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Social Science & Medicine 66 (2008) 301–314
www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed
The donor, the father, and the imaginary constitution of the
family: Parents’ constructions in the case of donor insemination
Victoria M. Gracea,, Ken R. Danielsa, Wayne Gillettb
a
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
b
University of Otago, New Zealand
Available online 24 October 2007
Abstract
Current international policy trends in the field of medically assisted conception are moving towards increased openness
of information regarding the nature of conception where donated gametes are involved. In the case of donor insemination
this means that the donor is no longer anonymous, offspring have the right to access information about the donor’s
identity, and parents are encouraged to tell children the nature of their donor-assisted conception. Until recently, however,
the practice of donor insemination has tended to create the conditions for ignoring, or erasing, the existence of the donor as
the provider of the gametes. Changing policy creates numerous challenges to this erasure, and to traditional
conceptualisations of the father. This research is based on analysis of the narratives of a group of 41 New Zealand
couples who conceived children with the assistance of donor insemination 15–18 years prior. This article focuses on their
talk about the donor. The parents’ negation of the donor supports the normative formation of ‘family’, and is in turn
supported by an instrumental and de-personalising discourse in relation to the donor. A tension is created within the
parents’ talk whereby donors are negated and yet simultaneously appear as persons. We explore this discursive
construction, suggesting that a new framework for thinking about donated gametes and the role of the donor is influencing
parents’ narrations and understandings of family. We discuss these influences and examine their implications, particularly
with respect to a separation of the bio-genetic from the social-environmental.
r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: New Zealand; Donor insemination; Parents’ perceptions; Donors; Fatherhood; Family
Introduction
Current international policy trends in the field of
medically assisted conception are moving towards
increased openness of information regarding the
nature of conception where donated gametes are
Corresponding author. Tel.: +64 3 364 2692;
fax: +64 3 364 2977.
E-mail addresses: [email protected]
(V.M. Grace), [email protected] (K.R. Daniels),
[email protected] (W. Gillett).
0277-9536/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.029
involved. In the case of donor insemination this
means that the donor is no longer anonymous that
offspring have the right to access information about
the donor’s identity, and that parents are encouraged to tell children the nature of their donorassisted conception. In most countries, however,
secrecy remains the norm and this means that the
practice of donor insemination tends to create the
conditions for ignoring, if not erasing, the existence
of the donor as the provider of the gametes, or as a
‘father’ in any sense with a relationship to the
resulting child. Although some claim that the
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medical profession still supports secrecy in many
jurisdictions (Rushbrooke, 2004), there is a changing policy environment in an increasing number of
countries including New Zealand. This change
creates numerous challenges to this erasure of the
donor, and to traditional Western conceptualisations of the father whereby the biogenetic contribution and the nurturing parenting role are combined
in the one person.
This research is concerned to explore how the role
of sperm donor and the act of donation is perceived
by parents of offspring conceived with the use of
donor insemination. It is based on analysis of the
narratives of a group of 41 New Zealand couples
who conceived children with the assistance of donor
insemination 15–18 years prior. This paper focuses
on their talk about the donor; what is said, and
unsaid. We argue that the negation of the donor by
the parents reflects a medicalising process, and
supports the normative formation of ‘family’. This
negation is supported by an instrumental and depersonalising discourse evident in relation to the
donor. Regardless of efforts to erase the donor, he
keeps appearing; he transpires. These competing
constructions create numerous ambiguities with
respect to a separation of the bio-genetic from the
socio-environmental. Through an exploration of the
discursive construction of these ambiguities, we
suggest that an entirely new framework for thinking
about donated gametes and the role of the donor is
influencing parents’ narrations and understandings
of family. We discuss these influences and examine
their implications.
The invisible, silent, anonymous donor
As Daniels (1998) has recounted, in the medical
context sperm donors have traditionally been kept
in obscurity. In 1964, Finegold is on record for
saying ‘it is generally agreed the donor’s identity
should be veiled in absolute obscurity’ (Finegold,
1964, p. 35), and in 1981, Glezerman wrote that
semen collected from donors should be regarded as
‘material from an anonymous testis’, the donor
being a ‘non-person’ (Glezerman, 1981, p. 185).
These statements appear to characterise a medical
profession committed to playing whatever role they
could to create the family that heterosexual couples
could not attain without medical assistance because
of male infertility or sub-fertility. What was of
profound importance was the supreme value of the
family relationships created through the conception
and gestation of a child born to two preferably
married opposite sex partners. In a fiercely pronatalist social context, the anguish of the couple
unable to conceive and have a child, was matched,
we can assume, by the desire of the medical
specialist to break through this impasse. Medically
assisted conception through insemination with
sperm donated from an anonymous donor had
every outward appearance of ‘normal’ reproduction, possible in a context where the psychosocial
facets of parenting and the building of family
relationships was considered to far outweigh the
physicality of connectedness to the male through his
contribution to the offspring’s genetic complement—as one man referred to it in Edwards and
Strathern’s study, a mere ‘microscopic blip’ (Edwards & Strathern, 2000). This emphasis and its
concurrent irrelevance and dismissal of the provider
of the gametes is reflected in Glezerman’s (1981)
comment that ‘the myth of blood and flesh has to be
uprooted and a state of consciousness achieved in
which the donor, from the psychologic point of
view, does not exist’ (Glezerman, 1981, p. 185). This
view was premised on the possibility of a conceptual
separation of the bio-genetic from the socioenvironmental facets of reproduction and family
formation.
Daniels (1998) highlights the ‘medical paternalism’ of the time that also reinforced the obscurity of
the donor, whereby doctors involved in infertility
medicine were concerned to protect those providing
semen, so that they could walk away with no threat
of any paternal responsibility. He notes that
perhaps they were also protecting themselves, as
many donors were in fact medical students. Additional reasons for secrecy include the legal implications of a situation where the male partner’s name
was entered onto the birth certificate as the father of
the child. This was justified presumably by the
practice then of doctors encouraging couples where
the male was sub-fertile to have intercourse the
night of the donor insemination treatment, creating
the chance that the offspring could perhaps be the
biological progeny of the male partner and not the
donor.
