13Comments
A woman has posted a TikTok describing how an ancestry DNA test helped her discover she had over 50 half-siblings – sparking paranoia about accidentally dating a relative.
Izzy, who goes by @izzyvn_98 on TikTok, told her followers that she took an DNA test in 2018, curious as to where her ancestors were from. As well as discovering she was "not as Italian" as she thought, she claims she was contacted by another woman who had used the service. The woman said that Izzy had "matched" with her daughter, and asked her if she was related to a specific family.
Izzy said no.
"She then asks me if I was a sperm donor baby, because her daughter was too," Izzy wrote over her video. "Now I'm freaking out because she could be my sister because I am a donor baby."
"The donor's half-sister then matches with me and DMs me saying other mothers who used the same donor, and their children, are part of a private Facebook group and that I should join too."
After joining the group, she claims there were over 50 people in there, of various ages, all of whom were created using the same sperm donor's sperm. Izzy goes on to say that there's now "paranoia" in the group "because some of them are afraid there are so many of us and we may end up dating someone who happens to be a sibling."
Though unusual, the situation isn't entirely unheard of. In the Netherlands, one prolific sperm donor known as "Louis" fathered over 200 children via sperm donations. Louis was specifically hoping that if he donated enough of his sperm, one of his children would track him down.
“If I had 10 children this way, there would be a very slim chance of success,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “But what if I had 100… or even more?”
Well, in that sense it worked. As well as tracking down their biological father, many of his biological children were able to find each other. Some of them, on Tinder.
“Once, I swiped on a sister and she swiped right on me at the same time,” Jordy Willekens told the Irish Times of the incident. The half-siblings who found each other now keep a list of potential siblings, to prevent further mishaps like this, though there's no telling exactly how many more potential relatives there are out there in their dating pool.
Willekens now has to be careful when he dates, adding “I have a very trained eye by now".
