Abstract
A novel family created by the confluence of single motherhood by choice and posthumous reproduction, one we term – a Single Mother Ghost Father family, may become a commonly available reproductive route in Israel under a recently submitted bill. This is the first empirical research looking at this now-rare family structure from within. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 9 single women who chose to establish a Single Mother Ghost Father family, this preliminary study chronicles their journey from the nuclear family they had initially envisioned to the Single Mother Ghost Father family they decided to establish, explores what motivated them, and conceptualizes different notions of family, motherhood, and fatherhood. The findings demonstrate that constructing this family not only allows the mothers to display the appearance of a normative nuclear family, without explicitly challenging traditional patriarchal impositions, but also to subvert them as they preserve full control of the family.
Introduction
This article explores a novel family created by the confluence of single motherhood by choice (SMBC) and posthumous reproduction (PHR). PHR means using frozen gametes for conception, after the death of one or both parents, typically the father (Hashiloni-Dolev and Schicktanz, 2017). Sperm can be retrieved either perimortem (e.g. fertility preservation before chemotherapy) or postmortem, challenging biological temporality (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2020) by allowing a child to be born years after the death of its genetic parent (Hashiloni-Dolev, 2015).
While the more common use of PHR involves the surviving widow, this article discusses a distinct scenario where a single woman, who did not have a romantic relationship with the deceased, and usually without having known him, opts for PHR. This creates a family comprising the single mother, the late father whose sperm was provided with the consent of his parents, and their child/children, a family we term a Single Mother Ghost Father family (SMGF). The term ‘Ghost Father’ alludes to the cultural practice of ‘Ghost Marriage’ held in certain societies between two people, one or two of whom are not alive, primarily for enabling property retention within a patrilineal kin group in the absence of genetic relatedness (Schwartze, 2010).
The SMGF family represents a joint reproductive project between the bereaved parents seeking to use their deceased son’s sperm to have a grandchild, and a single woman seeking motherhood via PHR. This arrangement provides comfort to the bereaved parents, who not only lost a child but also his imagined future (Gan-Or, 2018) and ensures genetic continuity of the family lineage.
Under the Israeli Attorney General guidelines (IAG) that regulate PHR in the locus of our study, court approval is required on a case-by-case basis. However, first, the parents must find a woman willing to conceive with their deceased son’s sperm and welcome them into the extended family. According to the participants’ stories, some of the parents turned to the media or social media, others sought help from NGOs supporting PHR, and some searched locally through acquaintances. Ultimately, they selected a woman from among those who responded to their search.
The court’s decision is primarily based on the deceased’s wish. However, the deceased may have not formed any wish before his untimely death. In such cases, where no explicit wish of the deceased exists, the court assesses what would have been his will using admissible evidence (e.g. testimony of family and friends), and bases its decision on this presumed wish (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016). While IAG Guidelines initially restricted the attribution of presumed wish to cases where the deceased had a partner at the time of his death, Israeli courts, not legally bound by IAG (Hashiloni-Dolev et al., 2014), allowed PHR also for single women unbeknownst to the deceased, if convinced this would have been his wish (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016).
The bereaved parents – the future grandparents of the children in the SMGF family – are required by the court to commit to the prospective mother that they will not deviate from their status as grandparents (Gan-Or, 2018). Following the court’s approval, if granted, the prospective mother undergoes IVF using the sperm of the deceased to complete the creation of the SMGF family.
The SMGF family embodies different notions of family and parenthood: On the one hand, it is a single-parent family with a present mother and an absent father, challenging the necessity of two nurturing parents (Triger, 2017). On the other, although one parent is irreversibly absent, it ensures genetic parenthood with two biological known parents. Moreover, while motherhood in this family is seen as an involved role, fatherhood lacks any nurturing aspects (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016). In its perception of fathers as absent and inactive and in emphasizing genetic continuity, PHR reinforces gendered perceptions of fatherhood and validates patriarchal values (Triger, 2017).
