Seeking Different
Single Mother by Choice (former co-host of The Mocha SMC Podcast) Hera McLeod teams up with her precocious nine year old daughter Estela for the podcast "Seeking Different". The Mom and Kid duo explore what it looks like to navigate the world as a non-traditional family. They discuss hot topics such as donor sibling relationships, family travel, school choice, race relations, and navigating the playground.
Seeking Different
Season 3, Episode 1: Revolutionizing Donor Identity Disclosure with Dylan Morgan from Cascade Cryobank
Ever wondered what it's like to transition from a sperm donor to the Chief Operations Officer of a leading cryobank? Join us in an eye-opening episode of Seeking Different as Dylan Morgan, COO of Cascade Cryobank, takes us through his personal and professional journey. We'll explore Cascade Cryobank's groundbreaking Early Identity Disclosure Program, which offers recipient families immediate access to donor identities upon reporting a live birth. Dylan shares the program's origins, the essential role of psychological assessments for donors, and their collaboration with mental health expert Melanie Michelson. This episode uncovers how this innovative approach aims to meet the mental health needs of donor-conceived individuals and their families, ensuring transparency and support.
In another segment, we tackle the emotional and ethical complexities of being a sperm donor, including the lifelong implications and potential connections with donor-conceived children. Dylan recounts his own experiences and highlights the importance of open ID in fostering familial bonds. Stela's curiosity about her donor adds a heartfelt layer to our discussion, emphasizing the significance of heritage and identity. To lighten the mood, we dive into our shared passion for spicy foods, swapping amusing anecdotes about the hottest things we've ever tasted and even sharing some tips on making hot honey. This candid conversation promises to both educate and entertain, offering a rare glimpse into the world of sperm donation.
Hi, I'm Hera the mom and I'm Estella the kid, and this is Seeking Different. There are times when everyone feels different or left out. As a non-traditional mom and kid family, we're setting out to explore all the ways that families can be different. This is Seeking Different. Hi, welcome back To Seeking Different. We are really excited to bring you a special guest today. His name is Dylan Morgan.
Speaker 2:Nice to meet you.
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you too. So Dylan runs a small sperm bank in Linwood, Washington, called Cascade Cryobank. Dylan heard our show and reached out a couple of months ago to connect. Through our initial conversation I learned that Cascade Cryobank has a program called the Early Identity Disclosure Program, where they provide sperm donor identity directly to recipient families as soon as they receive a live birth report.
Speaker 1:This is cool, and it's the first bank that's done this. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dylan. We are really excited to chat with you.
Speaker 3:Can you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. My name is Dylan Morgan. I'm the Chief Operations Officer here at Cascade Cryobank. A little bit about me. I actually started off my job here as a sperm donor. It's my background and then we are, since we're brand new. When I was starting we didn't really have a distribution model. All we were doing is recruiting. We didn't really have a distribution model, All we were doing is recruiting, and we didn't have any way to get our product out to our customers. So Dr John Carpenter, our founder, he liked me and he thought I could do the job, so he decided to hire me, figured I was a little more valuable as an employee than as a sperm donor and yeah, the rest is history.
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Tell us about Cascade Cryobank. How long have you been operating and why are you different? Can you tell us a bit about this early ID program?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so it kind of goes back to 2019. Dr John Carpenter he's a tissue pathologist here in Linwood, washington. He started doing his initial research into sperm banking. He has a friend in the industry who glued him into kind of the needs and the industry demand that was present. And so over the few years 2019 to about 2021, he was doing research about the compliance and the science behind all of it and then in 2021, decided to start going into the business side, started filing and getting his FTA registration going and then come 2022 was when he started recruiting donors and that's when he recruited me. I was with him for a few months until August 2023, which is when he decided he was ready to go into distribution mode, then hired me into the business to do the role and essentially make it so people could buy the sperm that we'd been collecting the whole time.
Speaker 3:The call again. It's the early disclosure program. Early disclosure program, yeah, okay, how did that come to be and what does it entail?
Speaker 2:come to be and like what? What does it entail? Yeah, so, uh, we, when we started distributing um, decided that we needed to do psychological analysis on our donors, make sure everybody was stable and emotionally healthy. Um, so we got connected with melanie michelson. She's the chair of the mental health professional group for the american society for reproductive medicine. We brought her on board to do our psychological analysis.
Speaker 2:She's great, she's awesome. You know, when she passes sperm donors because she really likes them and when she doesn't pass them we cut them out of the program. But she's typically very discerning, very, very intelligent. So we talked to her quite a bit. I work with her very closely and when we started talking to her, she's worked for about 25 years with egg donors and with recipient families, so she's very closely connected to the donor conceived community. So it's through her that we learned that not only we have our open ID program, which is nice, you know we can release donor identity to the donor conceived people once they turn 18.
