. This was all kind of new information to me, as you can imagine, I'm 40..

I turned 40 in July. Dr. Debrovnair spoke to me graciously for about 40 minutes. He was no longer practicing medicine. He was in his 80s at this point.

But he was keeping busy lecturing on bioethics. Here was a doctor who may have inseminated my mother with a donor's sperm without her full knowledge. Based on what my mom remembered, she had no idea I was not Warren's biological son. I laid all of this out to Dr. Debrovnair.

And he later agreed to a video interview with me to tell me what he knew on the record. Does this face look familiar? Do you remember it from 42 years ago?

All right, so that's right there. That's 30 years now. In 30 years of doing inseminations, figure, whatever kind of multiplier you have, it gets up to be a fairly large number. If you're doing two inseminations a week or five a month, or whatever you want to say, it's a lot of numbers.

It's very gratifying.

So no, he had no records and no idea who my father was. And that's exactly how it was intended.

Where did you find the donors?

So I knew my father was Irish, and now I knew he likely became a doctor who was apparently cool under pressure.

I was anxious to have a healthy child, but what the situation might be with the child as an adult was really not something I was perhaps factoring to the equation at that point.

The child me was never a consideration.

She remembers being inseminated, she says she thought she was getting pregnant with her husband's sperm. And I wonder if that element of doubt. This idea that possibly maybe a small percentage, but possibly her husband could be the father, became the reality over the course of the pregnancy and in the ensuing years.

Is that possible?

And if they didn't accept that premise, they shouldn't be having donor insemination. We did tell the couples that we're going to inseminate you on three o'clock on Tuesday. And we'd like you to arrange it. That your husband will be available so that you could have intercourse that evening on Tuesday night. So certainly there was that possibility, and maybe that's the possibility that she or they fixated on, but there's no way that they should have known otherwise.

Regardless of what happened in that office, regardless of what was said, secrecy was embedded into all of this. In most cases, the parents were aware that their child was conceived with donor sperm. But they followed the prevailing medical advice at the time and never told their kids. Deceit was built into the process.

Even the whole part about having sex after the procedure, Dr. Debrovnair said, that was to increase the naturalness of the whole deal. To make it seem to the couple that they were having their own fully biological child. It's the same reason doctors would mix the husband's sperm, which had proven to not work with donor sperm and inseminated women, with that mixture, Dr.

Debrovnair said he did do this mixing procedure, but that it wouldn't have happened in my case, he said. By 1977, when I was conceived, his office had stopped mixing. Still, I had questions.

When would this process have been done? Why was it to further protect the father from the burden of knowing he might not be the father? Was that why?

And while the doctor told me he matched physical traits of the donor and husband and would match religion upon request, how come my father apparently had a different ethnicity from my mom's husband? At the time? I had more research to do. Dr. Debrovnair was helpful, but something felt off These pieces were not fitting together.

Really appreciate it, bye-bye now.

So I had to find him. I'd spent decades trying to connect with a man who often seemed to want little to do with me. But I'd been banging my head on the wrong wall the whole time now. I had an opportunity to put Warren in my past and figure out who had dropped off his genetic material. In Dr. Dubrovnik's mailbox on a fall day in 1977. To finally find my father for real.

So let the search begin for Irish men who would have been in medical school in the 70s, living in New York, and are maybe now recently retired gynecologists.

Elena and I googled last names of distant cousins we found on ancestry.

Com and put doctor next to that name, like, Is there a Dr. Lynch anywhere in America? Is he the right age? Did he go to medical school in New York?

We did this for hours, days, months. I called New York University, where Dr. Dubrovnik was affiliated, and spoke to someone there asking for a registry of all medical students in the 70s. She was nice, she said. She couldn't help.

Then we wondered the other half-sister, Tara, has an Irish last name, and Elena said I looked like Tara's father. So could her father be the donor? Our father? We wrote him a letter.

We didn't hear back.

In February 2019, I sent Elena a note. The dark feeling I've had is we may never know, we may never be able to figure out what happened, but not giving up.

Months went on. Finally, Elena and I crafted a letter and sent it via certified mail to our half-sister Tara in California. She could be the key to finding our father. Dear Tara, we are writing to you because we both connected with you on ancestry.com. Matt already tried to contact you on Ancestry, on your website and on Instagram.

Since we didn't hear back, we looked up your address in order to find you. We hope we're not being too intrusive, but we don't think you received Matt's previous notes, so that's why we figured we'd try you this way. I hope you're open to hearing our story, according to Ancestry.com. We're all half-siblings.

Elena and Matt only connected with each other this past September and have since begun to piece together how we could be so closely related. Matt is 40, Elena is 41. Neither of us had any idea, until recently, that we would have had half-siblings. But based on this DNA evidence and based on our conversations with our mothers, it appears that we were both conceived by sperm donors in New York City in 1977..

We don't know how much of this information you may be aware of. If it is shocking to you, we hope that you are able to receive it as well as possible. We certainly know it's difficult. We're happy to tell you everything we've figured out so far, if you're willing to hear it.

We gave Tara our email addresses and waited to hear back.

Next time on inconceivable truth, keep going over the road and, uh, first road on the left.

Inconceivable Truth is a production of Waveland and Rococo Punch. I'm writer and host Matt Katz, the story editor is Erica Lance, mixing by James Trout. Emily Foreman is our producer.

Natalie White is our intern, special thanks to Lulu Miller and Pat Walters of Radiolab. Our executive producers are Jason Hoke at Waveland and John Perotti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch. For photos and more details on the series, follow at Waveland Media on Instagram X or Facebook, and you can reach out via email at podcasts at waveland.media.

That's waveland w-a-v-l-a-n-d. If you like the series, please leave us a review and, as always, don't forget to tell a friend or relative I'm Matt Katz.

Thanks for listening.