Previous studies of PHR families focused on the posthumous grandparents (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2020), policy (Hashiloni-Dolev, 2015), and ethical considerations (Bokek-Cohen and Ravitsky, 2023). Other works examined social attitudes toward PHR (Bokek-Cohen and Ravitsky, 2019; Hashiloni-Dolev, 2015), or gender and parenthood aspects (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016; Triger, 2017). This preliminary study presents the first empirical qualitative data worldwide on single mothers who formed an SMGF family.
Single motherhood by choice
The question of whether single mothers are single by choice or mothers by choice was long debated until studies found that the choice pertains to motherhood, and their first preference often remains having a child within a so-called normative nuclear family (Graham, 2012). Only when a suitable partner is not found, and due to age-related fertility decline, they divide their dream into two parts – motherhood and marriage, and are determined to first realize the part they believe is under their control – motherhood (Hertz, 2006; Ludtke, 1997), without relinquishing hope of finding a partner (Graham, 2012).
Pursuing this choice, the single women need to choose between different ways to realize motherhood, demarcated by the genetic father’s role in the family, a choice that bears consequences for the mother and children alike. For example, women who choose sperm donation generally seek sole responsibility for the children and are not interested in social parenting with the donor (Hertz, 2006), whereas women who choose co-parenting prefer shared social parenting (Herbrand, 2018).
Women who opt for sperm donation also need to decide between different types, a choice inviting them to balance between the importance they attach to the ability of their children to know their identity on their father’s side, against their wish to maintain parental control (Hertz, 2006). Choosing an anonymous donation may guarantee the single mother peace of mind regarding parental control, but at the cost of her children’s future ability to know their fathers’ identity or contact him. Some mothers favor allowing this choice to the children even if they themselves do not want to know the identity of the donor, considering genetic parentage insignificant compared to nurturing parenthood (Landau and Weissenberg, 2010).
The single-parent family of choice is not the result of circumstance but a family created so intentionally and thus may undermine the normative nuclear family (Graham, 2012). While single-parent families have gained increasing social recognition, being dubbed as non-traditional or alternative, suggests they do not conform the norm (Erera et al., 2021). Despite the social recognition of single-parent families, the nuclear family based on biological relatedness remains the dominant standard in Western society (Graham, 2012; Hertz, 2020).
The Israeli context
Israel presents a traditionalism–modernism paradox (Bystrov, 2012), undergoing individualization processes akin to other industrialized societies (Lahad, 2017), while also upholding a stronger family institution (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2002). Marriage is still perceived as the primary family structure for child rearing (Fogiel-Bijaoui and Rutlinger-Reiner, 2013), and the traditional nuclear family remains predominant (Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 2023).
Israeli society is also characterized by a pronatalist ethos – encouraging childbearing, to the extent of being ‘saturated with the ideology of fertility’ (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016). Pronatalism, which translates in Israel mainly into the right to genetic continuity (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016) is manifested, inter alia, in an unbounded acceptance of ART and the state’s generous funding of IVF, resulting in the highest rate of IVF treatments per person globally (Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2010). In addition, donor anonymity is mandated (Ravitsky, 2010), but open-identity donations can be imported at a higher cost. This donor anonymity is not compromised by PHR, as in this case the sperm’s origin is not from donation, but from self-preservation or posthumous extraction.
Israel’s pronatalism, which includes the use of ART to ensure genetic continuity, extends to those not among the living, as evidenced by the courts recognizing the right to parenthood of individuals after their death (Hashiloni-Dolev, and Triger, 2016). This pronatalist stance is also evident in Israel’s permissive attitude toward PHR, which stands in contrast to countries like Germany, Italy, and France, where is it completely prohibited, or others like England, Belgium, and Australia where is it allowed under certain restrictions (Tremellen and Savulescu, 2015; Triger, 2017). Moreover, it is predicted that with a new bill, submitted on September 2022, explicitly seeking to allow PHR by single women, SMGF families, currently extremely rare, will become another available reproductive route and therefore far more common. PHR cases have been broadly and emphatically reported from time to time in major Israeli media outlets (Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2010). Now, following the 7th of October attack on Israel and the death of many young civilians and soldiers in war, PHR was widely discussed in public, and sperm was posthumously retrieved from 128 men (Fux, 2024) (for posthumous sperm retrieval during war, see Oreg and Ben-Ari, 2024).
