Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception

Petra Nordqvist, C. Smart

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137297648
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. Using in-depth interviews the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception and offer insights into the complexities of these new family relationships.

1

Proper Families? Cultural Expectations and Donor Conception

Judges are asked to rule over child who has ‘three parents’

(The Times Tuesday February 7, 2012)

Such headlines in the UK are now far from rare. For example, in February 2013 alone The Guardian had two similar articles; one was headed ‘Who’s my sperm donor father?’ (February 23, 2013) and the other stated ‘Our kids have two mums’ (February 16, 2013). Similar headlines would have been unthinkable 50 or even 20 years ago and perhaps what is most surprising about such media coverage is that, although the tabloid press might take a more ‘shock/horror’ approach to such stories, in the main they are presented as news stories which just reflect the changing shape and structure of contemporary family life. These stories challenge, and ultimately may start to redefine, taken-for-granted assumptions about motherhood, fatherhood and what constitutes a ‘real’ or ‘proper’ family. So the question we open this chapter with is ‘What constitutes a proper family?’

The dominant cultural narrative about family life is still largely based on the idea of a married heterosexual couple who live together with their ‘own’ genetic children (usually just two of them). Even though this idealised model has never fully represented the diversity of family life in the UK, until recently it has been a powerful image which not only seemed to represent the actuality of lived experience but also became the moral standard of what families should be like (Gillis, 1996). Thus people who did not fit exactly within this model were often seen as undesirable or as harming their children (e.g. Rights of Women, 1984). The idea that all proper families must consist of married heterosexual parents and their two children reached a pinnacle in the 1950s and 1960s when marriage rates soared to their highest in recorded times (Allan and Crow, 2001; Lewis, 2001; McRae, 2004) and when any form of deviation from this ideal led to ostracism and sometimes even legal intervention (Keating, 2009; Sales, 2012). These marginalised, even stigmatised families might have included families with illegitimate children, single-parent families, adoptive families, mixed-race or mixed-religion families, same-sex families, unmarried families, small families, large families and so on.

Given the strength of the ideal or ‘proper’ form of family in the popular imagination until quite recently,¹ it is hardly surprising that, even now, new family forms materialising out of changing social, legal and cultural conditions can cause worry, alarm and sometimes dismay in some quarters. Hence for many years the growth in divorce and the rise of lone-parent families, particularly in the 1980s in the UK, was met with distress and condemnation in almost equal measure (Morgan, 1995; 2000).The first ‘test-tube baby’ (Louise Brown) was welcomed as a miracle but also as an indicator that families might start working against nature to produce ‘designer’ babies. Even the practice of adopting children in the early twentieth century was seen as a way of damaging the proper family because unmarried mothers could too ‘easily’ rid themselves of the burden of their sins and thus serve to condone sex outside marriage.

Adverse reactions to novel or changing family forms are therefore far from new and families formed through assisted reproductive methods, especially those using donated gametes, are now under this kind of fretful scrutiny. Some families find themselves under particularly close examination because their private lives come to public notice when they have gone to court to solve a particular family conflict or problem. Such cases give rise to the kinds of headlines in newspapers that we feature at the start of this chapter.

So in this chapter we first want to explore what it means when issues of donor conception enter into a semi-public, legal forum because this type of event provides insights into how society responds to these new family forms. Focusing on one case will allow us to discuss cultural ideas about what constitutes ‘proper’ families and the importance, or otherwise, of blood connections within such families. We will then consider child adoption because this practice is frequently seen as analogous to donor conception and it is often argued that the principles governing adoption should apply to donor conception. We will explore how the practice of adoption was also originally seen as undesirable, how it became shrouded in secrecy and how this has given way to open adoption where a child knows about their birth parents. Following this, the question of personal identity will be explored because a core contemporary concern around donor conception is the idea that the child who is detached in some way from genetic kin (formerly blood kin) will suffer a loss of identity (Marshall, 2012). We suggest, however, that rather than a focus on the idea of identity, a broader notion of ‘belonging’ is a more appropriate way to understand these new families. Finally we focus on the new narratives of family life that are emerging and how they bring with them new frameworks for understanding what families ‘should’ be like. In our conclusion we will outline the broad theoretical stance that informs this study and which is referred to as the relational approach.

The case of ML & AR v RW-B & SW-B [2011]²

Court cases can be seen to occupy an important symbolic place in the process of forming public opinion about family change. The details of cases involving donor conception (e.g. a child having two mothers or the rights of sperm donors to obtain legal privileges in relation to genetic children) inform a wider public of these otherwise private practices. They also put such events into context and at the same time can be very suggestive of whether these new family practices are desirable or not. The more the general public reads about these cases, the more they become aware of different forms of family life, whether they ultimately approve of them or not.

