Life is full of many surprises, but I imagine discovering you have nearly 100 children you didn’t know about has to be up there among the more shocking ones. Dylan Stone-Miller was an undergrad at Georgia State University in 2011 when his roommate suggested donating sperm to earn some funds. Dylan, who says he was broke at the time, estimates he visited the Atlanta sperm bank Xytex about 400 times over five years, at $100 a pop. For those of you mathing along, that’s $40,000 he made for… that activity. Dylan signed a form that said his info would not be provided to any offspring until they turned 18. Although there are no national regulations on sperm donations (a fact that Dylan would later become very acquainted with), Xytex told Dylan that his contributions would be used on no more than 40 families. Nearly 10 years later, one mother tracked Dylan down to thank him for his donation, and then everything spiraled from there:
The first connection: Back in 2020, just minutes into his new job at a software engineering firm in Atlanta, Dylan Stone-Miller read a direct message on Instagram that left him stunned. A woman who had conceived a daughter with the sperm he first donated to a sperm bank nine years earlier while attending college had managed to track him down — and wanted to thank him. Soon Stone-Miller found himself clicking through the woman’s Instagram profile, staring at hundreds of photos of his biological daughter. “Seeing this little girl’s beautiful face just filled me with so much joy, love and gratitude,” he recalls. “I had to fight to hold back the tears.”
There was a Facebook group for families with children using his donor #: In the months that followed, Stone-Miller began hearing from dozens of parents — all of whom welcomed children with his sperm. Using his donor number, they had found their way to one another online and formed a Facebook group to stay in touch. At last count Stone-Miller estimates that he has at least 97 biological children in six countries — but says the true number could be more than 250. The revelation altered the trajectory of his life and eventually inspired him to become a passionate advocate for donors and families. Now he’s calling for legal limits on the number of pregnancies that result from one sperm donor, as well as changes to the ways that the multibillion-dollar industry treats people like him and recipient families.
His real number of kids is likely between 150-250: When Stone-Miller began meeting other parents online and became aware of his ever-increasing number of offspring, he was in disbelief. “Right now I know of at least 62 families,” he says, noting that some of them have had multiple children using his sperm. “But typically only about 40 percent of recipient parents report their birth back to the sperm bank, so I anticipate there being around 150 families and more than 250 children.”
He meets his kids with families that welcome it: Soon Stone-Miller — who had spent years helping to raise his ex-wife’s son — decided that he owed it to his biological children to meet them before they turned 18 if the parties were interested. “I know how inquisitive children are and how important it is to answer their questions, especially ones about where they came from,” he says. Starting in 2021 he began meeting one after another. (He thinks the oldest of his kids would now be 12.) By the time he decided to take a sabbatical from his computer programming job and embark on his cross-country road trip last May, he had gotten to know 18 of them. The number now stands at 26. The parents and children first connect with him online, “and then we figure out if we want to meet in person,” he says. “It’s not like strangers meeting. It’s like online friends becoming friends with a mutual lifelong commitment.”
He’s an advocate now: For Stone-Miller — who is currently based in Washington State and works remotely for a non-profit that he’s launching to help sperm donors and recipients navigate challenges — the days ahead will be filled with more meetings with his biological children, including a second trip to Australia, where at least five of them live. He recently learned that his youngest was born four months ago. “The sperm bank tells me that they’ve retired me,” says Stone-Miller, “but there is no legal requirement in the U.S. for them to stop distributing my donated sperm.”
A family for himself? Asked whether he hopes to someday start a family himself, Stone-Miller thinks it may be irresponsible. “At one point in time I really wanted to raise children of my own,” he says. “But I don’t think it would be ethical for me to bring more children into the world. For now I’m seeing if I’m fulfilled enough by the connections I have.”
The article doesn’t suggest in any way that Dylan split with his wife over the discovery of his kids, but I can’t stop the image in my head of a judge asking “And why are you seeking this divorce?” and the ex-wife answering, “I learned my husband had 97 kids.” My goodness, there are soooo many questions. Does Dylan start making Christmas calls in September? If there’s a Facebook group, does that mean that these families are getting together without him? If so, what do the parents say to their kids? Once these kids are of dating age they’ll have to download Iceland’s am-I-related-to-you app. I just hope Dylan doesn’t go broke with the birthday present upkeep.
