VANCOUVER - Olivia Pratten hasn't felt whole since she learned at age five she was conceived through sperm donation, and over the years she learned she's not the only one who grew up without a name or face for her biological dad.
Now she's hoping a British Columbia Supreme Court judge will end her decades-long crusade for the man's identity, not by giving her his phone number but forcing the law in her birth province to change so that people like her can have that right.
The 28-year-old sued the provincial government seeking to end anonymity for sperm donors, even after learning her own records have likely been destroyed.
"Lost generation sounds a little bit cheesy, but in essence that's what it is," she said in an interview Wednesday, when a judge reserved her decision in the case.
"I'm speaking out to prevent this from happening to other people."
Joseph Arvay, Pratten's lawyer, contends his client has been discriminated against because she doesn't have the same ability to learn her genetic roots as adopted children.
The lawsuit asks the court to toss out the B.C. Adoption Act of 1996 in favour of laws that include children conceived through sperm and egg donation. It would ensure physicians maintain donor records in perpetuity so that the offspring of such reproductive technologies can access them -- if they choose -- once they are adults.
Should the judge rule in Pratten's favour, children born prior to 1996 would be able to ask the record holder to contact the donor and to glean if they're willing to be contacted. The donor could outright agree, or choose to only disclose certain information such as their ethnicity or religion.
Children born after the judge's ruling, however, would have no barriers to gaining the donor's identifying information. It's up to the judge to determine which of those options would be given to those born between 1996 and her forthcoming ruling.
"I feel relieved after it's done. It's been a long haul," said Pratten's mother, Shirley, who has heard the case alongside her daughter. "Just let's hope that common sense prevails here, honestly, and humanity prevails over business."
The doctor who inseminated Pratten's mother in a Vancouver clinic has said that donor's records were destroyed in the 1990s, because they were part of medical records that only had to be kept for six years.
The provincial government, named as defendants in the suit, argued before the judge that it's not up to courts to make major policy decisions.
Lawyers for the B.C. Attorney General contend a ruling now would also be premature, because federal legislation already governs the reproductive industry -- it's just not in full force because of it's own legal challenge by Quebec. That province is arguing in the Supreme Court of Canada that the Assisted Human Reproduction Act treads on provincial jurisdiction.
Pratten and her lawyer disagree with doctors in the fertility industry who say the implications of striking down anonymous sperm donation would dry up donors all together. While men initially stopped going to banks in places like the U.K., Australia, Sweden, Pratten claims the numbers always rebounded.
And even if they didn't here, Pratten admitted that's not her concern.
"To me it's like, 'Oh no, there might be less anonymous donors' and I'm like 'good.' That's like saying there are going to be less children born with diabetes," she said.
"Up until this court case we have had no rights, so if it means a smaller system but where the children have rights, that's what I support."
A federal law prohibits men from being paid for their sperm in Canada. Only one sperm bank with 40 donors currently exists, and it provides semen across the country.
