So my mother's fertility doctor decided to use his own sperm instead of the sperm donor
that my parents selected and did this without their consent and without their knowledge.
I'm from a really small town in East Texas called Center.
It's about 5,000 people in population, so it's really, really tiny.
My parents struggled with infertility.
So at the direction of my parents' fertility doctor, Dr. Kim McMorries,
they looked into artificial reproductive technologies, specifically artificial insemination
by an anonymous sperm donor.
Dr. McMorries handed them a sheet of paper from California Cryobank in which they selected
sperm donor 106.
So after many inseminations with donor 106, I was finally conceived.
When I was 7 years old, that father, Doug, passed away from cardiomyopathy,
which is a heart disease.
When I was 16, I was very nosy and curious,
and I had a habit of going through my mom's e-mails.
And I came across the communication that she had with California Cryobank.
And that's how I found out that I was donor conceived.
When I was 18, I was eligible to submit my mother's insemination records in order to
gain more information on donor 106.
After about a year, they finally got a hold of Steve, donor 106, and they told him that
he had an offspring.
We got really close, and that's been our story for the last 13 years.
Ew, Play-Doh!
Can you stir when we get it started?
How many eggs?
Let's do three.
I cracked it.
My son, Hutton, was struggling with some pretty significant medical health issues.
Last year at the direction of his doctors, we decided to gather more genetic variations on him,
and the way that they wanted us to do that was through 23andMe Plus Health.
When we got those results back, we found out that he had celiac disease, that I had a
celiac variant, and I was not reporting this to his doctors because I was reporting medical
history from sperm donor 106.
Hey, Hutton, are you ready?
Once we finally got him OK, and his allergies sorted out, and his food therapies, and speech therapies,
I really started to become more curious about connections.
So I was looking at ancestry in 23andMe on the DNA portion, and I was immediately connected
to two half brothers.
So I talked to them.
They both know that they're donor conceived, and this is a part of their story.
And then there was a third one.
So I contacted who I assumed was a third half brother.
He was very adamant that he was not donor conceived.
So we went back, we looked a little bit deeper into it, and I said, "Well, you know, we could be first
cousins according to this, so why don't you tell me about your uncles."
And he said, "I have one uncle, and he's actually from your area in Nacogdoches.
And his name is Kim McMorries."
My exact reaction was, "Oh shit.
That is my mom's fertility doctor."
Being donor conceived is really lonely.
And then to find out that you're actually not donor conceived and you're the product
of your mom's fertility doctor, it's even lonelier.
When I discovered this, I had to be the one to go tell my mom.
And I had to be the one to call Steve, donor 106, who I've called Dad for the last 13 years,
who my kids call Papa, the man who officiated my wedding,
and tell him that he wasn't my biological father.
These are all of our letters and e-mails, all of the communication that I had with the doctor.
We had multiple communications over the course of five or six weeks.
With those letters, he kept changing his story.
He wasn't consistent in his story.
I asked him if he ever discussed mixing the sperm or inseminating with his own sperm
and then told him that my mom was very overwhelmed
and insists that she did not consent or acknowledge this.
He says that there was only one to two pregnancies that were successful,
but now we have four illegitimate children.
It's shocking to me that this is a $5.4 billion industry that is essentially self-regulated.
So the next thing that I did is I called a friend who's a lawyer, and I was just in complete
shock to learn that this is not a crime
in the state of Texas or anywhere else.
I really wanted to make this about changes, not about charges against Dr. McMorries.
And I wanted him to be a part of my legacy.
I didn't want to be a part of his legacy.
So at that point, I really recognized that the only healing to take place with this
whole tragedy was to make it bigger than myself and to protect the future of vulnerable people
who are using artificial reproductive technologies.
This is the drive that I made every single week, once a week, to come to Austin for four months.
When I started coming it was so emotionally exhausting because I would tell my story
over and over again.
But it was also very therapeutic because it was like I was putting a
purpose to my pain, and then it became really empowering.
OK, so this is the lobbyist group that I worked with, and they're the ones that championed
this bill for me.
So the first time Eve came down to Austin to meet with me was January 31st.
So we were already 22 days into the legislative session.
We didn't have a champion.
We didn't have an author in the House
or an author in the Senate.
From that point on, Eve came down to Austin one day a week, every week for the session,
and we just wore out the Capitol halls with meetings.
All of our meetings were good with one exception.
The meeting with the local state representative that represents Nacogdoches
and knows Eve's doctor Daddy did not go well.
We kept trying to talk, and he kept interrupting.
And then finally
at the end he turned to Eve and said, "I don't know why you're all upset anyway 'cause looks
like it all turned out well for you."
That was really marginalizing for me, because here I am struggling with this and feeling
like they didn't think that my genetic identity was important or I shouldn't be doing this.
This man was my mother's doctor.
He was not her donor.
Thank you.
It's very clear to me that it should be a violation of the law.
And I would expect this bill to be reported out to the full Senate.
In the future, we'll be able to hold people accountable.
I really want to continue this Erin Brockovich approach to this, because I am only one person.
But I have the ability to share my story and raise awareness
to show people that fertility frauds are out there
and that this is an important issue.
You are not protected.