All right, now that I’ve gotten the juvenile responses out of my system, let’s talk about Dylan. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that many, if not most people in his situation would become completely overwhelmed and back away. Dylan hasn’t. He’s embraced this improbable circumstance and made it his life’s work, sharing resources for donor conceived people, recipient parents, and for anyone who wants more info on the current state of anonymous donations and suggested reforms. This line in his bio says it all: “Doing what I can to show up for the ones who want a connection.”
A few months ago James O’Brien was discussing this issue (sperm donors’ right to anonymity) on his radio show. A guy with similar story called, he was also a broke college student and did it for money, but got assurance that he will have full anonymity. Then, the law in UK changed, I think now the children over 18 can get info on the donors if they request it. Unlike Dylan, some donors don’t want to know and meet their bio children. It is so weird that before building a fully functioning sperm/egg donor system, the lawmakers didn’t fully work on its future implications on both donors and kids who may want to know their bio parent.
It’s because the system started in wild west times (known as mid-century America lol). Originally the donors were other doctors and medical students, and parents were advised never to tell their children their true origin story. However, with the rise of online genetic test, you just need to get an inquistitive cousin to closely match a stranger and look into it a little.
I matched with a secret half brother on 23andMe (my dad knocked up someone in college and they gave the kid up for adoption). When I google the phenomenon most of the stories were people finding out that they were conceived by donation.
While I understand the origin story of the bonkers system it is well past time for better regulation in the United States.
Maybe this point has already been made but it doesn’t matter whether the laws have changed. Given the number of people using 23 and me or similar sites, the kids will find their half siblings and then track down their biological father’s cousin or sister or uncle to track him down.
Technology has made the laws irrelevant.
I have friends who were able to become parents because of people like Dylan.
It’s impressive that he thought to ask the question about the number of families that would be created as a result of his donations in the moment, because it’s a window into that industry. And it’s impressive that he’s advocating on behalf of those kids and families.
I now live in the NLs and I have two friends who used donors to get pregnant. The laws since the 1990s are that one sperm donor can have a maximum of 25 children. All countries. This means that said donor is usually used for certain families as well—it doesn’t mean 25 separate women/ parents get to use a sperm donor. Children of sperm and egg donors legally have the right to know their “DNA” and who the donors are as well. And now due to genetic testing, lots more are finding out who they are biologically related to. In terms of IVF, you only get three tries… I have no idea what the bleep this guy was thinking!! He should have been able to do the math, and the sperm bank is absolutely shady, immoral and it should be investigated. How on earth could they genetically test this guy to make sure he doesn’t carry any major illnesses and pay him 400 (!) times? Why hasn’t the US (my people, wtf?!) regulated this?
Thanks for this @ML – when you say “all countries,” are you talking just about the Euro Zone, or is this an international agreement? I’m curious about the agency whose purview this would have fallen under….
Amy, There have been scandals here, too. They’ve discovered, for instance, a couple of men working for medical institutions who donated their own sperm—especially before they increased the amount of regulations. However, if you donate sperm in the NLs, you are only supposed to legally have up to 25 children via sperm donation total. You’re not supposed to donate elsewhere, but I honestly don’t know now that I think about it, if there’s any way to check that this doesn’t happen.
I don’t know…I find it weird this dude is calling for limits on *pregnancies* and not limits on *sperm donations.*
Sounds very let’s-control-women’s-reproduction-rather-than-men’s.
Nobody forced this dude to donate sperm over 400 times.
He could have put his own limit on it at any point, but now he wants laws regulating women’s/family’s access to sperm, instead of instituting donor limits?
@DK, thank you for making this point. I am also troubled by his decision to frame this as a problem of pregnancies and not donations. He’s fine making a bunch of $ from selling his genetic material, but he wants to limit the benefits to the people who seek to use his material. He can profit financially, but we can’t let people with wombs benefit too much?
I think it’s fine limiting the number of successful pregnancies a specific donor can contribute to. That’s not really a limit on women having pregnancies.
