Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness

The opposite of a step parent - The genetics without any of the emotion: 'sperm donors' reflections on identity-release donation and relatedness

This paper draws upon data from an online survey with closed- and open-ended questions completed by 168 identity-release sperm donors who had all donated in the UK between 2010 and 2016. Paying particular attention to the qualitative data obtained from the donors' responses to the open-ended questions, this paper explores the sperm donors' thoughts and feelings about being an identity-release donor and about future information exchange and contact with offspring conceived with their gametes. It shows that the majority of donors regarded identity-release donation as their preferred method of donation, supported the removal of anonymity, did not have concerns about being an identity-release donor and indeed saw positives for both the donor-conceived offspring and themselves. However, it also highlights that the donors' thoughts and feelings about being an identity-release sperm donor, how they saw themselves in relation to the individual conceived with their donation, and their preferences for information exchange and contact, varied greatly. The paper explores how identity-release donation is surrounding by many unknowns and consequentially sperm donors struggle to conceptualize what it means to be an identity-release sperm donor. As well as adding to the literature on donor conception, relatedness and kinship, by giving voice to sperm donors' own views and experience of the identity-release regulatory context, and their thoughts and feelings about future information exchange, this paper will help policy makers and clinicians prepare for the imminent time when donor-conceived individuals in the UK can start requesting their donor's identity.

Toxic money or paid altruism: the meaning of payments for identity-release gamete donors

Public discourses commonly frame gamete, organ and other forms of bodily donation as altruistic 'gifts'. However, despite on-going debates about the ethics of payments to donors, few studies have examined the views of donors themselves regarding the meaning of payments and their compatibility (or not) with understandings of these practices as gifts. This article addresses this issue, analysing 24 in-depth interviews with UK identity-release gamete donors. It was crucial to all participants that their donation be viewed as fundamentally other-oriented, motivated by the desire to help others. However, whilst egg donors often accommodated payment within this narrative, male participants explained that any money would taint the gift they had given. I argue that sperm donors faced particular challenges to incorporating payment within a gift narrative for two key reasons: first, sperm donors relied on a discourse of 'pure altruism', including absolute opposition between gifts and market exchange, in order to present their donation as other-oriented. In contrast, egg donors were also able to mobilise a discourse of relational giving to present their donations as a personal gift. Second, according to a continued stereotype of sperm donors as financially motivated students, their payments have already been culturally earmarked as side-line earnings.

The Familial and the Familiar: Locating Relatedness in Colombian Donor Conception

In this article, I explore how women undergoing in vitro fertilization with familial or anonymous egg donors located relatedness with a donor-conceived child through familial and social identities. Recognizing gametes as substances that contain biological and sociocultural/behavioral traits shaped women's narratives around interconnected notions of the familial and familiar, or the social understanding of biological and social inheritance, and knowledge of the genetic materials involved. Women's narratives of relatedness reflect their relationships with family and society and their desire to reproduce these relationships in their child(ren), a process that reproduces prevailing Colombian social values and notions of ideal citizens.

Being a 'good' parent: single women reflecting upon 'selfishness' and 'risk' when pursuing motherhood through sperm donation

Drawing upon the narratives of 23 single heterosexual women in the UK thinking about and pursuing motherhood through sperm donation, this paper explores how solo motherhood can be construed as a 'risk' to the identity of a 'good' mother. It shows how, for these women, solo motherhood was a departure from an imagined life of having a child within the context of a stable relationship and was a prospect viewed with much ambivalence and uncertainty. Choosing to become a single mother challenged their conceptualisation of a 'good' mother, someone who puts their child's interests above their own. By examining the flexible and creative ways these women navigate the field of reproductive technologies in the pursuit of motherhood, this paper explores how the women engaged in a process of 'damage limitation', becoming 'moral pioneers' of family and relatedness, as they realigned their ideals versus realities of family building and tried to make solo motherhood as 'good as it can be' for their future child.

Transforming social contracts: the social and cultural history of IVF in Denmark

The introduction of IVF in Denmark was accompanied by social transformations: contestations of medical authority, negotiations of who might access reproductive biomedicine and changes in individual and social identity due to reproductive technologies. Looking at the making of Danish IVF, this article sketches its social and cultural history by revisiting the legal, medical, technological and social developments that characterized the introduction of IVF in Denmark as well as by contextualizing the social research on the uses and impacts of IVF carried out in the 1980s and 1990s within these developments. The making of Danish IVF is presented as a transformative event in so far as it changed Denmark from being a society concerned about the social consequences of reproductive technologies to a moral collective characterized by a joined sense of responsibility for Denmark's procreative future.