Donor Mum: The Children I've Never Met, BBC One

Six months after giving birth to a child conceived through anonymous sperm donation, Sylvia decided to become an egg donor. It was her way, she said, of “giving something back”. It was 1991 and she was to become one of Britain’s first anonymous egg donors. Once she'd left the clinic, she was expected to think no more about it: she was helping an infertile woman realise her dreams, just as she, lacking Mr Right, had been helped to realise hers. She never thought for a minute that her act of altruism would come back to haunt her.

Six weeks after donating her eggs, Sylvia came across an article in the Daily Mail. It told the story of Joan who’d successfully become pregnant using an egg donor. The few sparse details she had to go on fitted: the same clinic in Harley Street, the dates, the fact that Joan was pregnant with twins. Sylvia was, understandably, very shaken. But the stories in the press kept coming, including a BBC documentary which featured the twins as toddlers. One of the children, the boy, looked just like Sylvia’s son, Eliot.

Joan’s story was a harrowing one. Four years before her donor pregnancy she and her husband had lost their two children, two boys, in a car accident. Joan was already 41 and the impact of the accident caused, she said, her body to “shut down”. But the desire to have children, and the feeling that she could never heal her life without experiencing motherhood again, were strong.

But where did this leave Sylvia? Could she now get on with her life in the knowledge that her two biological children were very much loved and appeared to be happy and secure? Guilt began to eat away at her. She felt that the children might resent her for somehow abandoning them. “I’m not meant to feel like this,” she said. “I’m not meant to care.” And then, “It’s so fucked up. Who am I to them, and who are they to me?”
 
In 2005, anonymous donation was lifted in the UK, so that children born after this date can now learn the identities of their donor parents once they reach 18. Campaigning groups consisting of adult donor children welcomed the change, whilst many fertility doctors opposed it, anticipating a steep decline in donors. They were right. There is a paucity of donor gametes in the UK, which makes costs at private clinics high, and many women and couples choose to go abroad, to countries where anonymity is still guaranteed.

But the right to know where you come from, who you look like and who you take after, has proven to be as resilient and as fundamental as any human need. At a donor meeting Sylvia attends she at last hears people, in situations similar to her own, who don’t tell her that it doesn’t matter, or that she shouldn’t care. One adult donor child spoke of a huge void that can't be filled.

Sylvia did eventually make contact, and all ended positively. Joan didn’t feel threatened by Sylvia, and Sylvia was careful that she shouldn’t. As for the children, who are now 18, they’d been told of their origins years earlier, so nothing came as a dramatic shock. Besides, they all seemed like lovely people, and wise enough to take things slowly. And there were lovely moments in this sensitive, unsensational film: Eliot and his half-brother learned that they share a love of motorbikes, while Eliot's half-sister has embarked on a navel career, just as Eliot had on leaving school. There are, naturally, striking physical similarities, too.

Eliot, meanwhile, has embarked on his own journey. He approached UK DonorLink, an organisation which matches donor children with their donor parents through their DNA. But unless Eliot’s biological father comes forward to give a sample, he is destined never to know that half of his genetic origins.  

The programme left us with a postscript. Unfortunately, it didn't consist of a heartwarming meeting between genetic father and son, because Eliot’s father has not contacted UK DonorLink. He may never do so. It was the information that, come October, the Department of Health plans to stop funding the organisation. Where will this leave adults like Eliot? We can only hope that it won’t be with a huge, unfillable void.  

• Watch Donor Mum: The Children I’ve Never Met on BBC iPlayer