Limiting the number of donations can be problematic. For one, it can take multiple attempts to conceive a child with donor sperm, so if you want a specific donor and you want more than one child, you are likely going to need a number of samples. Plus, sperm can be used in general research on a number of areas, so again, need a lot of samples.
If he donated so many times why does he care how many times his samples have been used?
@Lauren, that’s exactly why donor limits, rather than pregnancy limits, make more sense.
Limiting the # of pregnancies could still create those problems, but with massive impacts on the family/ies trying to get pregnant: say you’ve been trying for your second child with the same donor you used for your 1st child, but because that donor has contributed 400 samples and others are also using the samples, whoops….sometime in all the attempts it’s taking you to conceive, that donor’s sperm has reached its pregnancy # max via other families, and now you can no longer use his samples, and you have to find a new donor.
Whereas, if the donor # is limited to a reasonable amount of donations (if any of this is going to be regulated with # limits), say 10-20, a family could feasibly purchase ALL the donations so they can try many times and ensure their child has no unknown half-siblings, if that is important to them (in fact, I know many couples who have done this).
So I remain unconvinced that regulating pregnancies, rather than the number of donations a man can get paid for, is the best choice.
He donated his sperm over 400 times!!! What did he think was going to happen. He should have expected at the very least 400 babies (at the very very least)
That was my thought. Did he think nobody was going to use those 400 deposits?
I think limits would be good. If most of the children live in the same area, the chance of unknown incest happening is very high.
IVF (which is presumably what his donated sperm was used for) does not have a 100% success rate. It’s quite typical to go through several cycles for one healthy pregnancy. Even with “natural” pregnancy something like 25% end in miscarriage. Basically, 400 babies would be an incredible success rate (though also, “only 62” seems maybe a little low).
He was young and stupid, I can give him a pass.
I can’t to the sperm bank, though. They should limit the number of donations a person can give and limited the number of times a donor is used.
It’s nice that he’s using this experience to advocate for change.
This exactly.
I would say young and lazy. Instead of getting a job, he donated sperm. He didn’t care what happened to it.
He wrote on his Insta that the sperm bank told him the extra genetic material would be used for research.
Sorry but he was looking to make fast easy cash instead of working at Burger King
I know!!!! WTF did I just read? I always assumed it was a couple of donations at most, and maybe one or two times a donor is selected. Was there no one else donating to that particular bank???
I have a friend who used a donor when she wanted to have a child and I’m very happy it exists and works for people who need or want it, but this is just unbelievable, the numbers.
I also always thought the donors remained anonymous, it’s so strange to me that people are contacting him and he’s meeting all “his kids”.
He was a college student. He wasn’t thinking about the big term consequences, and (reasonably) assumed this established medical institution knew what they were doing. It wasn’t like back alley donations. He knows better now, so he’s going above and beyond to do better.
It’s not like we haven’t been college students too looking to make money but I would never have resorted to selling sperm 400 times
What an idiot. What did he think was gonna happen to his sperm?? He says he doesn’t want kids because it would be unethical but he didn’t think that when he was being paid $100/pop for his donation. I’m having a hard time taking this guy seriously.
He wrote on his Insta that the sperm bank told him the extra genetic material would be used for research.
Big difference in guys’ brains between 18 and 30.
Exactly. He realized that he participated in something less than ideal. Partly because he was lied to, partly out of youthful naivete, partly out of changing technology (genetic testing), and partly out of changing social mores. And then he quit his likely well compensated software engineering job to start a non profit to try to make things better.
I’m annoyed at calling them his “kids”. He’s a sperm donor. They are their parents’ kids.
I completely agree. They are not his “kids”, they are his biological material. They are the kids of the parents who raised them. This topic has come up in my family because my spouse and I have frozen embryos from IVF that we are considering donating to a fertility center. The doctor at the center emphasized that it is not really wise to think of these as your kids; the parental attachment is to the person who raises them and you are just the biological material for a future parent. I don’t know what the better term would be for this media story, but I definitely object to the connotation of them being his “kids”.
