SUNDAY MAIL
January 30,2008I Was the Daughter of a Sperm Donor
By Alison Smith-Squire
The champagne and laughter in the crowded marquee was flowing.
For Stella Kenrick the family party wasn't only a wonderful celebration of her beloved Aunt Peggy's 90th birthday, it was also a chance to catch up with friends and her many extended relatives.
But as Stella, a mother of two grown-up children, mingled with the guests, she could never have imagined that for her the day would be memorable for all the wrong
"Then she looked me in the eye and said: 'Your father isn't your real father - it was a donor insemination.' I was completely stunned."
"She said my parents had gone to a clinic in London. Obviously I know that these days people donate sperm and eggs so infertile couples can have a baby, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd been conceived that way - and in the 1950s.
"I thought of my late father and how much I'd loved him, thinking he was my real dad.
"Then I thought of my mother - we had never got on - and I felt sick as I realised the depth of 50 years of deception.
"In that instant the bottom dropped out of my world. I remember looking over at my brother, Charles, and thinking: 'You're not my brother any more.' It was a terrible moment."
Later that day, Peggy revealed that she had always known the truth but her mother, Anne, 89, had sworn her to secrecy.
"I never ascertained whether Peggy thought I already knew or whether she blurted out the truth because she was growing older and wanted to tell me before she died," she says.
"But from then on my life changed. It was as if my whole life had been built on a lie."
The revelation was to send Stella - ironically a professional private investigator - on a journey of self-discovery in a bid to unearth her true parentage.
She admits that until that fateful day three years ago, she had never questioned her family background. In fact, she had been proud of it.
"My father, Charles, came from a distinguished family. He was an army officer," she says.
"My mother was a teacher and we had a very middle-class upbringing."
Indeed, many would call it privileged. At the age of seven, her brother Charles - who according to Peggy had also been born by artificial insemination - was sent to the prestigious Westminster School.
Meanwhile, Stella went to board aged 11 at Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire.
Today, fees at both schools cost more than £25,000 a year each. The family grew up in a large detached house with a huge garden in Henley-on-Thames, Oxon.
"We weren't spoilt but we had everything we could ever want," Stella says.
"In hindsight, my parents, who were well off but not rich, must have made huge financial sacrifices to give Charles and I such a good education.
"My parents were deeply religious. My mother had been a nun for a while before she married and we went to the local parish church as a family every Sunday."
However, while to outsiders they appeared the perfect family, behind closed doors all wasn't well.
Although Stella had a good relationship with her father, she felt distanced from her mother.
"Given that I wasn't really his child, it is incredible how loved I felt by him but unfortunately the same couldn't be said of my relationship with my mother," she remembers.
"If you had asked me who I took after I would have said him, not my mother who was in fact my biological relative.
"In contrast to my father, who was warm and such a gentleman, my mother was cold. She never once cuddled me as a child or told me she loved me.
"Looking back, she ruled the family with a rod of iron, showing her disapproval by retreating into moody silences.
Stella Kenrick
Painful truth: The man Stella thought was her father was not biologically related to her"I loved playing the piano and took many examinations but anything less than a distinction was never good enough. She was pushy with Charles, now a pharmacologist, and very disappointed that he didn't study medicine.
"My father adored her but she gave him a hard time. Nothing he did was good enough."
After completing a degree in modern languages at Dublin University, Stella went to work in London as a PA for an international law firm. Then, when she was 22, her father suddenly died from a heart infection.
"It was a terrible shock as he was just 52," she says. "But the worst thing was that my mother never told my brother and me that he was ill until he was on his deathbed.
"He'd been in hospital for two or three days. By the time we reached the hospital our father was dead.
"Now, with hindsight, I believe she was terrified that he might tell Charles and I the truth before he died. He was such an honest man and it is a total mystery how he could have lived with such a huge secret.
"She was a domineering woman and I now think she must have threatened him never to tell us because I feel sure he would have wanted us to know the truth, however painful."
In 1981 Stella married John, a management consultant, and gave up work to care for their two children - Alice, now 24, and Tom, 21.
However, after 20 years together, Stella and her husband grew apart and divorced.
Yet, despite her mother being widowed, and the birth of the grandchildren, Stella's relationship with her never improved.
Eventually, her mother grew frail and was admitted, her mind still sharp, into a nursing home.
"When my aunt told me that my father had found he was infertile and that he and my mum had gone to a London clinic for sperm donation, a lot of things suddenly clicked into place about my mother," admits Stella.
"I was determined to find out the truth." The first thing Stella did was to tell her brother, Charles, who is two years older, about her discovery.
"That night as we drove back from the party to our hotel I asked him to stop the car," she recalls.
"He sat in a silence while I told him what Aunt Peggy had revealed to me.
