Adults conceived through donor insemination (DI) who have lesbian parents were generally satisfied with their knowledge of and contact level with their donor siblings, according to recent findings from the longest-running study of lesbian families.
The NLLFS
The National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) has focused on the same group of subjects since 1986, when the researchers began interviewing the inseminating or pregnant parents. (They looked solely at DI families in order to limit the number of variables.) They have interviewed them again in seven waves, several years apart, and also directly questioned the children starting at 10 years of age. Now the offspring are in their early 30s.
Donor Siblings
A recent paper from the NLLFS, “Donor sibling relations among adult offspring conceived via insemination by lesbian parents,” explores how the now-adult offspring from these planned lesbian families feel about and relate to their donor siblings. It is the first study to focus on the relationships between “established adult” DI offspring from LGBTQ families and their donor siblings.
Because the NLLFS began before the offspring were even born, and the offspring now include people “with varying levels of knowledge, interest, and access to” potential donor siblings, the authors say that it avoids the biases of other studies, which have focused only on DI offspring already seeking or already happy with their donor siblings.
The study included 75 adult offspring, aged 30 to 33 years old, from the original 84 families, yielding an impressive 90% family retention rate. One-third of the offspring have known their donors since childhood; roughly another third have open-identity donors (who agreed to contact when the child turned 18), and another third have unknown donors.
The study found that more than half of the offspring (53%) had found donor siblings, most often via a donor sibling registry or sperm bank registry (45%), but sometimes via the donor (29%) or parent (29%). Most of these offspring then made contact with their donor siblings.
Half of all the offspring (51%) considered their donor siblings to be “only a genetic connection”; 16% considered them to be “a ‘real’ sibling.” Other views on the relationship included “a distant member of the family” (24%); “unrelated” (17%); and “a special relationship, like a good friend” (15%). (Multiple responses were allowed.) Among those who had contacted their donor siblings, almost half called them an “acquaintance” (49%); other terms used were “brother/sister” (39%); and “relative” (26%).
The reasons they sought their donor siblings were varied, including:
- To find out “What they are like” (61%)
- “To have a better understanding of why I am who I am” (39%)
- “To form relationships” (39%)
- To see “Do they want a relationship with me?” (32%)
- To see “What their families are like” (29%)
- Other reasons (19%).
(Multiple reasons could be chosen.) No matter the reasons, the offspring largely had their motivations fulfilled (with a mean of just over four on a five-point scale).
Overall, those who had contacted donor siblings judged their relationship with them to be good (with a mean of just over four on a five-point scale), and 65% had maintained a continuing relationship, via mobile phone (calls, texts, or videocalls), meetings, and social media. Most had no hesitation in telling others about having contact with their donor siblings, and most had told relatives, “with neutral impact.”
The offspring, whether or not they knew their donor siblings, were satisfied with what they knew or didn’t about them, and satisfied with their current level of contact. This contrasts with studies of DI offspring with non-LGBTQ parents, who have reported problems with their donor sibling contact, including “feeling overwhelmed” by the number of donor siblings and “a loss of agency and individuality.” The fact that one-third of the NLLFS offspring had known donors, who were less likely to have multiple offspring across multiple families, may have played a part here.
Key takeaways from all of this?
Early discussions of DI origins and possible DS [donor siblings], careful consideration of DI sourcing and quotas, and a modest total numbers of DS contribute to offspring DS satisfaction, and support the practice of transparency within families using gamete donations.
The relatively small and nonrepresentative number of participants in the current study, however, who are “US citizens, mostly White, highly educated individuals” (factors related to the difficulty of finding participants when the NLLFS began) does beg the need for further research on more diverse populations, the researchers add. As DI continues to increase and DNA-matching sites make it easier for donor siblings to find each other, they say, our need for understanding the implications of gamete donation will continue to grow.
The paper is: “Donor sibling relations among adult offspring conceived via insemination by lesbian parents,” Audrey S. Koh, Henny M.W. Bos, Esther D. Rothblum, Nicola Carone, and Nanette K. Gartrell, Human Reproduction (November 2023).
NLLFS Principal Researcher Nanette Gartrell is a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute.
Resources and More
Want more on the NLLFS? I posted earlier this week about another recent NLLFS paper, about what donor-conceived adults with lesbian parents think about parenting their own kids, and what the lesbian parents think about becoming grandparents.
I’ve also had the pleasure of interviewing Gartrell twice, once in 2008 when the offspring were teens, and once in 2018 when they were 25. I’ve also written many more posts about previous NLLFS findings. One of my favorites is about a 2019 paper on what the NLLFS parents said were the best and most challenging parts of 25 years of parenthood.
Want more on talking with kids about donor conception?
- For young children: The picture books from my Database of LGBTQ Family Books tagged “Sperm donor” and “Assisted reproduction.”
- For middle-grade readers: Roads to Family: All the Ways We Come to Be, but please read my review at the link for one major error and a few shortcomings.
- For older youth and adults: COLAGE’s “Donor Conceived: A Guide for People Who Have LGBTQ+ Parents and Were Born via Donor Conception and/or Surrogacy.”
- For adults: LGBTQ Family Building, Your Future Family, and Building Your Family each offer useful advice on talking with kids about donor conception, but again, see my reviews for some errors and shortcomings. Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin is a more academic but still very readable book about donor kin networks in both queer and non-queer families.