Speaker 2:But families are just. It makes sense. You know you're genuinely curious about the genealogical heritage of your sperm donor. So this has become quite a pressing issue for the mental health of the recipients and, of course, the donor-conceived people of the world. And so we decided hey, you know what OpenID is great, it's a cool program, but let's take it a step further. Let's see if we can do a little bit better. Let's just go about releasing donor identity directly to the families as soon as we know that a family has been made with this donor.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. So for our listeners who aren't as familiar with the sperm donation process, open ID basically means that a donor agrees that when the child is 18, the bank can release their identity to that child. A lot of I think the nexus of that was probably, you know, folks being concerned about was it child support or, like you know, just make sure that the kid is an adult before you release the identity of that. But I think the interesting thing about the ID disclosure program that you all have is that I mean, I imagine that all the donors have signed legal paperwork, so releasing the identification and allowing the children, if they so wish, to contact this person and have some kind of communication while they're still children, I imagine that there's still some legal protection. There. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Is that right? Yeah, absolutely so. The recipient contract and the donor contract both very explicitly cleave any kind of legal relationship between the donors and the families. So with that in mind, we were pretty comfortable putting this program together. I mean, we talked with our lawyer about it and you know, you're right, it's brand new legal territory. It's not something that's been done before. But you know, what I would like to tell people is, you know it's, we'd rather shoulder the risk of starting a program like this and, you know, doing what we can to make it work than just pretending that it's not an issue. You know that it's not something that people want. So, yeah, it's it's. We have our basic protections in place for ourselves and for our donors and for the families as well, just to be a solid legal back background for a program like this.
Speaker 1:What has it been like? How have the donors reacted to this? What's the percentage of the donors that agree to this? Can they change their mind if they initially don't want to?
Speaker 2:Great question. So, number one, they can change their mind up until we've made a sale of that donor.
Speaker 3:And then it's like no turning back you already said yes, so that is out of the bag. You already said yes, so that is out of the bag.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the reaction that we've had from the donors has been generally very positive. For one, I should mention, we don't accept anonymous donors anymore.
Speaker 2:We still have a couple, but just due to what people are asking for, we only onboard donors who are at least open ID, and then about 48% so almost half of our donors have agreed to be a part of this program, so it's really promising, from what we could tell, at least initially when we were starting, it was the only reason people hadn't been doing it was because banks didn't think donors would agree to it. And I mean, hey, you may as well ask. You know, like if they ask them. They say no, they say no. So yeah, it's been a very positive experience.
Speaker 1:Tell us a bit about what it's like for the donors, Like when they walk into the bank. What happens next?
Speaker 2:Oh, great question. It's pretty standard procedure most of the time. First, our initial meeting with them is over the phone. I'll kind of start from the very beginning. They send an application, we call them on the phone, we we kind of get a good idea who they of, who they are and whether we think they'll pass through our psychological screening. Because you know, if we don't think that's going to happen, it's probably not. We're not licensed medical health, mental health professionals. We are. I'm an administrator, we have a medical director who does our blood work and all the physicals and everything. But provided we think they sound good on the phone, we bring them in for an initial evaluation. We take a sperm donation at that time so we can qualify it and then so wait hold on, let's back up.
Speaker 3:So for Stella, that means they make sure they're not crazy before they go for it, which is really good from recipient parents' perspective, because I want to make sure that I am not using sperm from somebody who's not psychologically stable. Okay, keep going.
Speaker 1:It's a good thing that you don't choose someone crazy, because then that would be crazy if there was someone who's crazy.
Speaker 3:Yes, and then that would also be pretty tough for a kid who one day found out that their donor when they were 18 was crazy. Yeah, it might make you think, am I?
Speaker 2:crazy. You don't know if you're crazy too, but yeah. So then after we get that initial donation, we qualify it and we bring them back in, we do our blood work, we do genetic testing. That's when we do our full clinical psychological evaluation. That starts there. We take a written evaluation from them line. Before we start distributing their samples, we have them meet with our, uh, with our therapist, um, with our mental health professional, rather, um, yeah. And so once we're all on board and everything's good to go, you know, we get to interview them, learn a little bit about about them, we get to see their baby pictures and write up their profile on our website and then, whenever they come into the bank, they show up, they say hello, we give them a form to sign and a cup to produce a sample into. We send them into the donor room and then sometime later they come out and then we take that sample and we process it and we freeze it.
