So Chris and David start talking to various organizations, explaining that their friend Mansour is looking for his family, but the prognosis is not good. There are 42 million refugees in the world at the time, and the systems in place just aren't equipped to handle their request. So they decide to take matters into their own hands and go with Mansour back to Pakistan.

By this time he was 18, he had a Danish passport. Mansour traveled Peshawar for six days out of the seven he had there without finding anything. But on the seventh day, ran into the trafficker that had shipped him out five years earlier and said, "Look, you sent me away five years ago, you said my family was gonna be right after me. I've been waiting, I don't know where anybody is.", et cetera. And then the trafficker says, "Yeah, that's fine, I don't care. I do this to 100 people every month, I ship out thousands of folks, go away."

But Mansour is persistent and convinces the trafficker to dig deeper. Eventually, they find out that his brother has been sold into slavery in a place called Stavropol in the south of Russia. The trafficker gives Mansour a phone number, and Mansour starts calling that number every day. But each time a Russian voice answers. One day, an Afghan man picks up and Mansour is finally able to explain his situation.

The guy goes, "Well, you're calling a phone booth in the midst of an Afghan bazaar in the city Stavropol.", so essentially a public place. But he says, "But I think I know who you're talking about."

David, Mansour and Chris fly to Russia to track down Mansour's brother [Parwan 00:03:35], who's hiding out somewhere in a bizarre on the east side of Moscow. They only have four days left on their visa, and they're getting desperate. If they don't find Mansour's brother soon they may never find him. Finally, an old technology prevails. They get in touch with Parwan on the phone.

On the seventh of October, right around dusk, this taxi rolled up to the Seven Sisters Hotel, and Dave and I and Mansour were waiting out front. And out of the cab spilled his younger brother, who looked like the spitting image of Mansour, and obviously an epiphanous moment for all of us, but particularly for the two Afghan brothers, but especially also for David and myself, as two brothers who are extremely close to one another. Helping these two brothers to reconnect, and feeling the breakthrough, the closeness for them, and essentially move from being alone in the world to having each other once again, was definitely a moment that both David and I will take with this for the rest of our days.

Mansour's journey to find his family it was a wake up call for Chris and David.

It led us to question how come all these major organizations were not collaborating around a shared ledger, a shared database, an opportunity to input and extract, collect, curate and distribute data on the missing, not used across countries but across camps in countries. Across organizations, across governments, across very importantly the refugees themselves.

That was the beginning of Refunite, a database designed to help refugees find their loved ones. Chris and David knew from their work in refugee camps in East Africa, that even if families were struggling to eat or to find work, they almost always had a mobile phone. For some families it was their only connection to the outside world.

So the brothers partnered with mobile operators whose customers were in refugee camps, and sent a message to every single number telling them how Refunite could help them completely free. Then Refunite agents would take calls and texts from people who responded, recording the information of who they had lost, what they looked like, their age and even nicknames.

We've gone inside of who they are, the communities they live in, how they engage, what they talk of, and how they would find family if they had no technology. And then we take all that tidbits of information and then we amplified into tech, and we bring it to a point where we can distribute data on such a large scale, to see to it that we connect this relevant information to other people, to other tribes, to other communities and across the board of where we operate.

Refunite has more than 1.2 million people in their database, and it's impossible to know the exact number, but Christopher says they've helped at least 42,000 people find their loved ones. Refugees are often just another statistic in a world full of millions of displaced people. But Refunite is all about the individual. Because in order to make the connection between a number and a person, it asks questions about the things that we only tell the people closest to us.

On the night that we drove him home from the airport, David says to Mansour, he says, "Look, are you gonna be able to sleep tonight?" And Mansour says, "You know what, I'm going to sleep really well for the first time in six years, because Parwan may be in Russia, but I now know that I'm not alone.

Hi, I'm Claire Evans, I'm a writer and musician, and this is YOU, a podcast about the intersection of technology, humanity and identity brought to you by Okta. Today we're talking about family.

