Five years ago, Tiffany Gardner learned she had another father. She already had two.
One had colon cancer and died when Gardner was 4 years old. Her adoptive father taught her to drive and walked her down the aisle at her wedding. At 35 years old, when Gardner received news of a third, “I remember the room spinning,” she said.
Gardner had been in her mother’s kitchen. During the conversation, her mother let go of a long-held secret about the man Gardner had long believed to be her father. He was in an accident, her mother said. He had to relearn how to walk and talk. I couldn’t get pregnant. The doctors said the accident had likely left him infertile. We used a sperm donor.
More than a million Americans have been conceived through artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization in the decades since the techniques emerged. From the start, sperm donors went on with their lives with an apparent certainty they would never meet any offspring. Only sperm banks knew their names. Recent technology changed all that, shredding agreements of anonymity made in past years. Low-cost DNA tests provide genetic matches, and social media serves as an address book of fathers who never expected or wanted to be found.