Speaker 3:All right. So I don't know if we spoke about this before or last time we spoke, but I remember there was a huge case years ago out of Zytec Bank where somebody who was mentally ill I think he had schizophrenia came in actually right after he got out of prison for something and started making donations, didn't do background checks to determine that he had not only publicly disclosed that he had schizophrenia but also had been incarcerated up until right before he made his first donation. So I'm wondering you know, in addition to the psychological evaluations that you guys do which is awesome, and I would hope that you would probably catch somebody who was in that particular situation what other sort of background checks do you do? Do you do sort of like criminal investigations and other stuff to make sure that the person's not a criminal?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do a multi-state criminal and sex offender background check, also state and county specific background checks, just to make sure that we don't have any misdemeanors or felonies on the record. There are some things that we've had recipients tell us firsthand are somewhat permissible. You know, every once in a while we've had donors who have had, you know like, trespass, like seven years ago when they were in college, things like that, and so there's a little bit of a gray area to it. But for the most part we are. We don't accept people with criminal backgrounds outside of things like that. Um, and then, beyond that, of course, the psychological evaluation we have.
Speaker 2:Melanie, she's great, she's really good at uncovering backgrounds like that. Um, you know, looking and seeing, like, is this person's biography? We write a biography about them based on an interview before we send them off to her. She looks and sees and says is that accurate? Is what they sent told you accurate? That's really important. We verify college background, educational background. We can't necessarily do job verification due to the privacy agreements that we have with the donors. So we do have to trust their self-report on their career history. But anything outside that, we do our best to make sure whatever they tell us is truthful and honest. That's kind of number one for us is just making sure that we have donors who are willing to share who. They are up front and just be forthright. If you're trying to hide something, then that's not only are you hiding something, but maybe you have something to hide that people wouldn't necessarily want to know.
Speaker 3:That would be suspect.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mama told me that you signed up to be a donor at one point right, or at least went through the process. What was it like for you? What was your thought process like, and do you think you have agreed to open ID or early ID?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was an interesting experience. At the time I had been fresh out of college, I had a degree in biochemistry and entrepreneurship and at the time I'd gone to work for a brewery, a large local one. It was a great job making beer. I had a co-worker who had been a sperm donor at another sperm bank in the area and he was telling me about the experience and to me it just sounded like number one.
Speaker 2:It's a great way to you know, make a little extra money. Everybody, everybody can agree on that. But then what you're doing is it's a really cool service to provide. You get past the initial attraction of it that you know it is money but it's a lifelong thing. It's a lifelong implication that you're signing up for that. You are going to be helping people make people and people can live for a very long time and once you become a sperm donor you are tied to that person in a certain sense, counseling.
Speaker 2:After you understand what it is you're doing, you either turn away from it and you think, all right, I'm not willing to shoulder that emotional responsibility, or you can kind of see the cool thing that you're helping people provide, which is you're making helping people make families. That's a really special, really special and important service that, as a man, you're willing, you're able to provide people. So, and when I became a sperm donor, I signed up immediately for open ID. It wasn't even a question and it was kind of what helped inform me on creating the early disclosure program, knowing going into it 18 years from now, someone's going to give me a phone call and it's going to be a person that I've helped create. Someone's going to give me a phone call and it's going to be a person that I've helped create. Bring that back and you get to meet the family Like you get to be able to say hello, this is who I am, this is the genealogy, my heritage, a little bit of background for you. It's just cool.
Speaker 3:It's cool to be able to share that with people and, you know, hope they like it. Yeah, I think one of the things that is really exciting about the early release, at least from the perspective of a mom Stella might have a different perspective. I think it's interesting because I would imagine that on both sides it would actually be valuable. It would be valuable for the kid to be able to ask questions of the donor, not from the perspective of like oh, you're a parent, but more like just out of curiosity sometimes, like you know what, what did you like doing as a kid? And stuff that you may not see in a donor profile. And I think on the side of the of the donor, I would imagine there might be some curiosity on their side of like you know, how are these kids doing? You know, are any of them doing things like I did when I was little, and stuff like that?
Speaker 3:I can say, for one thing, my daughter, stella, is very springy. She's a gymnast and I was not springy at all and still I'm not very springy. So I'm very thankful to the donor, because he must be a very springy man, because she had gotten it from somewhere, and so I would imagine, if you get to meet him someday, which I hope you do. If you're interested, I'm going to just be like can you, can you jump for me?
Speaker 3:So, what about you, Stella? What sorts of questions might you ask? You got a chance to talk to your donor.
