After More Than 45 Years, Iowa Man Learns Mom's Doctor Is His Dad

For the first 47 years of his life, Mark Hansen thought he knew who both of his parents were. However, just months before the man he'd known as "dad" all his life passed away, he revealed to Mark that he wasn't his biological father. And he told Mark he didn't know who was.

As you can imagine, it was a stunning revelation to Hansen. He told the Des Moines Register "I wondered what I was. If I wasn't my dad's, who was I?"

Mark had known for decades that his mom and her husband were struggling to conceive a child and went to his mom's longtime family doctor for fertility help. He had always assumed the mom and dad he'd known his entire life were his biological parents. Knowing that wasn't the case, Mark suspected that Dr. Sidney Yugend, his mother's doctor, had artificially inseminated Mark's mother with his own sperm. When Mark pulled up Yugend's obituary online and looked at himself in the mirror, the Des Moines Register reports he knew he was right.

Mark Hansen

Adding to the craziness is the fact that Yugend signed the birth certificate for Mark... his own son.

Since uncovering the truth in 2014, Mark advocates for other families and children who've been deceived by what he calls "doctor donors." Unfortunately, there are many of them. Doctors in at least 20 states stand accused, but Traci Portugal, the daughter of a man whose been accused as a doctor donor, says not a single one has lost their license. She also told the Des Moines Register that a Texas doctor who admitted to artificially inseminating a Texas woman with his own sperm is still practicing medicine.

Portugal says she knows of a dozen children in Iowa whose doctors provided their own sperm to unsuspecting women. Mark is one of the 12. A man who knows his biological father is Sidney, but will always consider Rodney as his true dad.

Mark Hansen

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