A shift away from this radical elimination of the
donor, the removal or exclusion of his personhood
from the donor insemination process started gradually in the mid-1970s, as reflected in the literature.
‘Donors’ started to appear even if tangential
references did little more than mention ‘him’ in
passing. But ‘he’ started to appear as a person, and
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thus with the potential to have a view (thoughts and
feelings) of his own as a provider of gametes (see
Daniels, 1998 for a discussion of this early
literature). For example, researchers in the US
reported that the main reason given by university
students for not being willing to donate sperm was
‘the knowledge that it might produce children that I
may never meet’ (Emond & Scheib, 1998, p. 316).
The donor also started to appear as a person of
possible relevance to donor-conceived offspring.
For example, the Sperm Bank of California has
had an ‘open-identity’ option since 1983, whereby
donors agree to release of their identity and contact
information to interested offspring once they reach
18 years (Scheib, Riordan, & Rubin, 2003).
This shift towards greater focus on the role of the
donor coincided with an increasing emphasis within
the biomedical sciences, and through the popular
science press and media, on the significance of
genetic inheritance. As the genetic sciences have
expanded exponentially over the last few decades,
and as the claimed understanding of the role of
genes in human development has developed apace,
the significance of the donor has taken on an
entirely new and evolving profile.
The shift towards greater focus on the donor also
accompanied significant recent changes in the form
of the contemporary Western family. As Bornat,
Dimmock, Jones, and Peace (1999) note, figures
showing cohabitation and fertility rates, births
outside marriage and divorce are all indexed to
the ‘remarkable transformation in assumptions
about family formation that has taken place over
the last 50 years’ (p. 117). Judith Stacey’s (1990)
ethnography of ‘post-modern families’ focussed on
the way that rigid formulations of the 1950s nuclear
family with its breadwinner father and full-time
home-maker mother, were being challenged and in
many ways replaced in the 1970s and 1980s by
newly invented forms of family relating. These new
post-modern, reconstituted families were more
inclusive following an increasing rate of separation,
divorce and remarriage. According to Stacey, the
latter half of the twentieth century has seen women
and men ‘creatively remaking’ American family life
whereby complex, divorce-extended families respond to the imperatives of sociological changes
with the shift to a post-industrial society. The
context of political transformations in gender and
ethnic minority roles, identities and relationships,
work and employment patterns as well as marriage
and divorce all impacted on the family. The rigidity
303
of the normative, modern, conjugal family form
(albeit ephemeral, as Stacey points out) was
displaced by an increasing fluidity of the ‘recombinant family’ (see also Allen, Hawker, & Crow,
2001). The diversity of contemporary family practices has been the subject of a new sociology of
family, family policy and relations of intimacy (see
Beck & Beck-Gernheim, 1995; Beck-Gernheim,
2002; Eichler, 1997; Giddens, 1992; Jagger &
Wright, 1999; Nelson, 1997; Scott, Treas, &
Richards, 2004; Silva & Smart, 1999). This increasing diversity of family forms is paralleled in the New
Zealand context (see Dharmalingam, Pool, Sceats,
& Mackay, 2004; Ministry of Social Development,
2004).
The parents in our study received their donor
insemination treatment in a very different policy
milieu from that of today. In the early 1980s, in
New Zealand, the process was secretive, they were
not expected to tell the child of the nature of his or
her conception, and, as indicated above, in many
cases they were advised to ‘go home and make love’
so that they could create an enduring narrative in
their own imaginary constitution of their family that
the child might well be the father’s biological
offspring anyway. The donor was anonymous, and
the parents were led to understand that no
information would be kept and no future connection with the donor, or donor with the offspring,
could be made. Nearly two decades later, they are
now living through a time when fundamental
assumptions about the role of the donor are in the
process of undergoing radical change, both in
relation to the donor insemination-created family,
and particularly to the offspring themselves. Understanding how parents perceive the donor is important at this point in time as policy developments
internationally are poised to intervene in this
delicate and sensitive domain. Before considering
the empirical research, we turn to a brief discussion
of the relevant literature to date that has considered
perceptions of the donor.
Contemporary ambivalence
Many researchers have studied the question of
how parents create ordinary families through the
use of donor insemination, and more broadly,
gamete-donation. We do not review this extensive
literature here, but rather focus specifically on
literature pertaining to parents’ perceptions of the
donor of sperm. Maggie Kirkman’s research on
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narratives of gamete donors, recipients and offspring in Australia is the only study to date we are
aware of that takes the question of recipients’
perceptions and interpretations of sperm donation
as a central focus in an in-depth qualitative study
(see Kirkman, 2004). The narrative representations
of sperm donors across this mixed group reflect
considerable ambivalence, which at the extremes
Kirkman refers to as donors being simultaneously
‘saviours and satyrs’. Her findings present a ‘public
narrative’ where, when the topic is not avoided, it is
infused with a jokey attitude, with references to
wanking, insinuations of adultery, and general
ribaldry associated with the husband’s role being
superseded by a donor. Kirkman notes how
perceptions of the process of sperm donation need
to be understood in the context of a cultural history
of masturbation with its inherent ambiguities of
both erotic gratification, and forms of social control
and surveillance.
Because of the scope of Kirkman’s study (including donors and offspring as well as recipients), her
commentary specifically on the narratives of recipients of sperm donation is interspersed by the
views of providers and offspring on a number of
themes arising from this complex mix of narrative
perspectives. The recipients in her study were not
only recipients of sperm donation, but some were
recipients of eggs and embryos; most of her
participants were in female–male partnerships, some
single or separated, and a few were in female–female
or male–male partnerships. We learn that recipients
(of sperm, eggs or embryos) tended to view sperm
donation as of less significance to the donor than
egg donation, particularly given it is ‘easier’.
