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A Maryland woman conceived via sperm donation set out to learn about half-siblings she may have had. She soon found out she has 65 siblings, some of whom she has met in person.
Brenna Siperko, 20, has known she was conceived via sperm donation for as long as she can remember.
Siperko, from Ellicott City, Maryland, just over 10 miles from Baltimore, was raised in an only-child household for about 12 years until her mom and stepdad had her younger brother. But in January 2022, she completed a DNA test to learn more about her background.
“I had always thought I probably have siblings somewhere, or at least a couple since I come from a donor,” she told USA TODAY. “I took my test and found out from 23andMe.”
She found out she had about 13 siblings, then she was added to group chats where she found out she has even more siblings – 65 so far.
“I found people my age,” she said. “It was really exciting because I found people with common interests who I could become close to. They’re really easy to talk to.”
She thinks of her siblings as a support group, she said. Whenever she has a problem or something she wants to share, she texts the family group chat and they give her advice, she said.
She even met six of her half-siblings in Maryland. There are more of them there than anywhere else, she recalled.
She met 10 of them last year and flew to California in early 2023 to meet one of her brothers. Other siblings live in Canada, Texas, Michigan, New York, New Jersey and Florida.
Siperko and her siblings have an older sister, 27-year-old Fabiana, who a lot of them go to for advice. She lives in Baltimore.
“She’s kind of like the mom of the group, I suppose,” Siperko said. “She gives the best advice.”
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‘You can definitely see the resemblance’
Siperko said she and her siblings share some physical features, like their almond-shaped eyes and the roundness of their faces.
“A lot of our eyes are the same,” she recalled. “It’s like darker, more almond-shaped eyes … If you just put side-by-side pictures, you could definitely see the resemblance, kind of in the face shape, the eyebrows, sometimes the nose.”
She said it was “very weird” meeting people who look like her, but also cool.
“It’s weird to see myself in other people who I haven’t known my whole life,” she said.
The siblings haven’t met their biological father because he wanted to remain anonymous, she said.
Finding lots of siblings is common and a result of a lack of donor limitations, co-founder says
Wendy Kramer is a co-founder and director of the Donor Sibling Registry, a Colorado organization that helps people conceived via sperm, egg, or embryo donation find relatives. It happens every day through her organization, she said.
She has been connecting people from Siperko’s group for decades, including 38 of Siperko’s siblings. Altogether, the group has connected nearly 25,000 people with their half-siblings and biological parents.
And while some people are happy to find so many siblings, there is still an underlying issue she wants to see addressed: a lack of limitations on donating sperm.
Many sperm banks initially promised that each donor would result in no more than 10 kids, Kramer said, but − evidenced by Siperko’s case − that obviously didn’t happen.
What sperm banks are missing, Kramer said, is “accurate record-keeping on the children born.”
“That’s why we have so many half-sibling groups over 100 and even over 200,” she told USA TODAY. “Those groups just keep growing.”
“We all came to understand that that was a complete lie and they still lie about it,” she said, noting that in some cases, people find out they have more than 200 siblings.
Large sperm banks also ship sperm to clinics across the country and sometimes worldwide, she said.
Her organization has asked donors and parents of donor-conceived people what they think the limit should be and the most common number they hear is 10.
She said it’s unethical and irresponsible for the reproductive medicine industry to create so many half-siblings groups without updating families on medical information and limiting the number of births there are from each donor.
Part of the problem, she said, is that companies need to do a better job at keeping track of births. They aren’t always reported and record-keeping isn’t as precise as it should be.
“It’s just about a profit for selling sperm with no thought whatsoever given to the human beings they’re helping to create,” Kramer said.
“I used California Cryobank and my son has … half-siblings coast to coast, up and down, even in Puerto Rico,” she said. “You never know where your half siblings can be.”
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What’s it like to discover siblings?
How people respond when they find out they have so many siblings depends largely on the person, said Kramer. For introverts, finding out about lots of siblings could be “scarier” than it is for extroverts, she said. It’s deeply personal and there’s no telling how incorporating new people into your life will go.
But according to Kramer, there are many benefits to finding one’s siblings as well, including both medical and psychological.
“It’s an innate human desire to want to know where we come from and who we come from,” she told USA TODAY. “Allowing donor-conceived people to know about their ancestry, their close genetic relatives and their family medical history is crucial.”
Siperko said she has read concerning comments under articles about her siblings.
“I was reading the comments and a lot of it was about regulation and how people find it weird that somebody has all these siblings,” she said.
She has seen people post questions such as “What if you start dating and meet a sibling?”
“The reality of that happening is so low,” she said. “It’s weird to see people think of it that way. This is something you talk about when you’re first getting to know somebody.
Siperko, who has met some of her siblings, wants people in similar situations to know that they shouldn’t be too afraid to reach out and find each other.
“It’s a really great thing to have a whole group of people to support you … You may not know them, necessarily, but it’s very easy to get close to somebody you know you’re related to.”