It's funny talking to Chris about Refunite, I mean he's basically describing the goals of the early internet. He's talking about connecting people meaningfully, sharing vital information and resources, and bringing people together in a way that empowers them and makes them feel like they're part of a community. Those aspirations overlap with what many of us hoped the internet would be. I think we've lost our path. Maybe because of the sheer scale of it all, we take for granted how powerful our platforms for connection are. We've reduced their significance to funny memes, taking for granted the fact that in much of the western world anyway, the idea of losing touch with somebody, not being able to find them at all, is basically an alien concept. I mean, it's inconceivable to me, that there could be someone in my life that I lose complete contact with, and am unable to find for years because I'm so privileged.

So, it's remarkable to hear stories of people who are going through these much more precarious networks to find one another, and to make the meaningful connections that are so often commodified and taken for granted on social media.

Connections, specifically the connections we have with family, are what we're talking about today. In this next conversation, we'll hear from the mother and son who created the Donor Sibling Registry in 2000. Not quite the earliest days of the internet, but certainly a time before we were so very, very online. In those days we were just beginning to understand how the internet could impact our lives. And since then, the internet has infiltrated our relationships more deeply, changing how we communicate, who we call our friends, and in some cases even who we consider family.

Hi, I'm Wendy Kramer and I am the cofounder and director of the Donor Sibling Registry.

And I'm Ryan Kramer, I'm a donor conceived person. I'm Wendy's son and her and I cofounded the Donor Sibling Registry.

Wendy, let's start with your story. When did you decide that you wanted to start a family of your own?

I had been married for a few years and knew that I wanted to be a mom, and also was aware that my ex-husband had some infertility issues. So as we started planning to have a family, we right away went in for some testing and unfortunately it was confirmed that my ex husband was infertile, and that we would have to find a different way to build our family. And it was only a few weeks after that determination was made, that I went and was inseminated with donor sperm and on the very first try I was pregnant.

What is the process of choosing a sperm donor like typically? I mean, I imagine it's changed since you went through the process, so what was it like for you?

Well for me, I didn't choose the donor, that's the crazy part, the lady at the desk, whoever that was, had a catalog and she was looking through her computer talking to my ex-husband and I saying, "Well, I have 5'10", but if you want Irish background, I only have brown eyes not the green eyes. And I could see that my ex-husband was very uncomfortable with the process, and at some point I just turned to her and said look, "This is what he looks like, just find someone that looks like him." And we left, and a week later I was pregnant with the sperm of someone I had no idea who they were or anything about them. And it wasn't until three years later that I actually got information on our donor.

People ask, like is it weird to be pregnant with the sperm of a guy that you have no idea who they are? And the truth is, yeah you know, it's a little bit weird, but it didn't matter to me, I knew I was meant to be a mom and that was the only way that I could make that happen. And so, as Ryan grew up and as I saw this little being becoming and half of who he was, physical characteristics, temperament, you know, personality, there were parts of him that I just couldn't connect to me or my side of the family. So as he got older, it just became more and more curious about wow, what is that invisible side of you? The side that we know almost nothing about.

When did Ryan start asking questions about who his father was?

He was two years old, when he came home from preschool after seeing moms and dads, he was two and a half, and he said to me, "So, did my dad die or what?

Or what?

It was at that moment that I knew, okay this is the first conversation. It was a very brief two-year-old conversation about the mommy has an egg and we need a sperm from a dad, and I didn't have a sperm, and I went to a nice doctor, and that was it. So it was brief, but it was important in that it laid the foundation for all future conversations. It was not very much detail, but not much detail needed for a two-year-old child. But then, it kind of laid the groundwork, now his story was revealed to him. And as he got older and asked age-appropriate questions, we had a foundation to build on.

Ryan, did you feel like part of your identity was missing at that time at a young age? I mean I know you were very young at two, maybe you don't remember that, but as you grow older did you feel like something was missing?

