In 2005, the UK changed the law so that donor-conceived adults could find out the identity of their donor when they reached 18. At the time, there was great concern that this would make it difficult to recruit enough donors to meet the needs of infertile couples. Identifiability was seen as a deterrent, partly because the nature of the link between the donor and DC adult was ambiguous. Nordqvist and Gilman beautifully capture the ambivalence at the heart of this issue: whether connections made through donor conception are considered kin or not.
In applying the sociology of personal life to gamete donation, this book explicitly acknowledges the ways in which it builds on the thinking of scholars such as Morgan, Finch and Mason, and Smart. The authors frame their research by describing the UK legal setting as primarily based on individualist values, where in policy terms, donors are considered to be autonomous, with no relevant family and relationship ties. They intentionally complicate this approach by contrasting it with their findings, which show both how gamete donation creates a “messy network” of relationships primarily based on affinity, and also how donors’ families are impacted by donation.
Chapter 1 discusses the history of donation in the UK, contextualising the removal of donor anonymity as part of a broader societal shift towards seeing family secrets as unhealthy and emphasising children’s rights to know their origins. When only the recipients, donors and donor-conceived people have rights and responsibilities, this diminishes the rich interconnectedness of human relationships by reducing them purely to biological links, rendering donors’ families almost invisible.
Chapter 2 gives a flavour of the variation in donation pathways, practices and attitudes, arguing that, regardless of the donation pathway people take, donation is “something you do, rather than something you are.” The common threads between donation pathways are giving eggs, sperm or embryos to help someone else have a child, and rejecting the view that a biological link makes them the “real parent.”
Chapters 3 and 4 look at the social expectation to be a “good donor” and the pressure on donors to “know their place.” This is shown to mean simultaneously caring enough to become a donor, then detaching after the donation is completed, yet retaining an attitude of “neutral responsiveness” to contact from donor offspring. Donors accepted that enabling DC people to control contact rightly enhanced their autonomy, but this approach raises parallel questions about the autonomy of donors’ children who, unlike donor siblings, may not legally initiate contact.
Chapter 5 explores the donor’s relationship with recipient parents and DC people, described as “socially unscripted kinship,” meaning it is open to multiple interpretations by different family members and in different families; some may define their link in kinship terms, such as “biological parent” or “auntie,” while others see, or want, no link at all.
Chapter 6 explores how donors manage the framing of donation in relationships with their partner, children, parents and siblings, and the hierarchy of disclosure to them. The novelty of the data on this topic is one of the book’s great strengths. Donors expected their family to follow their lead in defining the nature of the relationship with the DC person; if they disclosed the donation at all, it was common for family members to feel they should not openly disagree.
This book showcases the strengths of qualitative sociology in producing evidence to question everyday practice and policy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the conclusion, where donation is shown as a relational practice, shaped by a number of factors, mutually constituted through donors’ and their families’ existing relationships and relational identities. The authors ask what donation policy and practice could look like if the implications for the wider family were recognised, and if different types of relationship were acknowledged beyond kinship aligned with biology.
Of the useful (and sometimes radical) recommendations to emerge from their research, two stand out as key. Firstly, donors’ children have no reciprocal right to initiate contact. While not facing the same (perceived) identity issues as DC people, they do face the same prospective challenges in relationship-building. Secondly, the authors call to create routes for non-clinic donors to be legally recognised as donors rather than parents. This recognises the desire for recipients, donors and their family members to acknowledge a relational link without affirming a kinship model of family, and without being required to use a fertility clinic.
This sensitively-written and accessible book is rare in paying in-depth attention to gamete donors’ perspectives and relationships, and even more so, to those of their families and children: this is the first study to map how donors’ siblings feel about the donation. The diversity in attitudes to kinship and donation could have been enhanced by including more donors from minority ethnic backgrounds, as the authors themselves point out. As well as being useful for clinicians and counsellors to understand the context in which donors make and then live with reproductive choices, much of what is written will ring true to donors. Current initiatives to modernise gamete donation practice could not be more timely.