Donna Marvin-Platt was 30 when she learned she was conceived through artificial insemination. She has made a documentary about her search for her biological father.
Informed that she was conceived through artificial insemination, a borough resident has produced a movie documenting the search for her biological father which is currently being streamed on Amazon Prime, PBS and later this month on Tubi.
Titled “Missed Conceptions,” the 87-minute movie was made by Donna Marvin-Platt who was 30 when her mother told her the truth about something which she had felt as a little girl.
“What my mother told me did and didn’t surprise me,” Marvin-Platt said recently. “I didn’t have a good relationship with my father.”
Learning what she did, she contacted the gynecologist who inseminated her mother and received a letter from his wife saying he had died and his records were given to the doctor who took over his practice.
“It’s very scary to pursue the identity of your biological parent,” Marvin-Platt said. “I didn’t think I had the right to know, in a way, and there’s also the fear of rejection. But I still looked. I still wondered.”
She thought that possibly she was the off-spring of the gynecologist who inseminated her mother because, like herself, he was short and artistic.
“I thought it was him and went to a psychic who said, ‘Yeah, it’s him,’” she chuckled. “Years later, I wrote the gynecologist’s daughter and asked if she’d take a DNA test but never heard from her.”
Marvin-Platt grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and attended Carnegie Mellon University where she studied design and was active in its well-regarded Scotch’n’Soda Theatre. She moved to New York City and worked as an art director in health care advertising and also did stand-up and sketch comedy.
A small-statured woman who grew up on Short Lane, in New Rochelle, she acted and produced a one-woman show titled “Life in the Short Lane.” It was a story about a woman finding self-confidence after her over-bearing mother dies but is reincarnated as different objects in the woman’s life. She later made a short film based on the story.
In 2012, about 20 years after her mother had told her about the artificial insemination, Ancestry.com launched its DNA-testing service. Five years later, Marvin-Platt decided to get an online test.
“I didn’t know much about this site until then,” she said.
She was then contacted by an amateur genealogist who wanted to know why her DNA had so much in common with his wife’s DNA. Marvin-Platt told him she was looking for her biological father and asked if anyone in the family was a doctor practicing in the New York area in the early 60s. She was informed there was one: Michael Ruttenberg, a doctor, an accomplished chemist, an abstract artist who was deceased. Ruttenberg’s aunt was the grandmother of the wife.
“When I found out he had passed,” Marvin-Platt said, “I was upset, but happy to find out who he most probably was.”
Marvin-Platt did not find out much about Ruttenberg from the husband and wife, but through them learned there was a website of his paintings. She contacted the woman who created the site.
She traveled to California to speak with Ruttenberg’s friends. Returning to Glen Ridge, she decided to go back to California to begin a documentary on Ruttenberg, his other donor-children and the concerns of unchecked artificial insemination. Four half-sisters were interviewed. Subsequent to the movie, a half-brother was discovered.
“I learned from his friends he always wanted children,” Marvin-Platt said. “He was in love with a woman, but she didn’t love him that way. He was always giving of himself. He spent his life as a humanitarian and donated his sperm for humanitarian reasons.”
The movie not only presents opinions discussing the psychological problems entwined with the practice, but also the revelation of the donor, too late coming to grips with his “lost children.”
Marvin-Platt’s parents had signed a contract that they would never search for the donor and she could never understand why information about a donor could not be divulged to the recipient. But she never signed anything, she reasoned.
“My biological father was still alive for six years since I sent that note to the gynecologist looking for information about him,” she said. “That’s what’s so tragic. The more I got to know him, the more I grieved. The movie was my way of getting to know him. I went out to his grave and got a copy of his death certificate. He paints, I paint; I’m in medical advertising, he’s in medicine; he was eccentric, I’m eccentric.”
Ruttenberg died at the age of 61 from a drug concoction he had created. He is buried in West Roxbury, Mass.
“I used all of my talents to make this film,” Marvin-Platt said. “I needed to make this movie, but I don’t know if I’ll have the motivation for another one.”
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