Recipients of sperm in Kirkman’s study wanted to
view the provider as altruistic, hoping that he was
not just doing it for money or ‘to populate the earth
with his genes’ (p. 327). Kirkman characterises
recipients’ representations of the sperm donor as
that of ‘gratitude mitigated by resentment, embarrassment, anxiety’ (p. 327). This mixture of reactions meant that comments related to the donor
were traversed by dilemmas reflecting a number of
tensions: a desire to thank the donor, the hope never
to encounter him, the fear that offspring would
consider the donor to be the ‘real’ father, concern
that he would not provide information if the
offspring wanted it, a sense of him as a generous
and noble person on the one hand, and yet as a
constant reminder of sexual inadequacy and the
shame associated with it, on the other.
Kirkman found that her participants considered
that the father’s attitudes to his need for a donor
would be significant in the view he would form of
the donor, and that shame would play a role.
Among recipient parents (of specifically sperm
donation), she notes that ambivalence and complexity are always apparent in their assessment of the
donor in relation to any notion of ‘fatherhood’. The
provider could appear anywhere on a continuum of
having no parental relationship with an offspring, to
being almost, at least potentially, a competing
father figure.
Kirkman’s research provides insight into recipients’ views of sperm donation as these views interact
with those of offspring and donors. The majority of
her participants were supporting the view that
offspring should at least be told of the nature of
their donor-assisted conception. The research presented in our study takes these insights as a starting
point. It pursues in a more singular, focussed and
hence in-depth way how sperm donation is
perceived by a cohort of heterosexual couples who
received donor insemination treatment at approximately the same time.
Methodology and method
We used thematic analysis as the qualitative
methodology for this inqury (see Braun & Clarke,
2006 for a discussion of thematic analysis). The
epistemological approach taken is not a naı̈ve realist
one, but rather a constructionist methodology
which is described by Braun and Clarke (2006) as
one that ‘examines the ways in which events,
realities, meanings, experiences and so on are the
effects of a range of discourses operating within
society’ (p. 81).
Our method involved generating narratives from
parents who had conceived at least one offspring
through the use of donor insemination. Our aim was
to interview them about their experiences of
forming their families with this medically assisted
procedure. This group of families was a part of a
study conducted in 1990 with 58 heterosexual
married couples who received donor insemination
through an infertility clinic in New Zealand between
1983 and 1987. At the time of the first study, all but
one couple agreed to being contacted at a later date
for further research into their experiences, views and
reflections. Of 57 couples, we were successful in
tracing 46 (either as couples, or as individuals where
couples had separated). Of these, 43 were inter-
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viewed. One additional couple from the original
cohort was also interviewed, although they did not
participate in the first study. Thus, 44 couples were
interviewed resulting in usable transcripts from 41
couples (three had serious taping problems and were
not usable). Of these 41 families represented in the
study, 23 were interviewed together (in one instance
the couple had in fact separated), in three instances
the man and the woman were interviewed separately
(had separated, or divorced, or in one instance the
spouse had died), and in 11 instances for women
and four for men, they were interviewed alone (and
again, had separated or divorced with the ex-partner
not being available or willing to participate in an
interview).
The participants were New Zealanders of European (predominantly English) descent except for
one woman who described herself as ‘part Maori’,
and one man who was born in England and raised
by English parents but now is a New Zealand citizen
and describes his ethnicity as Maori. The mean age
of women interviewed was 47 years (range 37–56),
and the mean age of men was 51 (range 41–68).
Women were grouped mainly in clerical, service and
professional occupations, while the majority of men
were grouped in service and professional occupations and a smaller number were self-employed.
Most of the participants had one child through
donor insemination (23 couples), many had two
children (16 couples), and two couples had three
children. Eight couples had a child(ren) subsequently without the assistance of donor insemination (one became pregnant but miscarried
twice). Ethics approval was obtained from the
National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human
Reproduction.
The interviews were conducted in 2004 by either
V.G. (9 interviews) or K.D. (remainder). The two
interviewers designed the interview protocol together, discussed the process, conducted a pilot
interview together, and listened to early interviews
as a means of ensuring consistency of approach.
Interviews with couples differed in some ways from
those with individuals. Couple interviews of course
allowed for interaction between the pair. This led to
generally shorter excerpts of text without shift in
turn-taking by comparison to those interviewed
alone. It is to be expected that narrative in the
presence of a spouse would be moderated differently
from a solo narrative. For the purposes of the
analysis performed and reported on in this paper,
the discursive characteristics identified could not be
305
differentiated on the basis of whether the interview
was conducted with a couple or an individual
parent; the narrative features were present in similar
words, phrases, concepts and themes across these
interview forms.
We used an open-ended approach to interviewing, beginning with a broad non-leading question,
asking participants to ‘begin by telling me what’s it
been like for you building your family with donor
insemination?’ As we wished to generate their
stories framed in their language and conceptualisations, the interviewer prompted further talk using
keywords used by the interviewees, enabling a
process whereby the interviewees set the topics and
foci for their stories about their families. This
approach aimed to provide the opportunity for a
spontaneous and reciprocal exchange between
interviewer and interviewee, giving participants the
scope to reflect on their experiences from their own
perspective (Levesque-Lopman, 2000). The interviewer’s probes were designed to elicit deeper
reflection on the topics and issues raised by the
interviewees. We were not concerned to generate an
accurate recall of historical events, but rather to
prompt a contemporary narrative that would
encapsulate their current views on the process of
building their family relationships over time.
