Written by: Julia Gytri
There’s a psychological difference most people don’t think about when it comes to privacy (a healthy boundary) versus secrecy (a withholding rooted in shame). For intended parents, learning the difference may be one of the most important things you do for your future child.
If you are using (or considering using) donor eggs to build your family, there is a question that tends to come up frequently. It’ll often feel like a bit of a whisper, it’ll often speak up at 2 a.m.:
Should I tell my child they are donor-conceived?
And underneath that question is an even more loaded one: Who else needs to know? Parents? In-laws? The pediatrician? Anyone in the school pickup line?
This decision can feel enormous because it touches almost everything at once: your child’s identity, your own sense of family, your privacy, every relationship you have, and the story you will eventually tell out loud and put down on paper.
If you can believe it, a generation ago, many fertility clinics actively counseled parents not to talk about donor conception. Wild, right? The field has since moved decisively in the other direction, encouraging early, age-appropriate openness with donor-conceived children. But that shift has left many parents floating in a confusing nether region: they’ve heard they “should” tell, but no one has handed them a framework, a script, or a way to think about how the rest of the world plays into their story.
The most useful framework we’ve come across (and the one that resolves most of the confusion) comes from renowned expert Lisa Schuman, LCSW, who has spent nearly three decades counseling intended parents from all walks of life, and is the co-author of Building Your Family: The Complete Guide to Donor Conception. The way she frames this is simple, but it changes everything: privacy and secrecy are not the same thing.
Schuman puts it plainly: “This quandary can be framed as a decision between privacy vs. secrecy. Feelings of shame are typically part of secrecy, whereas everyone is entitled to their privacy.”
In other words
The cleanest line you can draw, the one we keep coming back to is to (again) tell your child early, calmly, and often. Carefully choose who else in your life knows and on what timeline. That is privacy. The thing to avoid is a story your child cannot hear. You should never be making wide eyes at someone over your child’s head or asking someone to stop talking in their presence. You control the story better than that.
We learned this the hard way once before. Schuman points to a generation of children adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom were raised under instructions from agencies “not to tell.” As adults, those children have been strikingly consistent about the cost: identity confusion, distrust of their parents, and in some cases real anger at having been kept from their own story.
We are now learning the same lesson a second time with donor-conceived adults. The pattern is the same. The greatest harm is not the use of a donor. It is the late, often accidental discovery that a fundamental part of one’s origin story was hidden. A relative slips, a half-sibling appears on a consumer DNA site, or a paperwork mistake exposes the truth at the wrong moment.
By contrast, the donor-conceived people Schuman and other researchers describe today, often children of single parents and openly LGBTQIA+ parents who were typically told from the very beginning, are doing well. The shame model has been replaced with an integration model. Children grow up never not knowing. Their story is simply their story.
The takeaway is not that disclosure is risky. It is that non-disclosure is actually the riskier path, and that, in an era of $99 spit kits, biological half-sibling matches, and an era where the discovery of donor identity is ever more likely than not, it is also increasingly difficult to maintain.
The modern best practice articulated by Schuman, supported by decades of donor-conception research from scholars such as Dr. Vasanti Jadva at the University of Cambridge and reflected in guidance from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), points in one direction: tell your child early, tell them often, and create a household where donor conception can be discussed openly and without shame.
Two distinctions are worth knowing because they untangle most of the worry parents bring into the conversation.
Jadva and colleagues distinguish between structural openness (whether you have any contact relationship with the donor) and communication openness (the way parents talk with their child about the donor over time). Even children without a fully open donor relationship do very well when their parents communicate openly. When questions are welcome, the child senses that their parents feel good about how they were built.
Avoid building up to any one single moment of disclosure. The healthier model is likely a steady stream of age-appropriate language that begins before your child can understand the words, meaning they will grow up with them. As Schuman writes, “Sharing your donor-conceived child’s information to them is essential, disclosing to everyone is not.” The audience that matters most is your child, and the timeline is their entire childhood.
Parents often ask for ages and milestones. There is no universal script, but there is a useful arc built from the research, modern storybooks now widely available, and the lived experience of thousands of donor-conceived families. Here’s a playbook (not a rulebook):
Throughout, Schuman stresses that the goal is clear: a household where the topic is normal, the donor can be discussed with ease, and the child grows up with the words already familiar.
Most intended parents we hear from are not afraid of the concept. They are afraid of the sentence. Here are a few scripts borrowed from Schuman’s work and from families who’ve been living with this language for years that you can rewrite to sound like you.
Notice the pattern. With your child, the language is warm and matter-of-fact. With everyone else, the language gently centers your child’s ownership of their own story. That single shift — “this is my child’s story to tell” — solves an enormous amount of social awkwardness.
A few of the worries we hear most often, and what experience and research actually suggest.
Openness, in the end, is less a single conversation than a family culture. It’s the small things.
Your child’s baby book that mentions the donor on the same page as the hospital.
The way you mention the donor at dinner without lowering your voice.
The library shelf that includes a book or two about how families are built.
The pediatrician you choose because they’re donor-conception literate.
The friend you trust enough to be honest with.
It is also a posture, not a performance. No child needs a perfect speech. They need parents who empower them.
At Fairfax EggBank, this is the code we follow for the families and donors we work with. We provide clear, transparent information about our donors and our process, expanded genetic testing so families have the information they’llwant decades from now, and ID-option choices that reflect the modern reality of donor conception. The same logic that drives those choices on our side is the logic this article is about on yours: openness, not secrecy, is what protects the family being built.
Privacy is yours to keep. Secrecy is the part to let go of. The space in between is where most healthy donor-conception families live.
Julia Gytri is a multidisciplinary writer and healthcare advocate bridging the arts and public health through a hybrid career rooted in education, communications, and collaboration. Her mission is to improve the standard of care for those living with rare, stigmatized, and/or under-researched conditions through storytelling in every project she undertakes.
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