This study centers on the perspective of the single women who chose to start an SMGF family and conceive from the sperm of a deceased person who was not their partner – a group not yet studied. It explores their motivations, the role they attribute to the Ghost Father, their views on genetic versus social parenthood and the best interests of their children, and what their choice allows them in terms of social acceptance and parental control. In exploring a new unstudied family, this article originally interweaves the distinct theoretical discussion of single motherhood by choice and PHR. It enriches the current literature by adding new perspectives on ‘new families’, single motherhood by choice, and the tensions between traditional and modern values within ‘new families’. It also illustrates how patriarchy can be both followed and subverted at the same time.
Methods
With the main research goal to capture the participants’ perspectives, we chose to base our study on semi-structured in-depth interviews (Rosenblatt and Fischer, 1993). Our study is based on nine interviews with single women who chose to establish an SMGF family. Considering the rarity of this phenomenon, our study relies on a small number of interviewees (for limitations and benefits of such a method, see Guest et al., 2006). The inclusion criterion was being a single woman who committed to conceive from the sperm of a deceased person who had not been her romantic partner, regardless of whether this ultimately materialized.
Among the participants, seven had no prior acquaintance with the deceased, while two had familial or professional acquaintance with him, but not a romantic relationship. Two participants met the deceased’s parents through a prior acquaintance with him, three through a common acquaintance who heard of the parents’ search, and four through the media. Four participants were unaware of PHR before encountering the opportunity to pursue it, while five had heard about it previously, two of them through the media. Seven participants conceived via PHR – four of them had one child, and three had two children. One participant has a child from a previous marriage. However, the choice to establish an SMGF family did not materialize for two participants – one was still attempting to conceive, and one had to secede from her choice as the courts denied the PHR request. Table 1 contains demographic characteristics of the participants. All participants except one were born and raised in Israel and reside in urban areas across the country.
Participants’ demographics.
The interviews were conducted by the first author between October 2021 and May 2022, with the location and form determined by the participants: Seven were face-to-face – five at the interviewees’ home, and two at a coffee shop – and two were conducted online. The interviews, lasting between 45 and 90 minutes, were comprised of an in-depth interview composed especially for the study and a demographic questionnaire. Recording of all interviews was made with the consent of the participants and then transcribed in full. Supplementary telephone interviews were conducted with five participants to clarify specific issues insufficiently clear from transcription. The interviews were conducted in Hebrew, with quotes translated into English by the authors.
As part of the consent process, participants were informed that their participation in the study was entirely voluntary, and they were free to skip any question they felt uncomfortable answering. None of the participants declined to answer any questions. Participants were also assured of the confidentiality of their personal identity. To maintain their anonymity, pseudonyms were used, and additional identifying information such as residence, age, or number of children, is presented only in the aggregate and omitted from their presentation alongside quotes.
The participants were recruited through various methods. Some shared their stories in an identifiable manner in the media, thus allowing their location. In other cases, mediation was necessary to approach participants. This involved contacting bereaved parents who publicly shared their search for a woman to conceive with their deceased son’s sperm, lawyers who represented them in court, and organizations that support bereaved families. In addition, the ‘snowball’ method (Mack et al., 2005) was utilized as some participants were acquainted.
The exact number of PHR cases that have reached the courts is unknown (Hashiloni-Dolev and Triger, 2016). A review of the published court decisions in PHR requests, factually limited to decisions approved for publication by the presiding judge (Boguch et al., 2011) and media and social networks publications on the topic, suggests fewer than 20 cases in which PHR was sought by single women. Furthermore, court approval does not necessarily result in execution, with some bereaved parents not proceeding despite court approval. Therefore, the nine participants constitute a significant portion of the research field.