Once this process had run its course, if certain key
issues had not been raised and discussed, the
interviewer asked more specific questions. These
included questions designed to elicit their constructs
related to meanings of ‘genetics’ and the process of
genetic inheritance; we were interested in how they
viewed the significance of genetic or biological
linkages in their family building and how this
impacted on their formation of family relationships,
or otherwise; issues surrounding the donor included
how they viewed the act of donation, how they
viewed the donor, whether they thought about the
donor and if so, in what ways, and whether the
existence of the donor affected the formation of
their family narrative; we were also concerned to
explore their understandings of the perspective of
the offspring on the issues discussed; and most
importantly, decisions related to information sharing—how (and why) they made the decision they
had to this point, what influenced their decision,
how they perceived their decision had affected their
family building, to what extent there was agreement
between the parents, and if they had told their
offspring, how this occurred and how it had affected
their families. In almost all interviews, however,
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these topics were discussed by the interviewees in
the course of the conversational interaction (see
Levesque-Lopman, 2000, for further description of
this method of interviewing).
The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. To analyse this material, we read and reread the transcripts to identify the main thematic
areas, an identification shaped by an interaction
between our research questions, our reading of the
literature, and the themes that were evident within
the narrative texts. Consistent with a thematic
analytic approach, we searched for themes or
patterns across the entire data set (Braun &
Clarke, 2006). Prior to the interviewing, we had
established an area that seemed to us to be of
obvious importance: how participants talked
about the donor and his role in their formation of
their family. We identified all the sections of
text across the transcripts that related in any
way to the donor. Using the software package
NVivo to assemble and organise this data into a
node we called ‘Donor’, nine sub-nodes, or categories were then generated. Decisions about these
categories were driven by the content of the Donor
node, as we identified sub-themes that were
consistent across the transcripts. These categories
of text were printed off, read and analysed in terms
of the meanings within, and relationships between,
the categories.
Firstly, we discuss below how the family form was
constructed through an erasure of the donor and
then we explore how the stability of this imaginary
constitution of the normative family would be
disrupted by what seemed to be an inevitability
that the donor’s personhood would keep appearing.
The implications of the ambiguities generated by the
interweaving of these turns in the narratives are then
discussed. In the presentation of interview data
below, [F] stands for the name of the woman
interviewed, or the mother of the offspring where
the father only was interviewed; [M] stands for the
name of the father. [O] stands for the name of
offspring to whom reference is being made, where
offspring were conceived through donor assistance.
In each case the number, (for example, M.23), is the
interview number (the numbers relate to the original
study). [y] marks varying lengths of pauses within
the text.
Erasure of the donor
I just saw him as a collection of sperm (M.1)
The talk of the parents in this study was traversed
by many statements indicating that donors did not
exist as persons for the parents in their narrative
construction of their family. This orientation was
supported by an instrumental discourse regarding
the process of donation, which was reinforced by a
distancing effected through the medical process of
screening, testing and sanitising the sperm. This
erasure played a role in facilitating a view of the
offspring as the father’s daughter or son, enabling a
portrayal of the family in normative nuclear family
terms.
The donor’s non-existence
The fact that the donor was not foregrounded in
the parents’ narration of how it has been for them in
building their family with the use of donor
insemination is underlined by the observation that
any talk about the donor tended only to emerge in
response to interviewer questions directly about the
donor (asked in a variety of ways depending on
context, for example, ‘do you think about the donor
at all?’, ‘what role has the donor had in building
your family relationships?’, ‘are there any issues for
you surrounding the donor?’).
Characteristic responses would begin with the
claim that they never think about the donor, that
the donor has not had any role at all, or that there
are no issues related to the donor. For example, in
response to the question ‘do you think about the
donor at all?’ M.21 said ‘Never’; when F.28 was
asked ‘what part the donor plays’ in terms of her
thinking and her family she replied ‘Nothing really.
Nothing.’; and when asked ‘how do you view the
donor?’ M.9’s response was ‘Dunno, hadn’t thought
about it really [laughs].’
Beyond this there was a number of elaborations
on how this absence was marked by a claim that for
them the donor’s very existence was marginal to
them, for example, ‘As far as I’m concerned they
hardly exist’ (F.1); ‘They’re not y they’re irrelevant’ (M.23); ‘He’s donated sperm, end of connection’ (M.1); F.50 explained that ‘He just helped us
get what we wanted at that time and then he was out
of the picture, basically, for us. We’ve never thought
about it in that respect again.’
Some parents went further and actively removed
the presence of the donor as a person from the life
of their family. While M.23 said ‘Yeah, no idea, no,
don’t want to know him basically [laughs]’, F.51
said ‘you can [..] think, you can programme yourself
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to thinking that it is your husband’s. He is the father
of your child.’
Here, we can see the possible success of the
strategy advocated by Glezerman in the early 1980s,
discussed earlier. The donor could be deemed by
parents to not exist as a person, explicitly negated
from their consciousness. There is an active refusal
of any thought that the donor would have any
connectedness to the family in any sense. The
family’s narrative of the singularity of its nuclear
form (mum, dad and the kids) is afforded through
the negation of the donor.
Distancing through medical provision
F.4 had ‘never really given him a face, or
personality or person. Um. It’s just a someone out
there, yeah.’ For F.4 the donor can be depersonalised through the absence of connection between
any individual person as provider and her specific
insemination. The medical intervention of creating a
sperm ‘bank’ enables the possibility of this distancing in which there is no relationship whatsoever
between the act of provision and the act of
receiving. While the intention of the parents to
conceive is amplified, the intentionality of the
provider is depersonalised. M.25 makes this clear
in the following statement: ‘And because the donor
is out there, is out there, could have been, you
know, any of thousands of [..] thousands of people.
So, yeah, never sort of honed into the particular
donor.’ This disconnection is at the heart of
Strathern’s analysis of the problems associated
with conceptualising gamete donation as a gift.
