A New Book Explores Genes, Choice, and Donor Kin

Many queer families, including my own, began with one parent’s eggs and donor sperm—and donor conception is also an option for many single parents and non-queer fertility-challenged couples. But the sperm of a single anonymous donor may be used to create children for numerous families—and many of these them are connecting to create new networks of kinship that sit at the intersection of chosen and genetic family. A thoughtful new book explores how these networks have evolved and the benefits and challenges for children and parents in them.

Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin, by Rosanna Hertz, professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, and Margaret K. Nelson, professor of sociology emerita at Middlebury College, is the result of interviews with 212 parents and 154 of their donor-conceived children. When their children were born, about one-third of the families were two-mom couples, just over half were single parents, and the rest were different-sex couples.

The authors explore how parents chose donors, how they and/or their children chose to connect with donor siblings, and how the children within a donor network made sense of their donor and each other. They also look in-depth at five different networks, each begun at “a particular historical moment in the creation of donor-sibling networks,” Hertz explained in a phone interview. Each demonstrates “different points of connection and different ways in which people meet donor siblings.” The earliest of the networks studied, for example, began in the 1980s, well before the first online registry for finding donor siblings launched in 2000. The families in this network were, however, one of the first to use an “identity-release” donor, who agreed the children could contact him when they turned 18. Today, many parents join a registry and connect with donor siblings via Facebook and/or in person when their children are still infants.

Meeting donor kin “is a way to expand family in all kinds of new directions, particularly as families have begun to shrink in America and people begin to both search for their origins and look for new ways to create a form of choice family,” Hertz said. Unlike other forms of “chosen families,” however, “It is different in this case because people are connecting with their biological relatives.”

Some donor siblings and their parents developed close bonds and ongoing relationships; others had more limited interactions. “Like any group you join, you’re going to have to work at creating those relationships,” she noted. She stressed, however, “It’s the children who are the connection within these networks. The parents are fostering relationships for their children, not for themselves. Some of the parents did become friendly, but it wasn’t their motive for getting together.”

These networks embody a contradiction between how genes do and don’t matter. Prospective parents “spend a lot of care and time trying to figure out the best donor that will fit within their family,” Hertz said, but then “shelve the donor as part of their everyday family life.” If families choose to connect with donor siblings, however, “The whole issue of genetics becomes problematic again.” Many children had initially assumed that the donor was unique to them, and were “shocked” to realize the donor was “a shared collective good.” Kids in two-mom families sometimes felt that “by acknowledging that these children were their siblings, it undermined the whole idea of creating family within a lesbian context. They were much more hesitant and felt like they were betraying their non-genetic mom—or both their moms and the way they created the family—even though it was oftentimes the moms who prompted the family to search and were willing to meet other families.”

Over time, however, the authors write, “the stress on genetic ties recedes, to be replaced by an emphasis on the choice that the participation in these groups—and the dynamic affiliations that form within them—actually represents.”

Importantly, the children found multiple benefits in meeting donor siblings. “It helped them understand idiosyncratic things about themselves that they didn’t find within their own families,” Hertz explained. Most of the children, even in populous urban areas, did not know any other donor-conceived children. In meeting their donor siblings, therefore, “Many of them felt this was the first group they could really talk to about being donor-conceived and about their unique donor.” Most of the parents in the most recently formed network, with children under five years old, said the kids didn’t yet fully grasp who the donor siblings were to them, but the adults hoped they would reap the benefits as they grew.

“I think kids do benefit from this,” Hertz affirmed. “The kids say it was a good thing to know the other kids out there who share their donor.” Even when there wasn’t a strong sense they were going to continue those relationships, they indicated “maybe they would draw on them in the future.”

Connecting with donor kin “means that you’re acknowledging that there’s something beyond the nuclear family that exists out there,” Hertz noted, but affirmed, “It does take what was a market transaction [buying sperm] and makes it something that is incredibly intimate. That’s been a positive that everyone I’ve interviewed talks about.”

Grounded in academic research, Random Families is nevertheless an accessible and informative read for anyone who has or is considering donor conception in their family.

((Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column. Disclosure: I work at Wellesley College, although not with Hertz or in her department. I also independently helped her with some initial outreach for participants in this study.)