I was told very early, you know, I was two. So being donor conceived was always a part of my identity. And when you find out when you are two, it's not shocking, it's not really core to your identity, it's just sort of another thing that you kind of learn about yourself. So when I found out when I was very young, it was just sort of, okay, and then I went back to doing whatever it was I was doing as a two-year-old. And so, even from very early on I didn't feel like a component was missing. I always felt like kind of a a whole complete person in that respect. Then as I got older and I got curious about my extended family and where I came from, a lot of that curiosity was driven just by my origins and how I ended up becoming the person that I was. But I never felt incomplete in any way.

Family means people that fill your life with joy, I don't think you have to be biologically related. I think anyone that you love and that you love to share experiences with, food with, your home with, are family.

Family actually in some ways is people close to you, so it is I think obviously nuclear family, wife, children, but also parents. But then there's extended family, and there's people actually I have friends, that they almost feel more like siblings than some of my own siblings do.

I consider family anyone that I share a close bond with, as I've grown up over the years, so I don't think family is something strictly genetic or blood relation, it's really who you grow with.

It's funny, I feel like we all have this experience when we're growing up of cobbling together our identities, seeing our own tendencies reflected in our parents and understanding where we come from, it's sort of an evolution that happens over time. But your stories are much more kind of a detective story in a sense. I'm curious to know, how this transition from being a personal question that you had about, you know, who was my biological father, to a much larger project that encompassed so many other people's lives.

Yeah, so my curiosity was always driven early on, just about learning about parts of myself, particularly things that I didn't share in common with my mom or her side of the family. So for most of the early part of my life, we sort of got what information we could from the source that we had available. At the time, that was this 30 or 40 page donor profile, which was full of mostly non-identifying information like height and weight, and eye color, and hair color and things like that. And a few essay questions, and a little bit of family and medical history.

So I'd get curious about my eye color, or some particular characteristic, and we'd pull out the donor profiling and kind of browse it. And for a while that was interesting, but was never quite enough to satisfy my curiosity. So after sort of repeated attempts at contacting the sperm bank as a kid, at the encouragement of my mom, a lot of those those kind of attempts to get more information about whether or not my donor was out there, and whether or not maybe even he was curious, or whether he had donated multiple times that I might have any half siblings, those sort of requests for information went unanswered.

That's when we started to think about, well are there other ways that we can think of to maybe try to make contact with some of those other people who are out there. So that was back in the year 2000, when I was 10 years old, we started these donor sibling registry in its earliest form, which was a Yahoo group. Basically just saying, "Hey, we're here. I'm a 10 year old. I'm really curious. I'm donor conceived." And at the time, it wasn't really to make contact with my half siblings are my donor, I think we thought that was a really long shot, I'm not even sure it really even crossed our mind. But for the most part, it was just to see if there were other people out there who were in a situation like me, who were curious as well.

It's interesting that this journey coincides with the emergence of the internet, and the fact that you all the sudden had this outlet or this opportunity to connect with other people like you. I mean if you had been born 20 years earlier, this would be a totally different process.

Yeah, definitely. The timing was really great.

So what was it like to uncover, I imagine, you know, the strings of a new community of people, not just potential genetic relatives, but a community of people who shared the experience of having been donor conceived? What did that bring to your life?

It was really great. I think in the earliest stages, just to feel some validation that being curious about being donor conceived wasn't unusual or weird in some way. I think just making contact with other donor conceived families who felt the exact same feelings that I had, were really reassuring and really validating. I think early on when we started making our first matches, we sort of realized the potential of the donor sibling registry, and that was a really exciting time and really enriching.

What were those early matches like? I mean this is brave new territory, no one's made these kind of connections before. There's no protocol, there's no established way that one is supposed to go about these kinds of things. I mean was there kind of a learning curve in terms of understanding what works and what doesn't, and what clear sort of patterns of communication need to be done in order for these matches to be successful and to turn into fulfilling relationships?

