There's a sense of otherness, of not belonging, of not fitting in. 'The emotional experience of childhood is markedly similar among (donor-conceived people who didn't know as children and) adoptees that don't know that they're adopted and then discover it. At once, that moment Shapiro shared in the delivery room with her mother, and so many other moments, took on new implications. She had learned from a genetic test on, after her father had passed away, that he was not her biological father. 'What did this mean that they knew this about me, and that I did not know this about myself? And what did this mean in terms of our being a family together?' 'The feeling when I discovered that my paternity had been hidden from me by my parents was one of tremendous betrayal,' Shapiro said. The event was sponsored by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Medicine and the Muse and the Program in Bioethics and Film and was moderated by Paul Costello, senior communications strategist and advisor. The discovery shook her world, and inspired her book Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, which she discussed during a recent conversation, followed by questions, at Stanford. Instead, they shared a warm moment: mother, grandmother and grandson.ĭani Shapiro, an author of four memoirs, didn't learn the truth of her ancestry until she was 54. But at that moment in the hospital, Dani had no reason to doubt her mother's proclamation. Neither Dani, nor the newborn, were genetically a Shapiro. Dani's mother knew that Dani was conceived in Philadelphia after she and her husband visited The Farris Institute for Parenthood, which specialized in male infertility. 'He looks just like a Shapiro,' Dani Shapiro's mother told her, eyeing Dani's newborn son.

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