The gift is symbolic, passing between friends
and kin ‘precisely to indicate the non-transactable
part of their relationship’ (Strathern, 1992, pp.
37–38). The unknown act of donation is alienated
from social practices of gift-exchange and, as
Strathern added, ‘[i]f the idea of a gift sounds
hollow or off-key in reference to gamete transfer, it
is because the Enterprise Culture provides many
more and readier ways of thinking about a
calculating self’ (p. 38).
For M.42 the absence of any personhood
associated with the donor is linked to this distance
and anonymity: ‘Um, there is no, there is no face,
there is no personality that goes along with the
donor.’ F.53’s approach is to literally depersonalise
the donor through her use of language—the donor
becomes an ‘it’:
307
Don’t think so, no I don’t think I had any
thought about him, um, [..] actually we don’t
even call him a him, we call him donor, don’t
even like to personalize it, um [..].
Later she adds:
I do try to depersonalize it, think it’s not a
person, it’s just a [..] um, [..] it was just a person
donating something, it was a thing, they, we call
it the donor, um, if I talk to the children I call
them, oh, don’t even say him, I try to say ‘the
donor’. Um, because I really didn’t want the
children to think of that person as their father.
F.53 plays a role in managing the children’s
perception of her male partner as the sole father.
The gendered nature of the responses of parents to
this question of their views on the role of the donor
emerge throughout the interviews. Clearly, the male
and female in a heterosexual couple as recipients of
donor insemination occupy very different positions
in relation to in/subfertility, the act of insemination,
and the presence or absence of a genetic contribution to the resulting offspring. Frequently the
woman’s concern is to ensure that her contribution
to the collective family narrative is one that will
endorse and reinforce the man’s position as the
father, which is echoed in his desire to achieve the
same construction. Women in this study tended to
respond to what is arguably the man’s vulnerability
with a determination to assist and reinforce this
mutual construction. Because the vulnerability is
the man’s, the woman possibly is the more powerful
or at least influential in the success or otherwise of
this imaginary constitution of the normative family.
The distancing achieved through the medical
provision of sperm is evident also through an
instrumental discourse evident in some of the
quotations above. As M.1 said, ‘I just saw him as
a collection of sperm’, and later ‘then you needed to
get that genetic seed from somewhere and that’s as
far as it went.’ M.1 emphasised that ‘the donor was
just a means’, a sentiment reiterated by F.50 ‘but
that’s still all as I see him as, as just a contribution
only.’
The utility of the objectified and isolated sperm
was the primary focus, and is underlined by the fact
that sperm can be ‘stored away’ and ‘frozen.’ The
sperm was understood by many parents as a means
to the desired end of creating a child, their child. To
achieve this instrumental perspective, the donor
needed to be erased as a person, and concordant
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308
The genes in the sperm were understood to
contain these ‘ingredients’ which can be ‘used’,
and ‘used up.’ The imagery in F.24’s statement
possibly invokes the agricultural notion of ‘harvesting’ associated with the extraction of gametes when
she said ‘and then we went back to [place-2] cause
there was still another load of sperm off the same
donor [..] there and there was enough for one more
cycle I think.’ M.23’s comment, on the other hand,
that they should ‘limit them to six kids or something’ implies a perception of donors avidly wanting
to spread their seed around. The medicalised nature
of the procedure also served to accentuate this
distancing and objectification or even commodification of the ‘ingredients’. F.20 said she ‘just thought
of it more as [..] um, a clinical thing I guess,’ and
M.9 said ‘I certainly appreciate that we’re lucky to
have the, the service.’ The conceptual isolation of
semen from the donor as a support for the
demarcation of its instrumental role needs to be
situated in a broader context of the critique of the
commodification of body parts through biomedicine
and also through the media as an accompaniment to
consumerist health discourse (Seale, Cavers, &
Dixon-woods, 2006).
‘screened’? ‘He’ was a person with his own family
history.
Kirkman (2004) notes that the sperm provider
today can appear as a dangerous figure who could
lead to the inheritance of potential disease or
disability. The emphasis of parents in this study
was on their trust in the medical ‘service’ to ensure
that the donors had been screened and tested, that
all the appropriate checks had been done. The
donor as a figure with a potential to be a source of
harm by virtue of his inherited history is evident in
the following: ‘obviously they must screen them,
they must know that these people are healthy’
(F.21); ‘I would probably like to think well, if there
was a um, a very serious ah, [y] um [..] or major
illness within the donor’s family that they perhaps
wouldn’t use him as a donor’ (M.21); ‘You assume
that they do screen them for, like you say, ah, if
there’s a [..] a family history [laughing] of um [..] of
ah, cancer of some description ory’ (M.33).
The negation of the donor as a person, the
reduction of personhood to the utility of ‘its’
product, and the medicalised procedure of professional intervention mediating and obscuring any
relationship between donor and recipient all served
to reinforce the discourse of family that legitimated
the father in his role as parent, normalising the
priority of intimacy within the exclusivity of
relationships that form ‘family’.
This negation, however, was consistently challenged by, or in tension with, another imperative
within the parents’ talk. We have seen how the
donor emerged as person with a family history in
the context of medical ‘screening’ for the parents
despite themselves. There were more compelling
ways in which the donor appeared, like a shadowy
figure refusing this negation, transpiring through
the apparently seamless discourse of erasure
authorised by the medicalisation of donor insemination at the time of treatment.
The importance of screening
The donor as person
with this erasure, the ‘seed’ isolated from the
person. There was explicit talk about the ‘use’ of
the donor and the sperm: ‘I don’t know how many
times they used the donor’ (F.21); ‘and they used it
all so we just finished there’ (F.24).
