The New Kinship: Constructing Donor-Conceived Families

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction How do you know who is in your family? How do you define the group of people whom you label as family members? Do you consider them to be members of your family because you have chosen them or because you were born into a particular family with “your” parents and siblings? Imagine that you are not biologically related to at least one of your parents—or to either of your parents—because he or she used donor sperm, eggs, or a complete embryo. Are you related to the donor? Most donors are anonymous. No federal laws in the United States require that donors or recipients exchange any information, identifying or otherwise. Donors typically enter into contracts with fertility clinics or sperm banks that promise them anonymity. The parents may know the donor’s hair color, height, IQ, college, and profession; they may even have heard the donor’s voice. But they don’t know the donor’s name. And, until recently, donor-conceived offspring typically did not know that one of their biological parents was a donor. Should you have any right to know who that donor is? What about other children born using that same donor’s eggs or sperm? Are you related to them? How? 2 > 3 solely on parents who unintentionally used the same donor gametes. These extended donor kin networks could include dozens (or even hundreds) of people who are all linked via the same donor’s eggs or sperm. While the individual families are connected by genes, a traditional marker of family, they enact few of the other conventional and legal trappings of family life, such as living in the same house, pooling financial resources, or enjoying the legal protections accorded to family life. There may be no shared cultural orientations and belief systems; different families that have used the same donor are liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist, gay, and straight. Biological connection is, of course, only one of the many methods of forming a family. Yet the genetic ties among the children cause many to feel strong kinship bonds toward each other. In these new families, parents and children face the unique challenges of redefining their families, and we, as a society, must face decisions on how to approach the bonds created among these newly found family members. The New Kinship has three purposes: first, it is one of the only books to date that is focused on families/relationships conceived through donors, and it documents these newly developing connections. Second, it proposes a legal basis for the development of these new communities, exploring what it would mean for the law to consider and support these different sites for forming familial relationships. It provides answers as to why we should support the new kinship. The book is grounded firmly in the importance of family: donor-conceived people are created to expand or create families, which consist of people (not genes). Consequently, the law needs to shift its dominant focus away from medicine and technology (and commodification, too) and toward family and constitutional law. The fertility industry, because it is ultimately about creating families, needs to be subjected to laws that regulate people, not things. Finally, in thinking through the issues in the donor world, the book shows how donor families both reinforce and complicate the meaning of family, offering lessons for all families by questioning what makes a family. When we think of family, we tend to have certain images in mind (as explored further in chapter 2): we are typically talking about a group defined by its interdependence and emotional intimacy. Within the law, we may also be envisioning a group that is subject to legal protections for privacy, with a specific structure for the parent, child, and state relationship, and with restrictions on who can enter into legally cognizable unions. Donor-conceived “families” confound the legal issues, even as they construct the emotional ties. Indeed, in many ways, assisted reproduction creates families that are unlike others. 4 > 5 whether the state must treat all families equally in order for a group to qualify as a “family,” and whether the state should foster different kinds of familial relationships . As these families increasingly find each other, much uncharted territory remains to be explored in defining their new relationships. JoEllen Marsh is a poster child for these new families—indeed, she is the subject of a 2011 film, Donor Unknown. As she was growing up in western Pennsylvania, she knew that her family...