As part of the interviews, the participants were asked about various topics, including the structure of their nuclear family upbringing, their envisioned family, their considerations in choosing a family configuration, and their perspectives on them, in particular the SMGF family, and especially with regard to the role and place of the father in the family.
The findings were analyzed using grounded theory methodology (Strauss and Corbin, 1994), a methodology that is particularly suitable for explaining the social phenomenon being studied, which in this case – as stated above – has yet to be learned from this perspective. Identified categories were organized according to related themes in family study literature such as reproductive trajectories and single motherhood by choice, and their analysis, on their different layers and dimensions, served as the basis for conceptualizing the elements of this novel family and the participants’ choice to establish it.
Results
‘Happily ever after’
Growing up, the participants envisioned their family would be constructed on two conjoined pillars – marriage and parenthood, a family that some depicted as ‘normative’ and ‘regular’. Eden saw her future family as A regular family, a husband, three or four kids, caring between us, I mean mutual, and kids, as usual.
Dahlia looked forward to a happy family life with the love of her life: You know, like everyone else, I looked forward to becoming ‘happily ever after’, finding the love of my life, and getting married, I always wanted two children.
Over the years, the participants have realized that establishing a family constructed on these conjoined pillars is unattainable for them, due to the lack of a suitable partner. When what they described as the ticking of the biological clock became louder, cracks began to appear in the strong tie they initially perceived to exist between marriage and parenthood. Bella resolved not to give up on having children, even if she did not get married, and set herself an age limit until which she would try to have children with a husband, and later without: I did not imagine it, although at some point close to the age of 30 I remember saying to my mother ‘If I don’t get married, I will have a child out of wedlock’. . . I always loved children and always wanted [to have children], so I said, ‘Okay, [I have] no relationship, so at least I will not lose having children’.
This parting between partnership and parenthood has led the participants to a crossroad from which diverged three different roads commonly taken in this situation – anonymous donation, identity-release donation, and co-parenthood. They considered these models, some have even started pursuing one of them, when the fourth PHR road became available. Below we join their journey along the different roads, follow through with their reasons for ultimately choosing the less traveled PHR road, and conclude with the SMGF family which most of them established.
‘A child should know who the father is’
The will to provide the children with the option to know who their father was, was cited by all participants as a crucial element that guided them in choosing a family configuration. We use the term ‘father’ following the emic language of the participants, who mostly used this broader term rather than a ‘biological father’ or a ‘donor’. Knowing one’s origin was perceived by the participants as an essential part of the identity and belonging of children and serving their best interest. Eden was worried that otherwise, her child would seek her father in vain: I always thought a child should know who the father is . . . and [where] that’s a question mark left for the child . . . she will walk down the street and see ‘Hugh, his eyebrows look similar to mine, and the nose and that, maybe it’s my father?’ And it’s a lifelong feeling and a question mark that I did not want, . . . I said, okay I [will] take care of myself to have a child, but that she will spend all her life with a question mark, and a feeling of emptiness in her heart? I did not want it to happen.
Some participants justified this wish in a future need to address questions raised by their children who will see fathers of children around them and wonder about their own. Gabriella explained why she wanted her child to have some information about her father: Anyway, she will ask. . . all children ask: ‘Where is my father?’ They see the children [around them] with the father [. . . ]. So, she must know, yes, must know, true, not true. She must know where her father is.
The inability to know who the father of their children is with an anonymous donation led the participants to place it at the bottom of the list of available family configurations. For Eden, an anonymous donation was the last resort, but with no other alternative, she said she would choose it, as this unwillingness was still lesser to her deep longing for motherhood: I said I would leave it [anonymous donation] as the last option for me. Still, if I did not have other options, then, of course, I would take this option because the longing to be a parent is something that is really . . ., I think nothing else is interesting.
