“I am a white woman born into a mixed-race family after an in vitro fertilization treatment went wrong.”

Confusions are rare, but were more common in the early days of IVF when there were fewer regulations.

Hadiya says her family “stood out” in the small town on Prince Edward Island, on Canada’s east coast, where she grew up.

He remembers being subjected to some racist taunts in high school.

“There were comments from other kids like ‘you’re supposed to be black’ or making fun of being African,” she says.

She claims that her experience with racism was not as damaging as that of her mixed-race younger siblings (her parents had four more children naturally after conceived Hadiya through artificial insemination).

“We were in a small fishing village and they faced direct racism,” he explains.

For Hadiya, the “crazy” discovery of what happened at the moment of conception did not change her relationship with her father, but rather simply confirmed a truth about her life.

“(This) answered a question I had, but it didn’t give me the result I was still looking for,” he says, adding that he is still searching for some sort of explanation as to how the mix-up happened.

“He’s always been my father and the man who raised me. He was there the day I was born and he’s been on the road before. He’s still there today, so I’ve never felt any different about it,” she says.

“My childhood was not a lie, I was always included. I kind of knew I was of Ghanaian descent because I grew up eating the food and learning the language. I can’t speak it, but sometimes I can understand it.”

Hadiya’s parents met in Toronto in the 1990s and married less than a year later.

“My father grew up in Tema, a coastal town in Ghana, and immigrated to Canada when he was in his early twenties. It was in Toronto that he met my mother, who was from North Rustico, on Prince Edward Island.”

After years of struggling with infertility, they decided to seek IVF treatment at the Toronto Fertility and Sterility Institute, run by the late Dr. Firoz Khamsi.

Artificial insemination is a procedure in which a woman’s eggs are fertilized with a man’s sperm in a laboratory before the embryos are implanted in the woman’s uterus.

“They were trying to get pregnant for seven years, I think, before they succeeded,” Hadiya says. “It was a long IVF process.”

The couple made a clear request. They wanted a black sperm donor to recreate the heritage of both parents.

“When I was born, my parents were definitely shocked by my pale skin. When they called the IVF clinic, they told them to wait a year until I changed my color.”

But a year later, Hadiya’s mother asked the clinic to investigate the case further, and confirmed that the sperm donor was Caucasian. They described him as a man with red hair.

“At the end of the year, the clinic confirmed that there had been an error… (in) the donor injection numbers,” Hadiya says.

He later found out that his biological father had brown hair and was not red-haired at all.

“You should be grateful for what you have, you have a beautiful family, and you get what you want. Take me to court if you want, but that’s what insurance is for,” Dr. Khamsi told his parents at a meeting.

Hadiya says that in 2003, her parents filed a civil suit against the clinic and were able to reach a settlement for an undisclosed amount.

“It’s funny because in court they said they couldn’t prove I was a Caucasian girl, they would need a DNA test. But I think it’s pretty clear.”

He asserts that the matter became clearer throughout the legal process.

Hadiya says there were “no direct repercussions” to her condition and the clinic continued to operate until it closed.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario said in a statement that Khamsi resigned from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in March 2011, after a settlement led to the medical regulatory body abandoning a hearing into the care, treatment and record-keeping of 26 patients.

The physician has also agreed not to apply or re-apply for registration as a physician in Ontario or any other province.

In 2019, out of curiosity and not knowing anything about her biological father, Hadiya took a DNA test, which did not reveal anything relevant.

Five years later, a woman called her and told her their DNA matched. This led her to discover that she had about 12 half-siblings.

Most siblings were conceived between 1994 and 1998 through the same donor.

“It was crazy to know that I had 12 brothers at the time. In fact, I’ve found three more since then.”

“It makes you feel like a medical statistic that you weren’t expecting,” she explains.

“It was very difficult to know,” he adds.

“We discovered that I might not be the only person confused in the fraternity group, and that led to more questions and more research about my own history,” he says.

“It seems certain that all our mothers have promised that there will be no more than six or eight children born with their donations,” she says.

But the donor’s sperm ended up being used in at least 15 IVF treatments.

The news came as a shock to everyone involved, but especially to the siblings who did not know they were conceived via donation.

Hadiya says the donor thought his sperm would be used in medical research by the University of Calgary in 1994, and his biological daughters told him so, but somehow it ended up at Khamsi’s clinic.

In Canada, there is no legal limit on donations or the number of offspring per donor, but some clinics impose their own limits.

Most of her siblings, who were conceived by other women with sperm from the same donor, joined a chat group set up to meet and keep in touch.

“I have a biological brother who lives on the East Coast. We only lived two blocks away from each other and we didn’t know it.”

Overall, Hadiya considers herself “lucky” to have grown up in a family with dual heritage.

“My father was a first-generation immigrant to Canada, and he was very proud of his culture. So I was very fortunate to have kind of a dual-cultural perspective, experiencing Ghanaian culture and French-Acadian culture in Prince Edward Island.”

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