"He was as shocked as I was. We knew we didn't look like one another - he is dark while I am fair.
"But the family joke had always been that I looked like Dad and he looked like Mum.
"I faced the truth that it was quite likely we weren't a full brother and sister and that he was from a different sperm donor from me."
A few days later, Stella visited her mother.
"I said how lovely the birthday party had been. She and her sister, Peggy, had never seen eye to eye and now I wondered if one of the reasons they'd fallen out over the years had been over her reluctance to tell my brother and me the truth about our conception.
"Then I said: 'Mum, when were you going to tell me the truth?' Her eyes looked up at me coldly. And then she spat, 'Never!'
"From that day she refused to speak to me, going into one of her disapproving silent moods. Devastated and in tears I fled home."
Stella planned to go back again to challenge her mother with more questions. But, a week later, she received a phone call from the nursing home. Her mother had died.
"I felt incredibly angry that my mother had once again had the last word," she says. "Worse, she had taken any information about our true identity with her to the grave.
"I simply couldn't comprehend how even in the throes of death anyone could be so incredibly selfish."
From then on both Charles and Stella pooled their resources in a desperate bid to track down their genetic fathers. But further shocking revelations were in store.
"My brother's godmother then told me that I had been conceived in a clinic in Harley St run by a woman called Dr Mary Barton in 1953," says Stella.
"Yet, what puzzled her most was that her parents even knew about sperm donation, let alone where to go for such a procedure.
"This was the 1950s when it had hardly been publicised," she says. "It would have been very expensive and as it was so new, it was potentially a medically risky thing to undertake.
"My parents were also so religious, respectable and middle class that I can hardly imagine them considering such a thing."
While the first baby reportedly conceived after sperm donation was born in the U.S. in 1885, nothing much had been heard about it in the UK until a pioneering gynaecologist called Dr Mary Barton opened her Harley St clinic in the 1940s.
This was where Stella's parents went for their fertility treatment. Dr Barton, who experimented with sperm donation during World War II, caused uproar after she published a paper on Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID) in 1945 in the British Medical Journal.
The Archbishop of Canterbury decried it as unethical, a commission set up to investigate it even ruled it should be regarded as a criminal offence and the practice was driven underground.
Stella adds: "Rumours claim a fire at the clinic some years later destroyed all the records. But it seems Dr Barton, her husband Bertold Wiesner and a handful of her male friends were responsible for perhaps hundreds - maybe even thousands - of babies being born, known today as the 'Barton Brood'.
"Many of the small gene pool of donors consisted of Eastern European men, and Jewish men who had fled countries such as Czechoslovakia-Poland and Hungary for sanctuary in Britain during the war."
Along with people who know they too are the product of a sperm donor, and have also traced their parentage back to the "Barton Brood", Stella has had a DNA test and registered with UK Donor Link, a government charity set up to try to match donor siblings. But no matches have so far been made.
"In those days parents were told not to tell the children - perhaps because of the social shame," says Stella.
"It is a chilling thought that I probably have many half siblings but that those people most probably do not know they were conceived this way.
"I am a very traditional person and have found the fact that I was conceived in such a cold way - rather than as a result of a loving relationship - incredibly upsetting.
"Apparently Dr Barton even did the inseminations using a turkey baster."
However, all this is more than Stella's brother has managed to unearth about his background.
"My parents were living in Germany when he was conceived," she says, "so he has been unable to find out any information."
Meanwhile, she has broken the news to her two children that the family on her father's side are not related to them at all.
"They were shocked and in fact the whole issue has had a far-reaching effect on my life," she explains.
"One side of my family is missing. Relatives my children grew up with aren't related at all.
"Medical history I thought I had is wrong. A huge chunk of my life isn't there."
In the summer of 2006, Stella married fellow private investigator Nick, 59. "He has been very supportive but says what does it matter now? He thinks I shouldn't let it dominate my life," she says.
"I will never harbour any anger towards my aunt for telling me because I hate the thought that it had been kept from me for so long.
"There are still days when I look in the mirror at my face and ask my reflection: 'Who are you?'
"I'm left feeling frustrated. I can imagine it must be terrible to be infertile, but it does seem the laws are skewed towards the parents who want a baby. Surely the child's rights should come first?
"Parents have no right to pass a child who is not genetically theirs off as their own.
"They should be made to tell the truth. In fact, I believe it can make parents resentful to a child.
"I now think my mother felt guilty and a failure about the way I was conceived and that was why she was so cold."
Nevertheless, as science increasingly reaches new heights to give infertile couples their longed for child, more and more adults will surely discover unsavoury truths about their conception.
And in the years to come, it would seem that stories like this will sadly become much more common.
Link to article