In contrast, Bella was even willing to give up motherhood altogether and not use an anonymous donation.
I said ‘what am I doing? I really want a child’ and then you know, I wanted anonymous [donation], and then you know . . . I said, ‘I will not go through this, I won’t do it, I give up on having children, and I will not do it’.
However, they did not see identity-release donation – with the additional information about the biological father, along with the possibility that it would be augmented when the children reach adulthood – should the contact option be realized – as a solution to the wish to know who the father is. Dahlia worried about the uncertainty in the father’s future cooperation inherent in this model.
Actually, I wanted an identity-release donation . . . in which, at 18, the child can receive details of the father . . . It doesn’t guarantee anything that the father, you know, at the age of 18 will cooperate, but it does hold some possibility to put . . . a little light in this great darkness called the sperm bank. . .; it does open some kind of an option. [However] it’s an option for disappointments too. . .
Contrariwise, Hannah saw it as an unbearable risk of deep disappointment that justifies the elimination of this option: To me, it hurts even more, it’s like you know who your father is; you can know him, but. . . he will never function as a father. It seems to me as. . . a great agony . . . When you find out who your father is, and you realize he just donated sperm, and you don’t interest him, why?. . . Why do you need to know? It just seems harder to me . . . that price seems awful to me.
Likewise, insufficient knowledge of the potential father underpinned the participants’ elimination of the co-parenting model. Here, despite the potential father being known and present, but paradoxically also because of him being exactly so, the participants felt that they could not know him and his family well enough to trustingly co-parent with him. Iris said: You don’t know who his family is, you do not really know because you do not live with him, and don’t live with the family, say family meals and all that where you can slowly get to know [the person] and to understand that this is the person you want to be the father of your children.
The participants’ elimination of co-parenting was also underpinned by their unwillingness to divide custody and decision-making regarding the children in advance, especially with another parent who is not their spouse, a division inherent to the co-parenting model. Abigail compared this division to the one made after divorce: It’s hard for me . . . [to] know in advance that she [the child] will not be with me every weekend or every holiday. . . when you get married, you’re not getting married with the intent to divorce. Here you’re bringing a child to divorce in advance.
The participants’ wish for their children to know their father, or more correctly, who he was, was eventually fulfilled in the SMGF family. Faith sees the SMGF family model as morally superior to an anonymous donation by virtue of her child knowing who her father is: It is all the better, more moral than to have children who don’t know to whom they belong. . . My daughter has a good friend from school, whose mother is single. . . she’s from a [sperm] donor. . . and they’re sitting in the room, the girls, [and talking] ‘you know? I know who my father is, it’s his trophy’, because she has a trophy of his in the room, ‘I do not know who is the father’, ‘I know, I have a picture of him’, ‘I don’t even have a picture of him’.
Besides allowing the children to know who their father was, the SMGF family also saves the participants the need to cooperate with a living father, whom they feel they cannot know and trust well enough. Bella sees the unreversible absence of the father in the SMGF family rather as an advantage over the co-parenting model in terms of manning solo the decision-making position: But it’s like you know there are dilemmas in this matter, because there is a father here [in co-parenting], and when there is a father, the process is not as simple as when he’s dead, because once he’s dead, the decisions are yours alone.
Knowing who the father of the children is in the SMGF family allows the children to have an extended family also on their father’s side, seen by the participants as another crucial element that guided them in choosing this family. The participants perceive the extended family that their children have on both sides as an additional layer in the naturalization of their family. For Eden, the extended family that her daughter has on both sides transforms her family into a ‘normal’ family: I thought about the child having like two families, like let’s say divorced parents, so they have the grandparents and uncles here and there . . . it’s the same thing here, only the father is simply not present, but it’s the same thing, family on one side, family on the other. So that seems normal to me.
‘He somehow lives with us in the family’
The Ghost Father in the SMGF family certainly cannot be physically present in the family, but he is still present in its daily life. One of the representations of his presence in the SMGF family is his repeated mention in the ongoing family life. Iris feels that frequently speaking of the father constructs his presence in the family: ‘We talk about him a lot. Like, a lot of times, I sometimes feel like he’s present. He’s a part of us all’.