Speaker 1:I would probably ask something like have you ever played any sports or something, or like something that you would just normally ask a new person that you've met because, like, the donor would be a new person that I would meet and, yeah, I would ask them those types of questions like what's your favorite sport? Or like what's your like family background, like where are you from and what's your favorite activity to do, like on a weekend or something oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:What about their favorite food? That's what I want to know oh, that's super interesting.
Speaker 3:Like I, so stella's been like really into spicy food lately and I'm not a spicy person. So I'm also thinking that this donor is probably like the type of person that puts lots of spice on their food. What's the spiciest?
Speaker 1:I like to put some spicy sauce on my burgers and, um, I have, we have like this pepper sauce that my grandpa makes, and then I like putting it on my collard greens and like eggs and basically anything.
Speaker 3:He pretty much puts the pepper sauce on anything. But we have this one pepper sauce that we found, some peppers from Mexico and they're just like light you up, kind of like pepper spray you in the face.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Stella was like yes, yes, I want more of this I'm a spicy guy myself.
Speaker 2:I I get it.
Speaker 3:I love spice have you ever had hot? Honey oh yeah, I don't think we have.
Speaker 1:No, we haven't had hot before.
Speaker 2:It's really good. Go get some peppers, let them sit in some honey just for a little while. Honey gets kind of spicy, gets a little hot and it tastes so good on like put it on toast or things like that wow, oh, that sounds like a.
Speaker 3:That sounds like a game changer.
Speaker 2:We're totally gonna try that yeah what's the spiciest thing you've ever eaten?
Speaker 3:remember the time that you tasted grandpa's spicy oh yeah.
Speaker 1:So, um, we got grandpa some spice, some hot sauce from costa rica. He put a tiny drop on my finger and I had some, and then it was burning hot and my mouth just wouldn't stop like screaming, like I was like I think she was young too, you were like seven maybe, yeah oh man, that's wild
Speaker 2:it was painful I can imagine I've been there what's the spiciest you've ever tasted tasted, oh man, uh, okay. So in washington we have a little, uh, chicken wing place called the wing dome and they have the seven alarm wing challenge and you're supposed to eat seven of these things in seven minutes oh wow eat all the sauce.
Speaker 2:You know you can't leave anything on your plate if you do it. I don't know like they pay for the meal, I think, but I got through about a half a wing and I was. I I think I'm a good, I'm good at eating spicy food, but I was tapping out after half a wing.
Speaker 3:It was rough oh man, I can't even imagine. I don't even know if I would start that, because I'd probably like lose miserably oh yeah, you get like a stomach ache all day. It's just not fun not worth it, not worth no different meal wait a minute.
Speaker 1:You want to know the spiciest food I've ever tasted?
Speaker 3:well, the second spiciest those hot doritos oh yeah, we had some like really hot doritos and I don't know they were just, they didn't even taste good, they were like my stomach was like I don't, I don't like those Doritos.
Speaker 1:I was like these are too spicy, not for me. I'm throwing these out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good call, good call. Sometimes it's a bit much. You got to be careful.
Speaker 1:So tell us something weird Like what's the funniest or craziest thing that has happened with a donor, maybe with one of those extra future parents who has a strange request oh, that is a great question, like in our office or um in their stories.
Speaker 2:Uh, either yeah, okay, yeah, um, oh, let me think about that for a second. Um, I don't know, In the office we typically keep it pretty sterile, so yeah, we've definitely had some interesting people come through the door that we've had to cut out Our donors are typically like yeah, we've definitely had some very interesting people.
Speaker 2:There was one time where we had a guy in our office who we didn't know. We didn't invite him in. He showed up, said he wanted to donate and we said okay, send your application in. So we did it on his phone right there and we had to tell him right to his face sorry, we can't accept your application at this time. And he got pretty upset and that was pretty crazy. That was a pretty crazy one, but we kept our cool.
Speaker 3:I imagine it's pretty hard for donors, cause you know you go through this whole process and you give all this information If you get rejected, I mean, that's kind of like I don't know. That has to be a little soul crushing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it is. Um, it's a little unfortunate for a guy to figure out that he can't be a sperm donor. You know, like we tell people like on average, men produce 40 to 60 million sperm cells each time. Wow, we look a little more to 300 million. We need to. We need higher concentrations. So oftentimes we'll eliminate people from our program just because they can't produce enough sperm. And you know, we tell people like don't get bent out of shape, it's okay. It's like you're just not above average in terms of sperm production. But people get set on it and they get their mind into it that they're going to be a sperm donor. And it's always a bit of a bummer when you got to tell someone that they can't be part of the program.
