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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

From Anonymity to Availability: Exploring Contacts Between Formerly Anonymous Gamete Donors and their Donor Offspring

Anaïs Martin
Isabel Côté
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Résumé

Third-party reproduction has opened new possibilities for infertile couples. It has long been subject to donors being unknown: anonymity was supposed to protect all parties by preventing donors from being invested as parents. However, over the past 30 years, that rule has been increasingly criticised for its detrimental impact on donor conceived people. Several countries have lifted anonymity; and where it still prevails, many donor offspring have circumvented it by using commercial DNA-testing. Unforeseen contacts have thus been made between sperm or egg donors and the people they helped to conceive. Those contacts are likely to become more and more frequent. Yet, little empirical research is available on the matter, especially from the point of view of donors. From an anthropological standpoint, the phenomenon raises questions relating to new family forms and multi-parenthood, namely what it means to have more than two people participate in conceiving a child and how it challenges the central role procreation supposedly plays in Euro-American kinship. This paper presentation will therefore examine the following questions: how do the men and women who donated anonymously experience being contacted by their donor offspring? How do they position themselves towards those donor offspring? The presentation draws on data from an on-going qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with anonymous gamete donors who were contacted by a donor offspring (9 sperm donors and 1 egg donor from Australia and the US as of March 2023). Participants have mainly been recruited on social media. All have donated in a clinic, a gamete bank or a doctor’s office between the 1970s and the 1990s. The majority was first contacted by a donor offspring in the last 6 years, through a DNA-testing website or a State-register. All current participants have responded to those contact-requests and built a relationship with at least some of their donor offspring. The presentation describes the transition these donors have experienced from being anonymous to being known. The transition is informed by changes in the meaning donors have given to their donation: throughout their life course, personal events (such as becoming parents) and the evolution of the sociopolitical context regarding anonymity and origins have shed new light on their role as donors. As a result, while most study-participants were originally comfortable being anonymous, they now express their wish to ‘be available’ for their donor offspring. They state the importance of sharing information about themselves when requested, and they emphasize their willingness to be present when donor offspring need and ask for it. From those results, the presentation will discuss how the idea of ‘being available’ forms a specific kind of connection between donors and donor offspring, that puts them at the edges of mainstream definitions of kinship.
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Dates et versions

hal-04389669 , version 1 (11-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04389669 , version 1

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Anaïs Martin, Isabel Côté. From Anonymity to Availability: Exploring Contacts Between Formerly Anonymous Gamete Donors and their Donor Offspring. 2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association; Canadian Anthropology Society, Nov 2023, Toronto, Canada. ⟨hal-04389669⟩
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