About five years ago, a mother in Kansas City started wondering about the paternity of her twins. Becky Peck had recently divorced, and she became more sensitive to what she perceived as the physical and behavioral differences between herself and her two children, Lindsay and Jeremy. Her ex-husband was not their genetic father. Becky had conceived through artificial insemination, and now she wanted to know who the sperm donor was.

Somehow she tracked the donor down and sent him a letter and a picture of the twins. David Ross, a piano teacher in San Francisco, was surprised. He had forgotten he had ever donated sperm. He ignored the letter, but later Becky and her two kids appeared in a TV documentary about the children of sperm donors and Becky sent Ross the videotape. That did it. Ross visited Kansas City. He is now close to Jeremy and Lindsay, and they even spend summer vacations together.

As reported in the Asahi Shimbun on May 24, the story is a happy one. It is also semantically tricky. What is David Ross to Jeremy and Lindsay Peck? The article refers to him with the awkwardly precise but nevertheless loaded term "father by virtue of heredity" (idenjo no chichi). In a different Asahi article about AI, such a person was simply referred to as a "donor" (teikyosha), while in still another, the term used was "the real parent" (jitsu no oya).