EVE Wiley was just 16-years-old when she was scrolling through her mum’s computer and discovered an email from a cryobank that would turn her life as she knew it upside down.
The 38-year-old, from Dallas, soon learned that the man she thought was her biological dad, Doug, wasn’t, and that her parents had used a sperm donor named Steve, while they were struggling to conceive.
But after tracking him down and developing a close bond with him, Eve would go on to realise that Steve, who she spent years calling ‘Dad,’ wasn’t her biological dad either.
And nothing could’ve prepared her for the moment she found out she had a third ‘dad’ – and that it was her mum’s fertility doctor, Kim McMorries, who allegedly mixed his sperm in with Steve’s before insemination.
DISCOVERING THE EMAILS
“My mum was a nurse at my school,” Eve explained, speaking to Mamamia’s No Filter podcast.
“I had this little habit where I would go into her emails and find all the juicy gossip on my cohorts. That’s when I found the emails in my mum’s personal inbox from California cryobank and I saw my birth date on it.”
It was only then that Eve realised her biological father was Donor 106, Steve, and not Doug, who she had believed to be her biological dad but who was essentially her stepfather – and who had died when she was seven.
The following morning, Eve approached her mum, Margo Williams, when she was getting ready in the bathroom and told her she knew Doug wasn’t her real dad.
But while her mum suddenly started “bawling” and explained she was going to tell her but didn’t know how, Eve recalls how she felt “excited” that she probably had some half siblings.
Doug, who Eve had believed to be her biological dad but who was essentially her stepfather, had died when she was seven.
“There definitely was a lot of grief and there was a level of trauma of not having a father figure growing up,” Eve explained.
“For me it was just trying to look at it in more of a positive sense.”
Eve explained that growing up, she was teased for being adopted.
After all, she had blonde hair and blue eyes while her younger sister, the biological daughter of her mum and Doug, had dark brown hair and eyes.
But suddenly, their differences in appearance all made sense.
TRACKING DOWN THE SPERM DONOR
After looking through a green folder her mum had kept with all of the relevant information, Eve managed to track down sperm donor 106, Steve, who her parents had used when they were struggling to conceive.
Eve recalls how he was “surprised” to hear he had a daughter – adding that he told her he’d been a donor years ago while in college as an easy way to “earn a quick buck” and had forgotten all about it.
Eve and Steve, who by now was a father of three, ended up talking on the phone and went on to develop a close relationship – meeting for the first time when she was 19.
“He flew down to meet me for the first time, and it was amazing,” she explained.
“It was like a huge hug and we stayed for hours talking in my living room and then went to dinner and live music and it was just catching up.”
But the news of having a daughter hadn’t only come as a surprise to Steve – his wife and kids hadn’t known about his donation either.
It took multiple years for Steve and his wife to tell the kids about Eve, but to everyone’s delight, she says they were “cool” with it.
As the years progressed, the bond between them all continued, with Steve even officiating at her wedding.
It was only when Eve went on to have children of her own and her son became sick that everyone’s lives were about to be flipped upside down once again…
“He had all these allergies and no one could figure out what it was,” Eve explained.
It turned out her son had celiac disease, a hereditary disease, which they said was coming from her, and so doctors recommended she go for DNA testing.
DNA SHOCKER
But nothing could’ve prepared her for the results that came back…
She learned that Steve wasn’t her biological father. Not only that, but testing found that her real dad was her mother’s fertility doctor Kim McMorries, who had used his own sperm.
“I remember literally downing my glass of wine,” Eve recalled. “My mother was upstairs watching a movie with my in-laws.
“My choice was to pretend like I never discovered this and continue to live a fairytale life with my dad (Steve) and my mum and just pretend like it never happened, or to go right upstairs, which is what I did when I was 16-years-old, and tell her again that my real biological father was her fertility doctor.”
Eve explained that she didn’t break the news to Steve until weeks later.
“It was the hardest part of this entire process,” she recalled.
“We just cried and cried and cried. At the very end of the conversation he said, ‘It changes some things, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re my daughter.’ That was all I needed to hear.”
And Eve was shocked to learn that this insemination without consent was only a crime in one state in the US – meaning that in most states, including Texas, what Dr Kim McMorries had done wasn’t against the law.
MAKING CHANGE
While Eve spoke about having 14 half siblings at the time of the podcast, in a more recent interview with The Telegraph in February 2025 she revealed she’d found out she has 16 – after since discovering another two new half-sisters.
She told the publication: “It’s just this continual existential question of how many more do I have? And anger, and sadness.
“On each occasion, “we go through this moment of, is this new sibling going to reject us? Do they want to know us? So many raw emotions come together at once.”
Kim McMorries retired from his Texas practice in 2021.
In August 2024, he agreed to a voluntary surrender of his medical licence while under investigation for professionalism related to “alleged lack of informed consent when providing fertility treatment to multiple patients.”
The world’s oldest mothers
WHILE older women often turn to adoption or surrogacy to have children, there are some who have defied the odds to have their babies later in life. Here are some of the world’s oldest mothers:
Erramatti Mangamma
The then 74-year-old took the record of the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth in India to twin daughters – also making her the oldest mother of twins.
She conceived via IVF, and gave birth via caesarean section on 5th September, 2019.
Daljinder Kaur
After having two years of IVF treatments, Daljinder gave birth to a baby boy – her first child – in 2016, at the age of 72.
Dr. Anurag Bishnoi, who gave Daljinder fertility treatments, was criticised by her peers for treating someone of her age.
Rajo Devi Lohan
Rajo was 70 when she gave birth to daughter Naveen in November 2008.
At the time, she was the oldest first-time mother in the world, and therefore hit headlines globally.
Omkari Panwar
It was the 27th June 2008 when Omkari gave birth to twins – siblings for her and husband Charan Singh Panwar’s two adult daughters.
Desperate to have a son, Omkari went through IVF treatment, which her husband had to mortgage his land, spend his life savings, take out a credit card loan and sell his buffalos to pay for.
Margaret Adenuga
Margaret was 68 when she had twins in April 2020, after three failed IVF attempts.
While she was told the risks of getting pregnant at her age, she proceeded anyway, and was able to carry her twins to full-term with no issues.
ABC News reported that in response to a 2019 letter to Eve, McMorries acknowledged mixing his own sperm with that of other donors, in order to achieve “better success” for patients hoping to conceive.
He added: “It is easy to look back and judge protocols/standards used 33 years ago and assume they were wrong in today’s environment.
“However, it was not wrong 33 years ago as that was acceptable practice for the times.”
Discussing the topic of consent, he claimed that after the repeated failures, he had discussed with Eve’s mother the idea of mixing in an anonymous local donor’s sperm with 106’s sperm.
He claimed she had agreed to proceed and wouldn’t have continued without her consent – a conversation which she denied took place.
“Absolutely not,” Margo told ABC News. “That would never have been a conversation we had…that just didn’t happen.”
According to the publication, Dr Kim McMorries did acknowledge that he never told Margo that the local sperm he was using was his own, but claimed he couldn’t tell her due to the anonymity agreement he signed when making the donation.
Eve is now an active campaigner for victims of fertility fraud, with bills having been passed in 12 states since 2019, 10 of which she was involved in.