Yeah, I mean, like you mentioned there is no road map, there's no procedure to follow, this was definitely very new. And to a large extent it still is, and for that reason the way that you approach these connections and the way that different families approach them is sort of entirely up to you. You do what works for you.

Everything from the nomenclature and the names that you use for each other, donor siblings, or donors, or sperm donor, biological father. You know, a lot of people are comfortable with some terms and other people aren't. And so, just what you call each other is entirely up to you. The type of relationship that you have, it can be everything from we met once and we exchanged medical records, and everybody's satisfied with that, all the way up to, we met and we feel like siblings, and you know, you kind of live the rest your life with a bond that can resembles that of a traditional sibling, siblings that have grown up together.

So there is no right or wrong way to make a connection, it's kind of different for everybody and those definitions are entirely up to the people who are making the connections.

There's an interesting distinction, from what I understand, between searching for genetic relatives and making it possible to be found. And I think that's a really interesting thing. I mean, maybe you didn't want to search for your father Ryan, but you wanted to make it possible for him to find you if he wanted to. Can you talk a little bit about that difference and the nuance between those two kinds of connection?

Yeah, very much so. I was really curious about who my biological father was, but I also understood and always respected the fact that when he donated he signed up for anonymity. And it's a tricky situation, because the donor signed up for anonymity, the parents sort of agree to that as well at the time of the donation. But the kids who are being created, who arguably have the most stake in the game never agreed to the anonymity, and so it's a little bit unfair. That being said, I think I did feel strongly that I wanted to respect the fact that anonymity was what he signed up for at the time.

So I didn't want to go invading his privacy. I didn't want to basically just just disrespect the fact that if he still wished to remain anonymous, that he could. At the same time, I did feel like it was my right to try to at least find out who he was and make him aware that I was curious. And so through the cryobank, there's no facilitation of mutual consent contact. So even if two people, two interested parties, are both interested in contacting each other, they won't facilitate that.

So in my case, I wanted basically to give him the opportunity to make contact with me if that was something that he was interested in, and that he wanted to do. So our mission with the donor sibling registry has never been about seeking people out or invading anybody's privacy, it's always just been a place to be found, so that you can say I'm here, I'm interested, and it gives you sort of an outlet to make yourself available to be found in that way.

But you ended up finding your dad through genetic testing, isn't that right?

Yeah, that's right. So, I guess my story is a little bit atypical from most DSR members, in that when I was 15, I put a whole bunch of pieces together that I'd been kind of gathering for a few years. It was a combination of information that I had from public record search that I'd conducted using information that we had about the donor from his profile. And then it was combined with information that I got from a DNA test from one of the commercial kind of family tree DNA tests. I didn't do any of these with the specific intent of locating the donor, just having 50% of my DNA and family heritage such a mystery for so many years, I was always kind of eager just to add information in any way that I could.

So without the specific intent of finding him, I did these DNA tests and these public record searches to try have a little bit of extra information, not knowing how it might be useful in the future, and then eventually like I said, the combination this information led to sort of a strong suspicion that we had figured out, you know, who he might be. And after a few kind of weeks of amateur sleuthing and calling alumni departments, and cross referencing different public records, we had a pretty good feel that we had figured out who he was.

And so, at that point I wrote him a letter, I had his email address, and so I kind of sent him a letter introducing myself. I wanted to be really clear with what I didn't want from him, which was that I didn't want him to be a dad, I didn't need him to make a commitment to be in my life, I didn't need college money, I didn't need support in any way, I just wanted him to know that I was here and that I was curious. And that if he was open to it, I would be interested in seeing a picture of him, or having a conversation or basically just having some of the questions that I'd had for my entire life up until that point, answered, so that I could kind of feel some sense of closure for that.

