The New Kinship: Constructing Donor-Conceived Families

4. Creating Communities across Families

>> 61 4 Creating Communities across Families In a highly acclaimed 2008 book for tweens, My So-Called Family, the narrator , Leah, is a thirteen-year-old who feels that something is missing in her life.1 When she comes home from kindergarten one day after learning that her friend’s mother is pregnant, she asks her mother to explain “sex.” Once her mother tells her where babies come from, Leah asks why she doesn’t have a father. Her mother then “explained that there had been a very nice man who’d known there was a mommy out there who needed his help to have her little girl. She said even though we didn’t know him, we should feel thankful to him because he had given her such an important present.”2 Without telling her mother, Leah searches for information about her potential donor siblings, and she ultimately connects with Samantha, a half-sibling. The first phone call, in which they identify themselves as being produced by the same donor, is awkward, but, by the end, Leah observes, “I realized that I had stopped feeling as though I were talking to a stranger.”3 While fiction, the book expresses common feelings among donor-conceived people of the need to search for connection and self-knowledge, and of finding comfort with a 62 > 63 a single parent or two mothers or two fathers. In the second type, when the child is born into a heterosexual family, it is not clear that the genetic parent is missing. Heterosexual families often keep the secret in order to preserve the interest of the nongenetic parent. Consequently, there is no need to know because the child has no reason to ask. As this section explores, the general donor culture values secrecy, although that secrecy is dissolving, and more parents are telling their children about their origins. The secrecy is pervasive. At a meeting at the fertility clinic, Peggy Orenstein and her husband were asked whether the blinds overlooking the street should be closed: “’We’re not ashamed,’” they explained.6 Orenstein wondered , “Had I been wrong to feel less furtive?”7 Similarly, when writer Melanie Thernstrom went egg shopping in the early twenty-first century, the director of one donor agency advised her, “’Tell everyone or tell no one. . . . But if it were me, I’d tell no one,” she added. “Look, I run an agency, so it’s in my interest to promote these kinds of families, but to be honest, if I couldn’t have children naturally—God forbid—I wouldn’t want anyone to know!’”8 The notion that blood families trump any other type of family remains deeply embedded in American culture, and this preference for blood ties explains some of the stigma that has accompanied infertility (and, as masculinities studies remind us, failure to reproduce is associated with male impotence and lack of virility). A second reason that historically led many parents not to disclose was a fear of how doing so would affect the child’s development. Children too might suffer from stigma because they were different or they might be confused about the identity of their “real” father.9 Parents wanted to protect their children from any bewilderment about the identity of their real families, and from any teasing because of the lack of biological relationship. Studies of families with children conceived through donor gametes have repeatedly shown that many parents are unlikely to tell their children about their donor origins, but that patterns of disclosure vary, depending on the type of family, with heterosexual couples least likely to disclose. Moreover, parents are likely to tell family members or friends, regardless of their intent to tell their children. In one study, a majority of the parents who never intended to disclose the fact of donor conception to their child had, nonetheless , informed at least one outside person, and the researchers note that these results are in line with what others have found.10 The disclosure decision , it turns out, is complex, encompassing not just whether to disclose but also when, why, and to whom. Literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick used the phrase “open secret” to discuss homosexuality as “at once marginal and central,”11 and this concept resonates in the donor-conceived world. 64 > 65 fourteen years later, followed up with the same families.20 When both parents agreed—either to disclose or not to disclose—there was no subsequent change in their intent. However, in families...