He was a professional sperm donor that made a lot of families fulfill their dreams of having kids. He was compensated financially for it. He can make peace with the joy he brought to other people’s lives
I don’t understand his his complaint. One, they are NOT his children. They have his genetic material, but he is NOT their father. That kind of language suggests he could have legal rights to them.
He donated sperm hundreds of times, but is surprised that dozens of families found success with his material? Was that not the point? Or was he just interested in the money, but imagined that most of his sperm was useless? Now, if the center lied to him that is a separate issue that needs to be addressed.
Otheewise, he got his money, people built families, none of the kids are his, so everything worked out just as like it was supposed to!
The sperm bank lied to him about how many families would use his sperm and what his sperm would be used afterward. They also lied about the children not having access to his information until they turned 18.
I think he’s got a lot to complain about from that angle.
Also, all of the adults in the room can think of it this way – not his family, no expectation for contact. But he is quite reasonably and compassionately saying the children born this way are going to feel quite differently – they want to know where they come from.
I’m conflicted. I think there should be a limit on how many times his sperm could be used…but also, he donated 400(!!!) times. What did he think would happen with all that sperm?!
But anyway, I’m really glad he’s willing to have a relationship with those children who seek him out. And hopefully his advocacy work will lead to better regulations around the use of sperm and eggs.
Apparently he said elsewhere he was told the excess would be used for research not so many babies
I also think there needs to be a limit on how many times you can donate sperm. 400 times? I understand that he was a broke college student, but that is excessive.
Remember the scandal in orange county, where fertility doctors were using eggs from one woman to impregnate others without consent? It was a huge scandal (and it’s Pedro Pascal ‘s father, incidentally, who also plead guilty to tax evasion last year)
The doctors does the country & laws were changed. Seems a good idea to can he sperm donor laws too.
Just think of the ethical problems that could arise from having so many kids that are related.
Imagine one kid has leukemia or some other autoimmune disease, and a sibling could possibly help. Would they share that in their FB group as well? Would people help voluntarily – or feel pressured?
Or imagine, somewhere down the line, grandkids falling in love without knowing their backgrounds. I can’t imagine them still having that donor #. We always joke how the BRF is related to other European RFs and that QEII and her cousband Phil were related, as they were second cousins. Just think what kind of medical problems could arise out of that.
There have actually been cases of siblings separated and independently adopted getting married and then finding out. Maybe people should start testing their DNA before marriage. The new marriage blood test.
Why did “cousband” tickle me so much. Okay, I’m a child; I’ll see myself out.
Yes, there is a very very very small chance that biological half siblings could meet and have their own romance, but other than that, I mean, nobody stops men from going and doing the same thing the old fashioned way.
Yes we do have a Nick Cannon post this morning.
🤣🤣🤣
He was compensated for 400 donations. One would think it would have been reasonable to assume at least one child would result from each of those donations otherwise what would be the point of collecting them.
With the availability of low priced consumer DNA tests, the days of “anonymity” of sperm donors are over. A competent genetic genealogist or search angel can find them.
Why would anyone make 400+ deposits without thinking through the possibility of large numbers of potential children. This is definitely an area that needs additional regulation.
A good friend and her wife had fraternal twin boys from donor sperm. They told me that ‘they bought all the available sperm from that donor’ so that this situation would be avoided. Years later, one of the twins does a 23andme and Voila! There is a facebook group of half siblings; 20 of them at this point. My friend has meltdown because ‘this wasn’t supposed to happen and their precious snowflakes were supposed to be unique, one of a kind, blah blah blah.’ She wants nothing to do with the facebook group, but her now ex-wife is more laissez faire about it. I was going through stem cell transplant at the time, so I pointed out to her – they have a BIG pool of half siblings if something like my cancer happens to them. Better to know WHO the siblings are to avoid in-breeding, and so on. But I had a quiet giggle about the whole ‘bought all the sperm donations from this guy’ because, clearly, he had MORE to give after they sold out his stock!
Here is the thing about the banks, if your sperm is not viable, it is destroyed. And sometimes those banks don’t tell you and take more at other times to see if they will take. Between that and the advancement of IVF, that many times really isn’t that far off.
