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
00:44an anonymous sperm donor. Dr. McMorries handed them a sheet of paper from
00:50California Cryobank in which they selected sperm donor 106. So after many
00:57inseminations with donor 106 I was finally conceived. When I was seven
01:06years old that father Doug passed away from cardiomyopathy which is a heart
01:10disease. When I was 16 I was very nosy and curious and I had a habit of going
01:19through my mom's emails and I came across the communication she had with California
01:24cryobank. And that's how I found out that I was donor conceived.
01:31When I was 18 I was eligible to submit my mother's insemination records in order to
01:37gain more information on donor 106. After about a year they finally got a hold of
01:43Steve donor 106 and they told him that he had an offspring. We got really close and
01:49that's been our story for the last 13 years.
01:54Eat your play-doh!
01:57Can you start when we get it started?
02:00How many eggs?
02:02Let's do three.
02:04Egg crack.
02:06My 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
02:19the way that they wanted us to do that was through 23andMe plus health. When we got
02:25those results back we found out that he had celiac disease, that I had a celiac
02:30variant, and I was not reporting this to his doctors because I was reporting medical
02:36history from Sperm Donor 106.
02:40Hey Hutton, are you ready?
02:44Here, go.
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.
03:04So I was looking at Ancestry and 23andMe on the DNA portion and I was immediately connected
03:10to two half-brothers. So I talked to them. They both know that they're donor-conceived
03:16and this is a part of their story. And then there was a third one. So I contacted who I
03:22assumed was a third half-brother. He was very 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, well, you
03:34know, we could be first cousins according to this, so why don't you tell me about your
03:38uncles? And he said, I have one uncle, and he's actually from your area in Nacogdoches,
03:45and his name is Kim McMorries. My exact reaction was, oh shit, that is my mom's fertility doctor.
03:58Being donor-conceived is really lonely. And then to find out that you're actually not
04:02donor-conceived and 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. And I had to be
04:13the one
04:14to call Steve, donor 106, who I've called dad for the last 13 years, who my kids call
04:20Papa, the man who officiated my wedding, and 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
04:39doctor. We had multiple communications over the course of five or six weeks. With those
04:46letters, he kept changing his story. He wasn't consistent in his story. I asked him if he ever
04:53discussed mixing the sperm or inseminating with his own sperm, and then told him that
04:58my 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
05:10illegitimate children. It's shocking to me that this is a $5.4 billion industry that is essentially
05:18self-regulated. So the next thing that I did is I called a friend who's a lawyer. And I was
05:26just
05:26in complete shock to learn that this is not a crime in the state of Texas or anywhere else.
05:34I really wanted to make this about changes, not about charges against Dr. McMorries. And I wanted him
05:41to be a part of my legacy. I didn't want to be a part of his legacy.
05:53So at that point, you know, I really recognized that the only healing to take place with this whole
06:00tragedy was to make it bigger than myself and to protect the future of vulnerable people who are
06:06using artificial reproductive technologies. This is the drive that I made every single week,
06:12once a week, to come to Austin for four months. When I started coming, it was so emotionally exhausting
06:23because I would tell my story over and over again. But it was also very therapeutic because it was like
06:29I was putting, you know, like a purpose to my pain. And 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
06:45for me. So the first time Eve came down to Austin to meet with me was January 31st. So we
06:52were already
06:5322 days into the legislative session. We didn't have a champion. We didn't have an author in the House
07:00or an author in the Senate. From that point on, Eve came down to Austin one day a week, every
07:08week for
07:08the session, and we just wore out the Capitol halls with meetings. All of our meetings were good,
07:16with one exception. The meeting with the local state representative that represents Nacogdoches
07:22and knows he's Dr. Daddy did not go well. We kept trying to talk and he kept interrupting. And then
07:29finally, at the end, he turned to Eve and said, I don't know why you're all upset anyway, because it
07:36looks like it all turned out well for you. That was really marginalizing for me because here I am
07:44struggling with this and feeling like they didn't think that my genetic identity was important or
07:49I shouldn't be doing this. This man was my mother's doctor. He was not her donor.
08:01Thank you. It's very clear to me that it should be a violation of the law. And I would expect
08:08this
08:08bill to be reported out to the full Senate. In 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
08:29are out there and that this is an important issue. You are not protected.
08:59You are not protected.
09:00You are the wants cyanideema.
09:02You are protected from each other.
09:03You