The utility of the sperm as the necessary
‘ingredient’ to be selected for matching characteristics was evident in M.25’s comment that
y I think did we have, we had a donor, and I
think [..] they run, we, they went on to another,
another donor [..] I think or something. But the, I
think basically it was just sort of eye colour and
hair sort of colour [y] and basic stature and sort
of things like that, yeah.
A discourse of ‘service’ extended to the screening
or testing of the product to ensure a sanitised stock
was being ‘used.’ Yet at the same time, the notion of
inherited diseases was a route via which the donor’s
personhood tentatively reappeared in the parents’
accounts. The question of screening was not related
so much to the sperm as a source of DNA, but to
the phenomenon of the health of the donor as
evident in his family history: had the donors been
I wonder what he must think about, if ever y
(F.4)
Reports of occasional wonderings, confessions of
a certain curiosity, were ambivalent and detoured
by dismissive remarks. There were numerous ways
in which the donor, as anonymous and unknown
yet singular and embodied subject, would ‘appear’
in the parents’ narratives (those containing the
greatest number of references); the most numerous
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and significant themes concerned possible resemblances, and speculating on what might have been
‘passed on’. The donor appeared and yet could
never materialise as a person due to the absence of
any knowledge about the donor.
Hesitance and ambivalence
In contrast to the adamant and reiterated
insistence that the donor was never thought about,
there were also references to times when ‘occasionally, you know, I, it, it goes through my mind’
(F.14); or ‘it would go through your mind sort of
every now and then, that [..] well, you know, I
wonder if y’ (F.27). The talk about any thoughts
related to the donor was consistently hesitant,
revealing an ambivalence at the heart of this
discourse that ran counter to the more assured
and dominant theme that the donor was irrelevant
to their lives and family.
I don’t know. It, it’s not often. But it’s just, I just
sort of some, well, you know, earlier on I sort of
thought, mm, yeah, okay, I wonder whaty but
anyway okay—just get on with life and we’ll get
on with it, so yeah, not much we can do now
(F.14).
Her tentative exploration of possible wonderings
is abruptly pushed aside with the pragmatics of
getting on with life in the face of an apparent
pointlessness in dwelling on such things. This
pattern of a tentative wondering deflected by a
down-playing of its importance was also the case in
M.25’s admission that
Well I guess, I guess sometimes, I think ‘‘Well I
wonder what he—was he, yeah, was the person
into sport or was he sort of a biggish person or
was he y’’, I some, I mean yeah, but it wasn’t a
serious ‘‘I really would like to know’’.
The ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding
their desire to ‘know’ arguably reflects the tenuous
nature of the challenge the parents’ gesture makes to
the ideology that links genetic connection with
parenthood. As Becker (2000) notes, Western views
of reproduction through the form of family ‘are so
focussed on biology that many people find other
ways of seeing reproduction implausible’ (p. 64).
For example, the fact that ICSI (intracytoplasmic
sperm injection) is preferred to donor insemination
is, in Becker’s view, upholding the patriarchal
ideologies of fatherhood by ensuring the use of the
309
father’s own genetic material. The more quickly the
parents can forget about the donor assistance, the
better, and yet somehow the ‘knowledge’ and hence
the ‘person’ persists in its shadowy manifestation in
the parents’ talk.
When parents referred to the gratitude they felt
towards the donor, sometimes this would be
expressed in a way that clearly implied their specific
donor (for example, F.9 said ‘Well I, I just see the
donor as, as a special person’). F.20 wanted to be
assured that the ‘medical side’ had let the donors
know how grateful recipients have been for their
donation, indicating a wish for a communication or
link to be made with their donor, even by means of
a generalised exchange. Imagining the intention of
the donor in donating sperm, M.20 had some
curiosity about the donor:
And I often think that [..] I’d actually like to [..]
meet the bloke from afar, without him actually
knowing y [F.20 laughs] just to see what he’s
actually like. And to see if he’s like [..] um, either
of the girls. Cause I think that would be quite
interesting.
The significance of resemblance
The question of resemblance to the offspring and
the possibility of inherited characteristics being
passed on was the major theme via which the donor
would become a presence in the parents’ constructions. F.22 said ‘Um, [..] I mean during the whole
process, naturally [.] had these bizarre thoughts, like
I hope the donor’s not bald or [..] you know, just
silly [.] silly thoughts y’ Again, hesitancy and
dismissal are evident in this portrayal of thoughts
on the donor who most importantly appears as an
unknown.
The wondering about the donor’s physical
characteristics was about likenesses. In a context
where reproduction tends to be understood to
include the reproduction of family resemblances in
some form, no matter how minor, the unspoken
absence of resemblance with the father was matched
by some comments about the possibility of physical
likenesses with the donor. This was most pronounced for F.29, who related how she encountered
a man in a social family setting whom she was
convinced must be her son’s ‘Dad’. She couldn’t
help but ‘stare’; it ‘haunted’ her; then she realised he
would have been too young. But for her it was
‘really scary’, ‘real weird’. The question of physical
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resemblance, whether actually seen in this case, or
imagined in the main, brings the donor as an
embodied person with his own persona fully into the
scene of the family.
Some parents wanted to ensure they had the same
donor for a subsequent conception to maximise the
possibility of likenesses between the siblings. F.56
said ‘I mean that keeps them- like, I mean keeps
their likeness, I mean they can see their likeness in
me [text missing] mother and then they’d have
donor.’ It is noteworthy that ‘donor’ here functions
less as a noun and more as a name in this reference.
‘Donor’ appears as a point of continuity between
siblings, arguably appearing in the sentence as a
person rather than a batch of semen in the freezer.
Such matching of likenesses between siblings facilitates the presentation of a ‘normal’ family to the
world and reduces the possibility of stigmatising
comment being made by the children’s peers.
Resemblance talk underlines the centrality of
genetic linkages in the construction of meanings of
family. As Becker, Butler, and Nachtigall (2005)
found in their research on issues for families in
which children were conceived with the assistance of
donor gametes, ‘resemblance talk is everyday talk’.
