Half Siblings With Same Sperm Donor Meet

Oct. 18 -- Last weekend, 8-year-old twins Jonah and Hilit Jacobson got ready to meet the sister they never knew they had.

"I'm excited and I'm nervous," Hilit told her dad.

Meanwhile, 9-year-old Maddison Walker, who had been desperate for siblings, was suddenly shy at the prospect of meeting her half brother and half sister.

"I'm going to cry," Maddy told her mother, Mara Walker. "I'm not going to look. I'm not going to look."

When her mother asked her what she was afraid of, she said: "Everything."

But soon the children were face to face with each other, and their unusual bond.Their moms became pregnant with sperm from the same donor, which makes the twins and Maddy half siblings.

Pregnant With Twins

Terri and Eric Jacobson, now 40 and 41, had been married for three years when they learned that Eric's sperm count would make it impossible for them to conceive naturally. Their desire to have a child led them to California Cryobank, where Terri was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor. In July 1994, she learned she was pregnant with twins.

Before she married husband Philip, Mara Walker wanted to become a mother, so she too went to the California Cryobank. She was inseminated with sperm from the same donor the Jacobsons used. Soon, Maddy was born.

The twins had been growing up in Atlanta, with no idea that across the country in Valencia, Calif., they had a genetic half sister.

It would take a Web site — donorsiblingregistry.com — created by 12-year-old Ryan Kramer to bring them together. Ryan, who was conceived with the help of a sperm donor, wanted to find that donor, or at the very least any half siblings he might have.

"My mother and I one day had an idea to begin a Web site where different donor children, and possibly, sperm donors, and everyone can go on this Web site and share their information," Ryan told Good Morning America in an interview last year. "And we thought that perhaps a match could happen."