Relative strangers: Family life,genes and donor conception Petra Nordqvist and Carole Smart

Reviewed by: Gabriele Griffin, University of York, UK.

About 15 years ago, I went through a phase of unsuccessful in vitro fertilisation, with pregnancies that would not ‘stick’ and repeated ‘spontaneous abortions’ at the end of the first trimester. On one occasion alone, we spent 20,000 euros (a lot more money then than it is now) on one such attempt – and, yes, we went abroad as time was running out and there was this famous Italian fertility specialist with a room full of photos of smiling babies he had helped to produce. At the time, there was no obvious counselling around this, and questions of how donor conception might impact on the child one might have, on family, etc. somehow did not seem to occur. Today, in an age of ‘a plethora of technologies that assist conception’ this would all be quite different, though success rates for donor conception remain low, particularly for women hovering around 40 years of age or older. But the public dissemination of knowledge on these matters and counselling availabilities have changed significantly, not least because of the increasing amount of research and publications in this field. Relative Strangers is part of this welcome surge, concerned with the vicissitudes of donor conception or, in the authors’ words, the ‘unexpected situations not typically encountered in everyday family life’ that those resorting to donor conception have to deal with. And these, as the book shows, are multitudinous, ranging from the – in the case of many heterosexual couples – unexpected, hence shocking, realization that one is infertile and may therefore need some form of donation (sperm, egg, embryo) to working out how to handle one’s donor offspring’s revelation of their birth origin to unsuspecting others. Donation, as this text suggests, makes both relatives and strangers of all involved. The child conceived through donation may be/come kin but may not be genetically related to some or all of the family involved. From this follow all manner of complex connections and affinities which have to be lived and negotiated everyday, refusing the taken-for-grantedness of much of how family is and remains culturally, socially, and legally conceived.

Petra Nordqvist and Carole Smart’s volume is singular in drawing on extensive research with both lesbians and heterosexuals, where almost all other publications in the field tend to focus on either lesbians or heterosexuals. This affords Nordqvist and Smart a unique, and in their case very effectively used, opportunity to make productive comparisons between the experiences with donor conception that lesbians and heterosexuals have. Thus, they show that whereas for their heterosexual interviewees donor conception was “enveloped in a pall of failure and dismay” where it was preceded by the unexpected discovery of infertility, “the lesbian experience [was] framed in terms of an (often unexpected) opportunity” – having a child and family against the odds. Lesbian couples are also predictably much more likely to tell their donor offspring about their conception – a fact that, as much research shows, makes for much better familial relations than the family secrets which were once, in relation to donor conception, strongly advised by all, and indeed continue to be practised by many to this day, often despite their best, articulated intentions.

Since there are no established narratives to deal with such stories of origin, knowing what to say and how to say it, is not easy. Many parents resort to the books published by the Donor Conception Network to help them find the words to say it. Living in a country which – even though this has only been the case since April 2005 – has legislated against donor anonymity, it is easy to forget that most of the rest of the world still practises donor anonymity, and that even in the UK it is only in licensed clinics that donor offspring’s rights in this matter are adequately safeguarded. But knowing how, when and, indeed if, to tell – and whom, into the bargain – is one of the many vexed issues that parents using donor conception have to contend with. Nordqvist and Smart importantly argue that disclosure is a process rather than a one-off event, an iterative affair that can be taxing for that very reason, and especially where families have histories of using silence as a way of managing family situations.

Nordqvist and Smart move their research beyond the more typical parents, or parents and child/ren dyad, in that they ask after the wider family and social environment in which donor conception occurs. Most particularly, they discuss grandparental reactions to the creation of donor-conceived grandchildren. This provides some interesting insights, for example around the role that mothers appear to play in accompanying their (heterosexual) daughters through the ups and downs of donation cycles. The book suggests, not least through the fact that Nordqvist and Smart had many more female than male participants in their research, that “female” and “family” remain more pronouncedly imbricated than “male” and “family”, with men appearing to find donor conception in some ways harder to take than women (some male partners refused to be interviewed), and fathers clearly acting more as “relative strangers”, or being much more peripheral to the whole process of their daughters going through donor conception, than mothers. The explanations for this are less evident, though notions of masculinity and the romance of “genetic connection” clearly figure as part of this. Interestingly, “the wider family [was] usually held at arm’s length during the conception process” in the case of lesbian couples who more often after the birth of the child engaged in bridge-building with that wider family.

For both lesbians and heterosexuals, though, grandparents proved to be very important in helping to create a sense of belonging for the child. Such belonging, as Nordqvist and Smart document, can come under strain when the parameters that parents using donor conception seek to establish for their family are breached by donors wanting to get involved in the parenting of the child when that was not agreed in advance, for example, or by partners laying claims to a child in the context of partner relationship breakdown. Since genetic connection still largely rules the legal frameworks for “rights over” children, difficult legal battles can ensue. This raises important questions as to the role the state should play in regulating family relations but, in a sense, this volume is not concerned with this issue; rather, it focuses on “kinship thinking” and its social and cultural dimensions. It sees such thinking in terms of paradoxes and highlights how “the parents and grandparents in our study … achieved a complex choreography between competing narratives and truths about kinship”. The point, Nordqvist and Smart suggest, is to make donor-conceived children “less like relative strangers and more like any other family member.” Given, however, that, as they also point out, their research participants were all willing to disclose about their experiences of donor conception, and that this is unlikely to be the case for the majority – globally speaking, there is, culturally at least, still some way to go before the norms that govern the intelligibility of families become more flexible, discursively as well as in practice.

This volume is accessibly written and will be of interest to all those engaged with questions of donor conception, the everyday management of family matters, sociologists of family studies, gender researchers and those concerned with new family formations. It makes an excellent introduction to the socio-cultural issues involved in donor conception.