Family resemblances are a talking point in social
intercourse as well as a means to sediment that
‘realness’ of family. The participants in the current
study both express the wish to normalise their
possibilities for resemblance talk, and yet at the
same time rupture the assumption of the appearance
of the normative nuclear family by acknowledging
the possibility or likelihood of resemblances with
the donor.
Wondering what he passed on
Yet equally significant were those queries about
the donor’s interests, his personality, his work,
whether he was an active sporty person, and so on.
These wonderings were prompted by a range of
influences, but the focus was invariably on what
might have been ‘passed on’ or what creates a ‘link’.
As F.43 said:
[O]’s a great one for collecting rocks and, and
piles of fossil things under his bed. And his donor
was um, a geology student [..] and we sort of
think, when he started collecting these rocks, we
said, ‘‘Oh well, you know, there’s a link there.’’
There were numerous such references, with F.51
wondering if the donor might have been a vet or a
farmer as her daughter loves animals, wondering
also if the fact that [O] is ‘quite a bright girl’ might
have come from the donor’s ‘side’: ‘I just think oh
well, that didn’t come from me [laughs] and my side.
It must have come from the other side and um, [..]
you know, that was all.’ Here there appear to be two
‘sides’, one and the other, which is some distance
from the contribution of sperm being referred to as
the ‘microscopic blip’ of complete insignificance in
the talk about how the donor hardly exists. ‘Well I
thought, I was, I mean when he first ever said he
wanted to go to medical school, I thought, ‘‘Good
God, perhaps his father’s a doctor.’’ [Laughs]’
(F.52).
The donor becomes present in characteristics of
the offspring that cannot be explained through the
mother’s ‘side’. More generalised reference to what
is ‘passed on’ opens up the possibility of wondering
about the man himself as F.58 explicitly stated:
Sometimes it’s passing through my mind you
know, I wonder what were their strengths, or
what were they like. Not physically really like,
but just as a person, I guess [text missing]. It’s
interesting because two of the children are, are
probably similar in nature and the third one is
quite different. [laughs] So I’d probably attribute
her, I wonder now, what sort of guy was this,
yeahy
The plural ‘their’ becomes ‘a person’, then a ‘guy’
in a sense that potentially encompasses his whole
personality, or ‘sort’. F.27 was prompted to think
about the donor when her son had a particular
problem (or she had a problem with the child) and
then:
it would go through your mind sort of every now
and then, that [..] well, you know, I wonder if y
the donor had this sort of problem when he was a
kid, you know, or [laughs]y’ and ‘whether
anybody in his family was sort of like it you
know [laughs].
Like talk about family resemblances, discussions
about inheritance of characteristics other than
physical appearance form part of family culture
(Emslie, Hunt, & Watt, 2003). The parents of
offspring conceived with the assistance of donor
insemination appear to invoke this talk to imagine
possible points of connection with the donor when
they do not and cannot know whether there is any
reality to these projected likenesses. There is an
appeal to a ‘link’ that might obliquely anticipate the
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donor’s interest in this link. Kirkman (2004) refers
to the experience of Edgar, a sperm donor
participating in her research, who had donated
anonymously years before. He ‘thinks that those
who know of their conception will have, like him [as
donor], ‘some wonder, almost wistful or romanticised, about what holes we might fill in each other’s
souls, or what questions we might answer for each
other’’’ (p. 14).
The sense of the donor appearing through an
absence was pronounced; the parents simply did not
know. F.5, whose daughter knows the nature of her
conception, put the significance of this in her view
into words:
I’m still an advocate of children born by donor
really have to have some input from the donor be
it, albeit written, verbal, anything, rather than
nothing because the nothing is nothing. So how
do you evolve and develop in yourself without
knowing who you are and where you come from.
And what’s genetically inherited, yeah, because
[O] starts looking at people thinking do I look
like them; she’s actually told me that.
Here, we see a fully developed emphasis on the
significance that can be placed on the ‘other side’ of
the discourse of erasure. Erasure of the donor takes
place primarily because it ‘doesn’t matter’; here the
question of the genetic history matters fundamentally to ‘who you are’ (see Landau, 1998, for a
discussion of the ethics of anonymity).
Tensions in competing perspectives
Not all, but the majority of the narratives
contained the tension evident in these two competing perspectives. Of 41 couples, 12 had told the
child(ren) of the nature of their conception, two had
partially told (for example told the child s/he was
conceived with artificial insemination, but not
conveyed that a donor was involved), and thus 27
had not told. Of these 27, 7 were considering telling
their adult offspring. At time of writing 5 of these 7
have told their offspring. Those who had told their
offspring about the nature of their conception were
less adamant about the irrelevance of the donor to
their family building, but most still emphasised that
they hardly ever thought about the donor, and this
was accompanied by a discourse of the child being
‘ours’ and the father being the sole male parent.
As we have seen from the quotations above, in
some instances the parents’ talk contained direct
311
juxtaposition of an interest in the donor on the one
hand, and yet dismissal of the donor having any
importance on the other. F.22 made this tension
explicit when she said ‘you probably tend to slide
the fact that it is a donor [..] a mysterious person,
you tend to put that aside for the more welcome
feelings of [..] you know, we’re going to get
pregnant, you know.’ F.51 was stating how she
would like to have ‘more sort of history there’ so she
could ‘just get a general idea of what [..] what, um,
yeah’ [M.51 said ‘what his lifestyle was’] and F.51
continued, ‘what his lifestyle was sort of thing’
which was immediately followed with ‘I didn’t, it
didn’t worry me, he didn’t have a name as far as I
was concerned, he was just a donor and that didn’t
affect me at all.’ Then F.53 related her experience of
‘slipping’ when she said to her daughter (who had
been told) ‘Oh, your dad’s a doctor.’ F.53 reflected
that ‘I remember saying that once, and feeling awful
about it because he wasn’t her dad at all, he was just
her donor and [M] was her dad. Yeah. Yeah, that
did slip out once so, I probably do subconsciously
just push it back and not like to think about it.’