An additional way through which the Ghost Father is present in the SMGF family is via his photographs placed in the family home. Iris told of a birthday present her daughter laid next to her father’s picture: It should have been his birthday last Friday, and I told her [the child], so she sat down, drew a picture, and put the picture she drew next to the photo of her father, so her father would see that she made him a drawing.
The Ghost Father is present in family life also by virtue of his belongings, through which the children seek to learn about his life, questions that arise from the juxtaposition of knowing who he was and the inability to meet him, both inherent to the SMGF family. Dahlia’s daughter was curious about her father’s shoes: She was with her grandparents one day and was interested in his shoes’ color, so the grandmother opened the closet and showed her his shoes. It’s all like he’s not present, but all the information is there.
Although never physically present in the SMGF family, the Ghost Father is still perceived as the children’s known father. Carmel said: From my point of view, he is the father for all intents and purposes . . . first of all, there are pictures of him at home. She [the child] talks to him before she goes to bed, looks at the sky, says ‘Dad, good night, take care of me’. . . he is not a donor, like not a sperm donor at all, he is her father.
Although the Ghost Father is perceived as a known father, with his family of origin being an integral part of the extended family, there is still room in the family for the mother’s partner. The presence of such a partner of the mother lessens the role of the Ghost Father, and while previously he was perceived as the ‘father’, now for the first time he is perceived as the ‘biological father’.
Eden’s daughter thus has two fathers: a biological father and a father with whom she lives: She. . . knows that she has the father, her biological father . . . and she knows that she has a father, that is a father who lives with us, and he is with her and he does things with her and everything, and I tell her ‘so you have the father you came from, he is the biological [father], and there is the father with whom you live’, but it’s the same thing.
However, Eden herself does not see her partner as a full father figure for her daughter but rather as a male figure in the house that her daughter can see. She said: It’s true that he is not her father, the biological [father], but the very fact that there is a partner, that there is a man at home who is like a father, so it’s just something that she sees . . . I’m good with it, because she does not have a father deprivation.
On the other hand, when it comes to making decisions about the children, despite the presence of the mother’s partner, the sole decision-making remains unaltered – exclusively at the hands of the mother. Eden described her partner’s role in making decisions about her daughter: All the actions that are related to her, so of course it’s my decision, . . . He [the partner] can make a suggestion, make a comment, but in terms of decisions about the child, things related to her, it’s me. It’s just me.
Dahlia envisaged the same for when she has a partner: Even if I meet a partner, then . . . he will not be her father, even if he will be my partner, and. . . everything will be fine, he will not be her father, I will still be . . . I am the one who . . . determines what is good for her and what is not good for her.
Discussion
In this article, we explore what motivated the participants to establish an SMGF family and the benefits they feel they attained by its virtue, especially compared to other new family types. Their initial preference was a normative nuclear family, but in the absence of a committed male partner with whom to form this family, they come to the realization it was unattainable. After a period of reproductive waithood, still hoping to make reproduction decisions within a romantic relationship (Inhorn, 2024), they embark on parenthood alone and deliberate between different forms of families. The participants contend that throughout this journey of choosing their family configuration, they were predominantly guided by their future children’s best interests. Although they initially aspired so, they do not necessarily see, unlike co-parenting mothers, the best interest of their children as requiring the active involvement of their biological father in their lives. However, here like co-parenting mothers (e.g. Herbrand, 2018), they do see it as requiring the children to know their father’s identity.
The participants’ choice to form an SMGF family allows their children to know their fathers’ identity and gives them both paternal personae (Ravitsky and Bokek-Cohen, 2018) and genealogical certainty in the form of access, from birth, to information about the father’s identity and life story (Bokek-Cohen and Ravitsky, 2019), which they would not have had in a donor-conceived family. However, it does not allow them to meet their father or to be raised by him.
