Donors: curious connections in donor conception

Abstract

This is an important book in the field of studying reproduction and health, and a timely response to the social changes following the policy shift that abolished the anonymity of gamete donors. Many scholars have been looking at relevant issues, mostly in relation to donor-recipient people, yet less attention has been paid to donors and their families. Petra Nordqvist and Leah Gilman examine gamete donors’ experiences from a relational perspective. Donors: Curious Connections in Donor Conception aims to explore the effects of changes in the legal, social, cultural, and technological context at this specific historical moment on people who have been or are considering becoming gamete (sperm or ovum) donors and how they make sense of the connections with the donorconceived children and the families. The shift from donor anonymity to traceability in the UK, which began in 2005, signifies a great transition from secrecy to openness in terms of the identity of people who donate sperm and ova. This regulatory change is the response to donorconceived people’s campaign for openness and the right for them to contact donors after they reach the age of 18 (p. 16). It has resulted in a new protocol for clinical practice in reproductive medicine and reflects wider sociocultural changes. By depicting donors’ lived experiences, Donors explains “the broader shift in donor conception practices and cultures” as the consent donor policy enacted and, at the same time, the emerging use of the Internet and social media to perform informal donation (p. 211). Thus, Donors examins both people who participate in donations in clinics, and those who donate informally, who are already acquainted with recipient parents. By looking at various donations, Donors captures how people perceive donation differently through investigating donors’ experiences as well as their relationships and their personal lives. With the expansion of reproductive gamete donation in the UK and worldwide, increasing research interests have been addressed around recipients, including recipient parents and donor-conceived children. However, there is a shortage of scholarly literature on the donor families and their relationships, especially research conducted via qualitative approaches, which can give a more in-depth understanding of how donation decisions shape donors’ lives and those with whom they share connections. Methodologically, Petra Nordqvist and Leah Gilman explore gamete donors’ experiences from a relational perspective and employ the personal life approach in sociology, to explore how social policies impact on people’s perceptions of connectedness. Donors sees gamete donation as a reflection of practices and relatedness negotiations, as well as a response to shifting social and political agendas. In the Introduction, the authors begin with the story of a sperm donor, Zak, to bring out the pressing questions: What does it mean to be a donor? (p. 1) How does that affect the donor, and their families and other relevant relationships in their lives? (p. 2) Chapter 1 begins by describing the historical context of the legal changes in terms of the birth of “identity-release policies” in the UK. This research, on which Donors is based, applied qualitative sociological methods by conducting 52 interviews with both sperm and ovum donors, 23 donor relatives, and medical professionals and counsellors helping the donation process from 2017 to 2021 (p. 11, p. 233). By tacitly focusing on 10 stories selected from the interviews, Chapter 2 elaborates on the meanings of different donations in terms of anonymity or openness of identity from lived experiences, rather than static categories often defined inside clinics and labelled on the donors. Donors suggests replacing typologies of donations with a more dynamic concept of “pathways”: identity-release pathways, known BOOKSHELF