Cannot fault his activism and outlook but like others said, he was donating more than once per week for FIVE YEARS. Something is not adding up about what was communicated to him- why would they pay him for hundreds of times over the supposedly maximum 40 times (/families?) He’s clearly not dumb so not sure what he thought was happening.
The price of cash pay IVF is high at an academic medical center and frequently astronomical at private community centers. (Sidenote: call up the local medical school and ask them what the cash price is and then go get the commercial before committing to private facilities)
$100 is nothing in scope to the cost of a round of IVF. Also, it factors in the time taken to drive, the time to “distress” from whatever, the time to do the deed, the time to drive back, etc.
What is funny though, is that there are roughly 80-300 -million- sperm per average ejaculation in a healthy young-enough man. So…… 400 events x (let’s spit ball) 150 million sperm per event = a lot of sperm. So. Many. Sperm.
Somewhere in Hollywood a script is being written…
It already was a film more than a decade ago. Delivery Man with Vince Vaughn.
As a donor conceived person I can tell you this doesn’t shock or surprise me. It is an unregulated industry that has awful practices. Companies still lie to recipient parents and donors because they did it for so long without getting caught. With the advent of home DNA tests there is no such thing as anonymity, all it takes is one distant relative to take a taste and the donor can be found.
Every single individuals conceived through the use of donor material / assistance was a very much wanted baby.
We can say that the facility shouldn’t have allowed him to do this 400 times, but honestly, I don’t personally know anyone who has actually donated sperm or eggs. Maybe if society did more to normalize this entire process, there would be more, um, genetic diversity in the available donor cells.
It’s the tip of the iceberg in regards to this surprisingly unregulated market. And waaay more male doctors than a person can guess use their own sperm without the woman’s consent. It’s such a dark rabbit hole.
He was donating sperm over 6x/month in order to get to 400 in 5 years. Capitalism, man…the model exceeds its limits and chaos ensues. The ethics of the genetic replication alone are questionable.
This is crazy! I kind of assumed that ethical clinics wouldn’t use sperm from the same man more than a few times, and only for a couple of families. I guess there is some sketchy stuff going on, and that’s why these regulations are needed.
Wayy, way back when I was barely an adult – 2001 – a friend of a friend wanted donor eggs and was willing to pay around 10K to get them. I was broke and needed/wanted money, and it seemed like a huge payout at the time.
The conversation I had between her and the facility turned me completely off the industry, for life.
She had severe mental illness, had been in jail multiple times, was newly sober (less than 3 months), and already had multiple kids who she had lost custody of, so she wanted a “do-over” (her words, not mine).She wanted eggs from someone she “knew” rather than someone anonymous and screened. The facility didn’t care about any of that. She had the cash, and as long as she could find someone willing to give eggs, they didn’t care about that person’s background either. I was very, very blunt about my genetic background, and my extended family’s mental illness background. Like there is a higher than average (of related peoples) rate of severe schizophrenia on one side of my family. I asked about sperm screenings to counteract that – there weren’t any. They made no effort to verify any information. In fact, two people told me to lie on the paperwork about my genetic history.
One 20 minute conversation later and I despised the fertility industry as a whole. To this day – 23 years later – I still believe the vast majority of it is highly, highly unethical. I struggle with a knee-jerk reaction every time I hear the words IVF. And – even though they have nothing to do with each other, and one should not effect the other – the more abortion is restricted, the angrier I get that THIS industry just gets to go along without a care, a clue, or any stringent regulation at all – all because BUHT BAYYYBEES!!!! They (the industry AND the politicians) don’t give a flying f*** about the actual lives of the actual humans produced, only that they get birthed.
So all that to say, yeah, this story completely tracks to me. The only thing I’m surprised about is that the guy is actually trying to be in the kid’s lives and didn’t change his name and run.
I agree. “Donating” is a misconception – everyone in Fertility is buying or selling. It’s commodifying children and is centered around the desires of adults instead of centered around the needs of children.
It is commodifying for sure
Along with what has already been said, accidental incest is a massive concern because of an excess of the same donor’s sperm within a limited geographical area.
There should be regulations to safeguard against this. However, it would be very difficult to create something that all parties, especially sperm banks, would comply with and that’s enforceable.