00:02So my mother's fertility doctor decided to use his own sperm instead of the sperm
00:11donor that my parents selected and did this without their consent and without their knowledge.
00:22I'm from a really small town in East Texas called Center. It's about 5,000 people in
00:28population, so it's really, really tiny. My parents struggled with infertility. So at
00:34the direction of my parents' fertility doctor, Dr. Kim McMorries, they looked into
00:40artificial reproductive technologies, specifically artificial insemination by an
00:44anonymous sperm donor. Dr. McMorries handed them a sheet of paper from California
00:51Cryobank in which they selected sperm donor 106. So after many inseminations with
00:58donor 106, I was finally conceived. When I was seven years old, that father, Doug,
01:08passed away from cardiomyopathy, which is a heart disease. When I was 16, I was very
01:15nosy and curious, and I had a habit of going through my mom's emails. And I came
01:22across the communication that she had with California Cryobank. And that's how I found
01:26out that I was donor conceived. When I was 18, I was eligible to submit my mother's
01:35insemination records in order to gain more information on donor 106. After about a year,
01:41they finally got ahold of Steve, donor 106, and they told him that he had an offspring.
01:46We got really close, and that's been our story for the last 13 years.
01:54Eww, play-doh!
01:57Can you start when we get it started?
02:00How many eggs?
02:02Let's do three.
02:04And crack them.
02:07My son Hutton was struggling with some pretty significant medical health issues. Last year, at the direction of his doctors,
02:15we decided to gather more genetic variations on him. And the way that they
02:20wanted us to do that was through 23andMe plus health. When we got those results back,
02:26we found out that he had celiac disease, that I had a celiac variant, and I was not
02:32reporting this to his doctors because I was reporting medical history from sperm donor 106.
02:40Hey Hutton, are you ready?
02:44Here, jump.
02:50Yum, yum, yum!
02:53Once we finally got him okay and his allergies sorted out and his, you know, food therapies
02:59and speech therapies, I really started to become more curious about connections. So I was looking
03:05at Ancestry and 23andMe on the DNA portion. And I was immediately connected to two half-brothers.
03:12So I talked to them. They both know that they're donor-conceived and this is a part of their story.
03:18And then there was a third one. So I contacted who I assumed was a third half-brother. He was
03:26very adamant that he was not donor-conceived.
03:29So we went back. We looked a little bit, you know, deeper into it. And I said,
03:34well, you know, we could be first cousins according to this. So why don't you tell me about your uncles?
03:39And he said, I have one uncle and he's actually from your area in Nacogdoches and his name is Kim
03:47McMorries.
03:49My exact reaction was, oh shit, that is my mom's fertility doctor.
03:57Being donor-conceived is really lonely. And then to find out that you're actually not donor-conceived
04:03and you're the product of your mom's fertility doctor, it's even lonelier.
04:07When I discovered this, I had to be the one to go tell my mom.
04:11And I had to be the one to call Steve, donor-106, who I've called dad for the last 13
04:18years,
04:19who my kids call Papa, the man who officiated my wedding,
04:23and tell him that he wasn't my biological father.
04:30These are all of our letters and emails and all of the communication that I had with the doctor.
04:41We had multiple communications over the course of five or six weeks.
04:46With those letters, he kept changing his story. He wasn't consistent in his story.
04:51I asked him if he ever discussed mixing the sperm or inseminating with his own sperm,
04:56and then told him that my mom was very overwhelmed and insisted she did not consent or acknowledge this.
05:02He says that there was only one to two pregnancies that were successful, but now we have four illegitimate children.
05:12It's shocking to me that this is a $5.4 billion industry that is essentially self-regulated.
05:21So the next thing that I did is I called a friend who's a lawyer.
05:25And I was just in complete shock to learn that this is not a crime in the state of Texas
05:30or anywhere else.
05:34I really wanted to make this about changes, not about charges against Dr. McMorries.
05:40And I wanted him to be a part of my legacy. I didn't want to be a part of his
05:44legacy.
05:53So at that point, you know, I really recognized that the only healing to take place with this whole tragedy
06:00was to make it bigger than myself and to protect the future of vulnerable people
06:05who are using artificial reproductive technologies.
06:09This is the drive that I made every single week, once a week, to come to Austin for four months.
06:18When I started coming, it was so emotionally exhausting because I would tell my story over and over again.
06:25But it was also very therapeutic because it was like I was putting, you know, like a purpose to my
06:32pain.
06:33And then it became really empowering.
06:40Okay, so this is the lobbyist group that I worked with, and they're the ones that championed this bill for
06:45me.
06:46So the first time Eve came down to Austin to meet with me was January 31st.
06:52So we were already 22 days into the legislative session.
06:55We didn't have a champion. We didn't have an author in the House or an author in the Senate.
07:02From that point on, Eve came down to Austin one day a week, every week for the session, and we
07:09just wore out the Capitol Halls with meetings.
07:14All of our meetings were good, with one exception.
07:17The meeting with the local state representative that represents Nacogdoches and knows he's Dr. Daddy did not go well.
07:26We kept trying to talk, and he kept interrupting.
07:29And then finally, at the end, he turned to Eve and said,
07:34I don't know why you're all upset anyway because it looks like it all turned out well for you.
07:38That was really marginalizing for me because here I am struggling with this and feeling like they didn't think that
07:47my genetic identity was important or I shouldn't be doing this.
07:52This man was my mother's doctor. He was not her donor. Thank you.
08:03It's very clear to me that it should be a violation of the law.
08:07And I would expect this bill to be reported out to the full Senate.
08:11In the future, we'll be able to hold people accountable.
08:15I really want to continue this Erin Brockovich approach to this because I am only one person.
08:21But I have the ability to share my story and raise awareness to show people that fertility frauds are out
08:29there and that this is an important issue.
08:32You are not protected.
08:51Being educated, people have no ability to sell it too much anymore.
08:58Well저, I am very happy, because …
08:58there are people watching and be more fearful of everything and escaping because it's deeply insUspy.
08:58You should also see thoseция games and veners who all these people sleeping.
09:04I could see them as a whole other person doing to live.
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