The vulnerability parents felt regarding any
tentative interest they might have in the donor was
evident in their invariable qualification of this
interest by their assumption that the donors would
not want contact anyway. In this way, the practice
of anonymity at the time of conception created a
view of the donor for the parents as a non-interested
party highly protective of his anonymity and not
receptive to any possible contact. This practice thus
influences the view of the donor that recipient
parents develop over time.
As discussed above, male and female parents are
differently positioned in relation to donor insemination. Women featured more prominently in the talk
reflecting interest in the donor, and men in that
reflecting the irrelevance of the donor. Women
made more frequent statements that could be
interpreted as expressing an empathy with the
donor (for example, F.56: ‘they’ve gone to the
trouble of donating sperm and then knowing that
they’ll never know how many—or do they know
how many they’ve actually fathered?’). The tension
between the erasure of the donor and interest in the
donor might be understood to reflect tension at the
societal level between parental gender roles in
relation to donor insemination-conceived children.
In the main, the discourse conveying the irrelevance of the donor in the life of their family formed
the genesis of the participants’ family narrative,
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framing its origin and hence its future. In the
interim there has been a reversal in policy, partly
instigated by concerns regarding the problems
surrounding family secrets or ‘lies’ (Baran &
Pannor, 1993; Bonney, 2002; Daniels, 2004;
Haimes, 1998; Imber-Black, 1998; Pettle, 2003),
facilitated by the increasing acceptance of recombinant families, but possibly more importantly by the
shifting emphasis onto the significance of genetics.
It is not possible today to imagine any contemporary salience for the sentiments articulated by
Finegold and Glezerman, cited at the beginning of
this paper. Today biology and specifically genetics
takes a supreme role in scientific and popular,
mediatised discourse on the nature of personhood,
and of health and disease.
Conclusion
As the ascendancy of genetics in the popular
cultural imaginary has taken root, as increasing
openness is encouraged, and as family forms
become more inclusive, the interest of parents of
donor insemination offspring in the person of the
donor becomes stimulated and legitimised. Alternative questions, images and wonderings emerge
and compete with the more established discourse
that discounts the donor, instrumentalises his
contribution, and reduces ‘him’ to virtual nonexistence. The policy of anonymity at the time of
conception has implications for the parents today.
Although there are many factors involved with the
decision whether or not to tell their now adult
offspring about the nature of their conception, the
policy of anonymity means that a lack of knowledge
about the identity of the donor forestalls and
constrains not only their wonderings, but also
hinders and complicates their decision.
As reconstituted families become increasingly
‘normalised’, the complexity of relationships reflecting biological connectedness and social parenting
are possibly escalating. It is important to acknowledge that the evidence on this question of increasing
diversity of family form is mixed (see Noble, 1998).
Furthermore, as the significance of biological
ancestry and connectedness takes a place alongside
that of social parenting, the entire question of
paternity will be important for the considerable
proportion of offspring whose ‘father’ is not their
biological ‘father’. In these cases, it is sometimes
only the mother who is aware of this fact, or
possibly no party is aware of it until a paternity test
reveals that no genetic connection is found with the
father. The quest for DNA-based knowledge of
paternity of course also has major social and legal
implications for sexuality and pregnancy, for both
women and men (Turney, 2004).
Currently offspring are encouraged to bifurcate
the meaning of fatherhood (in the case of donor
insemination) into two: the biogenetic donor and
the social father are two separate men. This
separation is not necessarily unprecedented and
certainly in some non-western cultures children may
have a father who is known as the progenitor, and
be raised, for example, by an uncle who has the
status of father. In the current Western context,
however, we are possibly seeing the development of
something quite different from that of two men with
different roles.
To further complicate this picture of two (or
more) ‘fathers’ (or ‘mothers’) in the context of
gamete donation, the entire conundrum of the
separation of the biogenetic from the psychosocial,
or the separation of genes and environment (nature/
nurture) in dichotomous terms has been critiqued so
uncompromisingly that it is no longer viable in
theoretical or empirical terms within the biological
sciences. Even the interactionist thesis (that genes
and environment ‘interact’) has been superseded by
the most critical and rigorous thinkers who propose
an understanding that embraces the notions of
emergence within developmental systems (see Oyama, 2000). Such a formulation has the potential to
induce a re-thinking of the meanings of fatherhood;
a re-thinking of the dualistic separation of fatherhood into genetic contribution or social parenting.
If we accept this critique, we have to ask, is it
really possible for the offspring to conceptualise a
genetic donor who is considered significant in terms
of biological inheritance, and yet is not a ‘social’
‘father’ in any sense? And equally, can it be said that
the ‘social’ father’s role in the offspring’s life is
solely psychosocial and not involving any element
of biology? If the answer is no to these questions,
the conclusion follows that the child has two men in
his or her life, each of whom represents facets of the
paternal figure.
As the policy changes promoting increased openness play a role in reconstituting how donor
insemination conceptions affect the process of
forming and building families, it seems inevitable
that donors will take on a presence as unknown, yet
potentially knowable, persons in family narratives.
This paper has identified a potential tension
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between this presence and the desire to erase the
person of the donor for the very purpose of
constructing the father as the sole male parent.
How this tension transpires, evolves, or resolves and
how it affects decisions to share information with
offspring should be the subject of further research as
these policy changes are implemented.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to the Health Research Council
of New Zealand for funding this research. We are
indebted to the work of Dr. Maria Perez-y-Perez for
her analytically informed collection of literature for
this study. We extend our most sincere thanks to the
participants in this research.
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