I think there was definitely nervousness that, you know, maybe he wouldn't respond, or maybe he would respond poorly and he would be upset that we had contacted him. There were a number of of concerns that we had. And after a couple days, he wrote back and basically said that he was really thrilled to hear from me, and that he was really happy to be my donor, and he was really open to answering the questions that I had. I was a teenager at the time, I wanted to know what kind of music he liked, and what kind of movies he liked, and did he play sports and things like that. And just with that little bit of information after a few months of back and forth emails, I felt really quite content about who I was, where I came from, the whole situation.

And then following that, when we finally had the opportunity to meet him and his parents, and sort of build these relationships that now we've been building for the last 12 or 13 years, all of that was just kind of icing on the cake for me.

Nature or nurture? I think probably nurture. Honestly I think you're born with whatever you're born with, but the people that shape the course of your life over the next 10, 20, 30, 50, 90 years, have to have a bigger impact than on who you happen to be and the random collection of DNA and molecules that you just sort of happen to be stuck with from birth.

I think it's a combination of both. I've always been for that argument. Definitely sexuality is the first thing that comes to mind, when I think nature versus nurture. I think that you were born where you are with on the sexual spectrum, but then depending on how you're raised, can affect the way you decide to live your life.

We're very influenced by our surroundings and our environment, and what other people need and want, and we make that our own needs and wants, and sometimes we can get confused.

I'm Claire Evans and is YOU, a podcast about technology and identity. I'm talking with Wendy and Ryan Kramer, a mother and son who cofounded the Donor Sibling Registry. We're talking about how technology has shaped and changed who we consider family and how we connect to them.

It's fascinating, I mean, you have such a unique situation in the sense that you're really able to see the distinction between nature versus nurture more clearly than anyone else. I mean, has it given you any insight into that distinction between nature versus nurture, and how much of yourself comes from your mom's side of things, and how much of it comes from your dad's side of things? Is there a really clear line in your head?

Yeah, very much so. I think if you would have asked me before our experience with the DSR, what element of a person is genetic versus how much it is your upbringing, my opinion would have been more towards the up bringing side. I sort of feel like might of have said how you're raised, and your value system, and what you're taught is like sort of what defines the type of person that you end up being. But both from my personal experience and from having seen the experiences of hundreds even thousands of people on our website who have had you the opportunity to make these connections with half siblings, or with their donor. Sometimes very large groups from different religions, different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, you know, very diverse sets of people who have amazing, amazing amounts in common, sometimes eerily so, definitely has moved me strongly towards the opinion that a large, large component, the vast majority of who we are I think it's to a certain extent pre-programmed or at least we're kind of predisposed to become a certain type of person.

Wendy, what was it like for you to find Ryan's donor father? It must've been somewhat destabilizing to see an adult version of your son basically?

It was crazy. I mean, so first of all I was having the opportunity to watch my son's dream come true. So that by itself is very profound. So that was stunning. But when we met Ryan's biological father, we met him in a hotel lobby, and as he walked towards us it was so strange. Here was this guy walking towards me, and when he smiled he had my son's teeth, and as he got closer he had my son's eyebrows, and you know, it was just really wild. And there I am shaking hands with a stranger who was just as related to my child as I was. So very, very surreal.

Wow, wow. What that a different experience for you then? Meeting for example, some of Ryan's half siblings? Or was it a similar thing?

Yeah, very different. I mean meeting the half siblings is really cool and really interesting, and it's so much fun to look at the nature and the nurture, and see what they have in common and not. Meeting Ryan's biological father had a whole other layer of emotion on it, because it was the person who gave him 50% of his DNA, so as much as I did.

So you're all still in each other's lives?

Yeah.

Wow. What is that family like, and how is it different from your other experiences of family?

In some ways it's similar, and in some ways it's dissimilar. It's unique because you sort of created family where there was none, so in your family of origin, the family you grow up with, it's established from before you can remember. When you establish family somewhere in the middle, it has a whole different feeling, because you kind of get to define it right from the start. What is this? Who are these people? What do they mean to me? What's possible, as far as what can we make these relationships look like.

