In 2009, Sarah Dingle was in a good place. At 27, a rising journalism star, her only problem was planning her next life move. She didn’t want to have children immediately, but she didn’t want to leave it too late, either.
Over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, she casually asked her mum, “Did you have any problems having me?” Her mum replied, “Maybe now isn’t the right time to tell you, but your father’s not your father… We had trouble conceiving and it turned out that your father couldn’t have children, so we used a donor… it was anonymous.”
The revelation changed Dingle’s life. “It was horrendous. The night she told me, I just wanted to snatch everything and run away. I walked around in a daze for a while. I was in a hole for a few months, not able to recognise my own face in the mirror,” she tells SBS Voices. Dingle’s dad, Gilbert, had passed away when she was a teen. He was the only father she’d ever known.
After months of depression, Dingle, who presents the new SBS documentary , decided to investigate: “(I thought) I’m a journalist and I can try to assemble facts around this frankly really sh***y situation. I decided that I would [use] journalism [to find] my way out of the problem.”
Her investigation led to a book and a campaign that would see Dingle reach out to others like her and raise questions about Australia’s multimillion-dollar donor industry that operated with little oversight or regulation – and largely still does to this day.
Dingle discovered that her friend Rebecca, also donor-conceived, was actually her half-sister
What the Walkley Award-winning journalist found shocked her. As revealed in the documentary, after being stonewalled by Sydney’s Royal North Shore hospital fertility clinic, where she was born in 1982, Dingle discovered that codes identifying her donor dad had been cut from medical records, a regular practice at the time. By sheer luck, a nurse who knew her gave her the codes by memory. The clinic had been taken over by IVF Australia, part of the ASX-listed privately owned Virtus Health, who kept all records created by the public hospital and was now worth half a billion dollars.
The shocks continued. On meeting her biological dad, she found out he had insisted the clinic provide his information if requested. She discovered that her friend Rebecca, also donor-conceived, was actually her half-sister. Dingle met donor-conceived people denied health records who later died from cancer, and others grappling with the horrific prospect of accidental incest. Blocked by clinics from accessing records, many pieced their history together through the website ancestry.com, which uses DNA science and family history records.
One woman, Shannon, and her partner had used donor 188 for their five children. Shannon found out by accident that others in her children’s daycare were also the product of donor 188. Donor 188 had produced 43 children, with more thought to be unrecorded. “I had blindly trusted that the clinic would’ve thought out these things and that there would be strict limits in place,” Shannon reveals on the program.
Dingle, who has pushed for greater industry regulation with little success, also documents Australian women unknowingly impregnated with their own doctor’s sperm as far back as the 1960s. Other women had died from venereal disease-infected sperm.
“This whole industry preys on vulnerability, (and) there are very little safeguards,” Dingle says
“This whole industry preys on vulnerability, (and) there are very little safeguards,” Dingle says. “There’s no safety net at all – it’s just a hole. There were no laws governing donor conception when I was made, and even today (there are no national laws regulating the practice of donor conception in Australia). The law is a joke… and nobody has been held to account.”
The idea of having an unknown number of siblings is something Dingle finds hard to grasp. “That’s not something I can actually keep in my head. It’s too big to recognise. It just sort of slides away. My brain can’t compute, basically.”
It’s estimated there are more than donor-conceived people in Australia. Dingle says the weight of family secrets have a huge toll on children, many of whom are never told they’re donor-conceived. This was compounded by a system of secrecy when seeking information.
“It’s the circumstances and the lack of transparency and the playing with people’s lives – the blank wall of ‘shut up and go away’ that continues – that really bothers me.
“It’s wrong. People aren’t as lucky as I am, and no one should have to rely on luck, anyway. There should be proper records kept, and anyone should have the right to know who their family is.”
Sarah Dingle presents , airing Tuesday 1 November at 8:30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand. The documentary is part of the ‘Australia Uncovered’ series, a package of four prime-time documentaries from Australia’s top filmmakers airing every Tuesday.