Speaker 3:I can only imagine. So what's next for the bank?
Speaker 2:What are things that you're planning and how you're planning to grow in the coming years? Yeah, so right now we've just solidified some relationships with some international partners.
Speaker 3:So we're starting to send sperm overseas.
Speaker 2:It's pretty exciting. That's awesome. Yeah, we've hit, you know, we're cash flow positive, so things are looking good from the business side and starting to put a little bit of money in the bank. So in the coming years, essentially what we're looking at is we're just recruiting more donors, getting more sperm donations, hopefully getting out there, getting more relationships with fertility clinics, which is very important out there, getting more relationships with fertility clinics, which is very important. And what's most important I have to share this We've been working with Eve Wiley from the man with a Thousand Kids, the documentary. She's a donor conceived people's advocate. She and her team have agreed to work as a donor conceived board for us. So we are working together essentially to not only develop our business to be more aligned with recipients and their children, but also kind of help in instances like this particularly spread the word about.
Speaker 2:You know what we as an industry can be doing to help support again our recipient families. Now what that looks like. We're still kind of in the inception phase and putting things together, but we're trying to take a stance against things like serial donation and fertility fraud and unfortunately those are things that have I'm not going to say rampant, but they have existed in our industry in the past. You know, I can imagine a lot of people are uncomfortable with that fact. So, yeah, we're trying to be transparent, trying to be open, trying to change the industry over the next few years and what people can expect from all of us.
Speaker 2:We all think that the sperm banking industry you know anybody should always be thinking about how they can do things better. There's always a better way to do things. It's the only way to grow, and so that's kind of our focus right now is, while we do these things like EDP and, you know, as we grow, as we acquire more recipient families and more donors, just continue to do so within the framework of how can we make this a better experience, not only for the donors, of course, but also for our recipients and their children.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. I know, one of the things that in my mom's group we talk about a lot is a lot of folks, a lot of women at least, single moms by choice, and then I don't know if this is the same or similar in other communities, but a lot of women come to this decision and they are concerned about their children not having the opportunity to connect with the donor until they're adults, and so a lot of times what that concern will do is either drive them to try to conceive with a friend or a person they know or potentially, in the worst case scenario, go to one of those Facebook groups that you know it's like find a donor. And so I think a lot of times there's so many risks with that I mean, like you mentioned, like serial donation and donor and you know, fraud and and these are folks that are also not vetted at all I mean, they're not tested for STDs necessarily there's a whole lot of legal complications that can come with that as well. You know, like, effectively, if you don't have a contract that that person's not a donor, that's a dad, which could bring just a lot of unnecessary legal drama.
Speaker 3:So I'm excited about this program that you all have, because I think that it offers an alternative to the way that we've traditionally thought about sperm donation and family creation. So I am super excited to watch and see how this progresses. So, before we let you go, we ask all guests to describe themselves as they would their favorite drink. For example, mama is like coffee. She loves coffee. We ask all guests to describe themselves as they would their favorite drink.
Speaker 1:For example, Mama is like coffee. She loves coffee and many people do, but not everyone loves coffee. But even though Mommy isn't for everyone, she will brighten up your day if you're a coffee person or, well, Mommy person.
Speaker 3:Yes, I can be very polarizing and Estella is like a Shirley Temple she's sweet and bubbly, but sometimes she can be a little much. Whenever you need something sweet, Estella is your girl.
Speaker 1:So what about?
Speaker 3:you.
Speaker 1:How would you describe yourself like your favorite drink?
Speaker 2:That is such a good question and I think I would have to say chocolate milkshake oh yeah, I love chocolate milkshake. Oh yeah, I love chocolate milkshake. You know I'm a stouter guy I'm a little short for my size Really really robust and tasty and fun, and I love a good, hot sunny day. You know, nice, I think that's what I day you know Nice. I think that's what I'm going to say about that.
Speaker 3:Well, that's awesome. Well, thanks so much, Dylan, for chatting with us today. Is there somewhere you can direct our listeners to to learn more about the Cascade Sperm Bank?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. Come to our website at wwwcascadecryobankcom. We have some information there about all of our EDP program and our donors. And yeah, if you need to get in contact with us, our phone number and our email address are on there too, so come on by say hello. And yeah, we hope we get to meet you.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thanks so much for chatting with us today. Absolutely Thank you Awesome.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for chatting with us today, absolutely, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to Seeking Different If you like what you heard, share us with your family and friends. Tell us what you'd like to hear on future episodes and share your stories about belonging and family.
Speaker 3:You can connect with us on Instagram at Seeking Different.
Speaker 1:See you next time.
