My “Before”

Sunday 2 August 2026

Camp ended yesterday morning — one last swim, then bags, then the flight home. The idea survived the forty kilometres, by the way. It was there every time I touched the wall.

This weekend I finally did what the plan said camp evenings would do: I went deep on the donor-conceived community. It is full of remarkable people doing remarkable work.

For people who don’t know — and I didn’t really know much, even six weeks ago — donor-conceived people are people conceived using donated sperm, eggs, or embryos. Some of them are also surrogacy-born. Many aren’t. They are a much bigger group than the surrogacy-born one, and they have been organising for longer.

The organisations I kept finding:

• Donor Conceived UK. The UK’s national peer-led organisation, by and for donor-conceived people. Set up after a national consultation in 2023. Their tone is calm and adult and serious. Their advisory board is made of donor-conceived people themselves. It is exactly the kind of thing I was imagining, but for a slightly different population.
• We Are Donor Conceived in the US. Stories from donor-conceived people, since 2016.
• Donor Conceived Community in the US, which provides support & education for people navigating donor conception & DNA discoveries.
• Donor Conception Network UK, which has been running since 1993 and even has a surrogacy strand for families who also used donor gametes.

(I can only see their public pages. There may be more going on inside their private groups than I can tell from outside.)

At some point I want to email Donor Conceived UK and ask how they built what they built. If I ever start something, I would want to learn from the people who already figured this out.

But here is the thing. I read their websites top to bottom and I did not find myself in them. Not because they are doing anything wrong — they aren’t. It just isn’t my thing. A lot of donor-conceived stories are about finding out — sometimes at twenty-eight, from a DNA test. Mine is different. I have always known. Nothing was hidden from me. I just want to understand more about the thing I have always known.

Also: nearly every voice in those communities is an adult. I am fifteen. There isn’t a teenage chapter to slot myself into.

So: same building, different room. A great model. Not my model.

— D.