The children are born into planned orphanhood (Landau, 2004), but will not suffer the pain and tragedy of losing their father during childhood, or at any time (Bokek-Cohen and Ravitsky, 2023). Nonetheless, they will suffer an ‘Ambiguous Loss’ of the relationship with their father that never existed (Mahat-Shamir and Pitcho-Prelorentzos, 2020) and can only be imagined, but still carries an emotional significance (Towers, 2023). However, as the Ghost Father’s absence precedes the formation of the family, it was the formation of the family that changed the children’s life trajectory leading to a lost father–child relationship, not his death. Although their choice to form this family irreversibly deprives the children of a present father, the participants feel they made the best decisions they could and that they could still realize what they perceive as being a good mother (Graham, 2018).
In choosing to establish an SMGF family, the participants may have been guided by what they perceive as the best interest of their children, but this choice embodies benefits for them too. Forming a family in which the children have two known biological parents enables the mothers to condition parental decision-making power regarding the children upon the existence of genetic relatedness in an all-or-none manner. As the genetic fatherhood part of the SMGF family is clear, and as the Ghost Father’s parents, although integral members of the extended family, do not have decision-making power over the children, this irreversibly leaves all parental decision-making power in their own hands from the onset. With this plain rule about parental decision-making power for the children they do not have to compromise on any of these aspects, as women are required to do when choosing between a known and an anonymous donor (Hertz, 2006), or a genetic parenting partner (romantic or not).
Along their journey from the family they had envisioned to the family they finally chose to establish, the participants see drawbacks in the family configurations available to them in the absence of a marital partner – the innate inability to know the identity of the biological father with an anonymous donation, the uncertainty inherent in an identity-release donation in relation to future cooperation on the part of the father, and the creation of a lifelong commitment with a co-parent based on a relatively superficial acquaintance. At the same time, they want to embrace other features of these family configurations. Like mothers in co-parenting, they see the knowledge of the biological father’s identity as an essential element of the children’s identity (Herbrand, 2018), and like single mothers who choose sperm donation, they want their children to be under their responsibility (Hertz, 2006).
In forming their SMGF family, the mothers reflexively engage in a form of maternal bricolage (Hertz, 2020), one in which they pick out certain favorable features of different family configurations while circumventing other features of them. Like other single mothers who try to minimize the differences between their family and a normative nuclear family (Hertz, 2002), so do the single mothers in the SMGF family, but in a unique fashion.
Like single mothers in donor-conceived families, mothers in an SMGF family leave room for a future romantic partner (Hertz, 2006). Allegedly, the mother’s partner (unlike the Ghost Father) can take a more prominent role in childcare. However, the participants reflexively negotiate his role in the family (Donovan, 2000), and eventually adopt a gate-closing strategy whereby they prohibit his involvement in decision-making regarding the children (Nixon and Hadfield, 2018; Puhlman and Pasley, 2013). Although the biological father is absent, the mother’s partner does not replace him to recreate a nuclear family as seen with some step-parents (Ganong and Sanner, 2023).
Placing participation in decision-making about the children in the hands of genetic parentage only, even when the mother has a partner, constitutes ‘genetic thinking’ (Nordqvist, 2017), expresses a geneticized vision of parenthood and forms a hierarchy between genetic and social parenting with the former on top. It also creates a mechanism that prevents any future competition between the mother’s partner and the biological father and gives primacy to the (invariably non-present and non-functioning) biological (ghost) father over any (present and functioning) partner of the mother. This choice thus creates another model of single motherhood, one in which the mother’s partner is not a partner in parenting, though by her choice, and not by his (Hertz, 2006).
And so, just as an anonymous donation was used to definitively safeguard couples from third-party interference (Folger, 2008) and disruption to family stability, so does the inherent and irreversible absence of the genetic father in the SMGF family protect the mothers from any such disruption, where even a future partner of theirs is seen as a third party for that matter. This scheme does come with a consequence in the form of the absence of a father from the family. However, the mothers accede to this trade-off, which even so does not depart from what they see as their children’s best interest.