So in some ways it's very similar, in that you love them, they're family. But in some ways it's just very different, because it's just a unique opportunity. You're starting from the middle, and then deciding what it will look like.

Yeah, I definitely think that people should be able to access their biological parents or grandparent's information, so they know some of their heritage, for sure.

I don't know who you give priority to for their self determination, whether it be the parent to not be known by a child, or does the child get the ultimate self determination of wanting to know their parent? I don't know, I'm sure that's a case by case basis, but yes, I would hope everyone could have access and should have access to know their biological parents and heritage. I guess if a parent really doesn't want to be known or found, I don't know, I couldn't answer that one.

I think everyone, that is ultimately their right, whether or not they want to share that, so why I'd like to think that a parent would be happy to share that with their child, you know, it ultimately is I think their right to refuse if that's what they want to do.

It's interesting that as you're going through this experience of reconnecting with genetic relatives and redefining family, you're also overseeing this organization that's doing the same thing for lots and lots of people around the world. How has your experiences, your personal experiences with reconnecting with your donor father and half siblings, changed or affected the way that you sort of facilitate those relationships between other people? I mean do you [crosstalk 00:32:19]-

Yeah, so I mean in one sense, I'm just another mom on the DSR, you know. I put my child's posting up there just like everybody else. We're figuring out what family is and what it means, and redefining relationships just like everybody else. So my own personal experience and Ryan's connections has only helped to inform me of what's possible and what works, and what doesn't work, and how tricky it can be sometimes to maneuver through these new relationships. So it helps me a lot as I do a lot of consulting and counseling with donors and parents, and donor conceived people. So it only deepens my own experience, which then has helped me quite a bit in dealing with other people, as they maneuver through their own personal situations.

Genetic testing is a lot more commonplace today than when you and Ryan began this journey. How do you think that has changed cultural attitudes about donor families?

I think the biggest thing is that there is no such thing as anonymity, even though all donors are still sold as anonymous. So for donors who are donating, you know, our advice to them is if you don't want to be found, don't donate, and that's just the way it is. Because it's not like, oh you might be found in 18 years, you might be found next year. People are swapping their baby's cheeks and figuring out who the biological father is right from the get go. So I think this needs to be acknowledged by the industry and by the public, that donor anonymity is dead, it's been dead since 2005, and we need to kind of pick up those pieces and walk forward in a more ethical and responsible manner, knowing that no donors can remain anonymous.

Take a look at anonymity and ask ourselves, "What's in the best interest of the children that we're creating?", and I think donor anonymity is never the answer to that question.

I just want to add to I think commonly to that is that if donors don't want to be found, then they can simply not put their DNA into, you know, 23andMe, or one of these websites. But I actually located my donor, as many other people, by making a connection with one of his distant relatives. In fact, the relative that was in the DNA database that I connected with that eventually led me to my donor, was such a distant cousin that they were only connected by a common ancestor from centuries ago. And so, the donors themselves don't have to have their DNA in a database to be found, they just need somebody from their family, even their very distant family to have done it.

It seems like donor conception is still pretty widely misunderstood, and maybe even sometimes stigmatized. Can you talk a little bit about stigmas around donor conception and how we can dismantle them?

So back when I got pregnant, most people using donor sperm where couples like me, infertile couples. But at this point, the landscape has changed so much that now about 50% of people that use donor sperm are single mothers by choice, about a third are LGBT, and now less than 20% are heterosexual couples dealing with infertility. So the issues are a little bit different for all of those groups, but I think for the LGBT families, and the straight families dealing with infertility, one of the things is that there's a nonbiological parent, and that seems to create the most problems. The nonbiological parent who maybe never dealt with the grief of their own infertility, or the sadness of not having a genetic connection with their child. And so therefore, the shame of infertility is passed along as the shame of donor conception, or the fear of not being looked at as a rightful parent, like for LGBT families, that fear is then turned into teaching their child that the other unknown genetic parent isn't important, it's just a piece of genetic material or just a donated cell.