The contribution of the Ghost Father to the formation of the SMGF family is mainly genetic, and compared to his necessity in the family’s construction, he is not essential to its daily functioning. However, despite the nature of his contribution to the family at its formation, and his absence from it together with his inessentiality in its ongoing functioning, the Ghost Father is presented – both internally and externally – as the children’s father. Single mothers who use sperm donation also relate to the donor in terms of presence (or absence). However, unlike in the SMGF family, their relation to his presence – or rather ‘absent presence’ – is confined to the genetic part of fatherhood (Zadeh et al., 2016).
Placing the Ghost Father’s photographs in the family home, which may be a taken for granted family practice, carries a different meaning in the SMGF family and serves as a tool of display that conveys meaning about the place of the Ghost Father in the family (Finch, 2007). The unique status of the Ghost Father – presented as a known parent on the one hand and his being an absent parent on the other, constitutes a hitherto unknown assemblage of the biological and social dimensions in parenting.
This unexampled status of the Ghost Father completes the composition of the family and gives the SMGF family the outward appearance of a normative bereaved nuclear family – a family unit consisting of one mother, one father (who passed away), and children biologically related to both (Zartler, 2014). This nuclear family is complemented by an extended family on both sides, and the Ghost Father’s family of origin is an integral part thereof, akin to the mother’s family, despite his absence. However, the mothers, who are unequivocally aware of the distinctions between the SMGF family and a ‘by-the-book’ normative nuclear family, see their family as a whole. For them, inasmuch as the identity of the biological father of their children is known and the children have a father figure, albeit virtual, the lack of a present father does not activate the view of the family in terms of deficit, as seen in other single-parent families (Erera, 2001).
Conclusion
The participants, whose first preference was to have a normative nuclear family, eventually construct a novel custom-made family they perceive to benefit their children and them alike. The single mothers in the SMGF family display an apparent ideal nuclear family without explicitly challenging it. The dialectical relationship between the single-parent family and the nuclear family is manifested in the SMGF family in the form of a single-parent family, which both displays the appearance of a nuclear family conforming to socially constructed expectations, and avoids openly challenging it.
The geneticized vision of parenthood, underpinning the notion of knowing the biological father’s identity as essential to the benefit of the children and in their best interest, is then instrumentally used by the mothers to give primacy to the biological father over a future partner’s social parenting. The irreversible absence of the biological father permanently provides the mothers with sought-after stability, certainty, and control. The SMGF family is thus built on the assumption that the identity of the father is necessary but active fatherhood is not, and that mothers are better given complete control as a means to protect both their children and their performance as good mothers.
Fatherhood in the SMGF family goes beyond mere genetic relatedness, but still falls short of fostering caring aspects. The mothers’ insistence on the (absent) presence of the Ghost Father in the family, and on the reservation of his place as the children’s father, allows them to counterpoise the threat SMGF families pose to patriarchal impositions. Thus, unlike other single-parent families, they do not seem to overtly challenge traditional impositions. Nevertheless, the SMGF family structure allows the mothers to retain full control of the family in their own hands, and subvert the patriarchal power structure, all while preserving its appearance. Hence, whereas the term ghost marriage was coined to describe a practice meant for the pertaining of property within a patrilineal kin group in the absence of genetic relatedness, SMGF families use genetic relatedness with the dead, patriarchal views of fatherhood embedded in PHR, and normative appearance, to receive social acceptance and preserve full control of the family in their hands.
This is a preliminary study based on a limited number of interviews, and its findings are therefore provisional. Anticipating growth in SMGF families in Israel, it is suggested that further research should examine the experiences and motivations of more single women contemplating the establishment of an SMGF family to gain more insight into this new family structure.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors extend their gratitude to the participants for generously sharing their personal stories. In addition, they thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Current Sociology for their comments and suggestions, which significantly strengthened the article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