So I think we have to go back to parents and having parents be properly educated and counseled at the front door, so that they can work through any issues they might have with having a donor conceived child. Like dealing with their own infertility, or grieving the fact that they won't have a genetic connection, or other issues that might come up, being the nonbiological parent of a donor child.

How do you balance protecting the personal information or the requests for anonymity on behalf of the donors, with the rights and desires of donor children to get information about their own genetic identity? Especially in an age where your privacy and anonymity is a rarer and rarer commodity?

I think from the very beginning of donor conception it's been all about everyone else's rights but not the donor conceived people's rights. So it was about the right of a parent to have a child, the right of a donor to be anonymous, the right of a sperm bank to make money, but nowhere in that conversation was there anything about the rights of donor conceived people to know where they come from.

So I think at the very least, the rights of donor conceived people need to be a part of the conversation, that would be a great start. Personally, I think it should be at the forefront of the conversation, about that question that other countries, like in the European Union, they have asked is it fair to bring a child into the world who is deliberately cut off from 50% of their ancestry, their medical background and their identity, basically. We have not asked that question here in the US, because the reproductive medicine industry has a lobbying entity, and so no, that question has not been put forward by the industry itself.

How has your relationship, the two of you, changed and evolved throughout this journey? I mean, you were on this adventure of trying to put the pieces together and figure out Ryan's genetic background. You also started this organization together. How has it changed the nature of your relationship as mother and son?

I don't know, we still like each other, right?

Yeah, kinda, no I'm kidding. We've always been extremely close. My mom was a single mom obviously, I was an only child. And she was a really, really unbelievably over the top dedicated parent. I think this personal journey of finding my extended family members, my half siblings, my donor, didn't really change our relationship. My mom was always my mom. She was a single mom, so for me she was both parents. And finding my biological father didn't take away from that at all in any way. And people oftentimes ask about, you know, her feelings towards it. And I think we always just sort of knew we always had an amazing amount of implicit trust, that she was always gonna be my mom, and she's the person who raised me. And I think that that's important too, for a lot of the nonbiological parents in donor families, is that you're still the dad, or you're still the mom, even if you're not the biological mother or father, it's the person who raised you in that relationship doesn't change when when a donor conceived person expands their family. The family kind of grows, but those relationships don't get taken away from in any way.

For a lot of the people on the DSR, myself included, family really does include your donor extended family members, both the donors and your half siblings. It's a different sort of family, every sort of family member has a different feel, you know, most people have a different relationship with their uncle, as they do with their father, or their first cousin. And your donor or your donor half siblings have a unique relationship all their own. But it's entirely inside the definition of family to me, and I think to a lot of other people as well. And like I said, it's up to you to define those relationships for yourself.

Yeah, I think sometimes people are afraid of making the connections because they're afraid that somehow it will take away from their family unit, their family structure. And what I always try to explain to people is that connecting with your own or your child's genetic relatives isn't a take away, it's an adding to. So your lives could be more enriched by these connections. So it's not gonna take away from the relationships that you have, but it does have the possibility of adding to them, and deepening and just building a more enriching experience of what family is.

I think my view of family has changed a lot. Family to me is a lot more than blood kin, it's the people that I've worked and known for 30, 40 and 50 years. I know we don't have the same genetics, but I consider those people like family, because they're very close and near and dear to me.

There is always a little difference. Because you grew up with your people closely, blood related, and I always choose my blood first. Even maybe if they're not as good as the other, the blood is always better for me.

So, i don't put any premium between like blood or chosen family, I think they all are the same to me, weighted the same ... I don't-

(Singing)

This is YOU, and this is me, Claire Evans. Thanks so much to our guests Ryan Kramer, Wendy Kramer and Chris Mikkelsen for joining us.

Thank you for listening. Find us wherever you listen to your podcasts, and please tell your friends. Please subscribe, share, and leave a review. We'll be back next time to talk about blockchain, what it is, how it works, and what it might mean for your life.

(Singing)