The legal case we focus on involved a lesbian couple who we refer to here as Rosie and Sally and a gay couple we refer to as Mark and Andrew. These are not their real names because although the details of their lives are in the public domain, they still have the right to anonymity. The facts of their dispute are not particularly unusual and the issues at stake are ones that face many gay and lesbian couples when they decide to have children through informal sperm donation. That is to say, they did not go through a licensed clinic to receive donor sperm because, if they had, the donor would have given up his rights to claim legal paternity of the children born from his gametes. Although this dispute may seem to be relevant only to same-sex couples using informal methods for conceiving children, the principles in play have a much wider currency. This is because there are important social values and ethical questions at stake. For example, in any situation where a gamete donor is already known to a recipient (e.g. a cousin who donates her eggs) there are commanding questions about how much of a role a donor should have in the life of a child they have helped to create (and we explore some of these questions further in Chapter 6). So the case of Rosie and Sally is not just about same-sex parents, it is also about how to establish who a parent is, and also whether ‘degrees of parenthood’ can be apportioned, such that a donor might have a small ‘share’ in parenting while the birth mother (in egg donation) or the non-genetic father (in sperm donation) might have a larger share. This case, and others like it, raises the question of whether parenthood can be envisaged as a kind of ‘parenthood pie chart’ which is no longer comprised of two equal parts taken by two genetic parents, but of several different adults who each have a different-sized slice of the pie or a different role to play.

The story

Rosie and Sally decided they wanted children together so they advertised for a gay man who would be willing to donate sperm. Mark volunteered. He was in a long-term relationship with Andrew. The couples met and decided to proceed with the plan with a general understanding that Mark would be a father figure to any subsequent child who was born. A daughter, who we call Paula, was born in 2001 and a second daughter, who we call Lilly, was born in 2005. Mark was the genetic father of both Paula and Lilly, and Rosie was the genetic and birth mother of both of the girls. Sally had parental responsibility for both girls arising from her civil partnership with Rosie. Mark and Andrew saw a lot of Paula and Lilly, taking them on holiday and having them to stay with them. During this period of the couples’ relationship it is possible to envisage the arrangement of the ‘parenthood pie chart’ with Rosie and Sally both having the larger slices, but with Mark having a growing slice and Andrew sharing in Mark’s portion. The girls referred to Mark as ‘Daddy’ at this time. However, in 2008 the relationship between the couples deteriorated rapidly; it seems that Mark and Andrew moved house to be closer to the girls and they began to want to have more time with them and to have a greater say in decision-making. The relationship between Mark (as a genetic progenitor) and Sally (as a non-genetic parent) became particularly strained. Conflict erupted and the couples went to court because Rosie and Sally wanted to reduce the amount of contact their daughters had with Mark and Andrew, but Mark wanted to be recognised as the legal father of the girls, and not only demanded more contact, but also made a claim for residence. This meant that he wanted the children to be removed from Rosie and Sally in order to come to live with him and Andrew. By reference to the ‘parenthood pie chart’ again, we can see that Mark saw himself in the same position as that of a divorced heterosexual father who could assume he was entitled to 50 per cent of the metaphorical pie, leaving the other 50 per cent (or possibly a bit less) to Rosie. Rosie and Sally were, however, only willing to concede about 10 per cent of the pie to Mark and Andrew.

The problem with this pie chart analogy, of course, is that it allows one to forget that these were real people arguing over actual children who were caught in the middle of stressful legal proceedings for at least three years. Paula, the elder daughter, was ten years old at the time of the final court hearing and by then she was refusing to see Mark at all even though Mark was insistent upon it. The contact facilitator reported to the court that Paula had said the following:

P told me that she wished she could move away, far away from all this conflict, all this horrible stuff. She told me that she cries at school in the toilets and her friend looks after her when she is upset, which is a lot. P said that she does not feel as if M is a father to her. She has two mothers. That is her family and she is happy with that. She liked M and A and likes seeing them too, but she did not think of them as her family because she has family. It is the mothers and her younger sister. She cannot just pretend that M is her father in order to make him happy.

(ML & AR v RW-B & SW-B [2011] para 2)

The ingredients of this case are exactly the same components that are to be found wherever donor conception results in the birth of a child. By this we mean that there are always more than two adults involved in donor conception and this can give rise to new dimensions of conflict when relationships break down. As a society we have become familiar with court cases dealing with divorced heterosexual parents who cannot agree about who a child should live with or how much contact a parent should have (Smart and Neale, 1999; Smart et al., 2001). We are less familiar with instances where there are three or even four people claiming parental rights. Although it is now quite accepted that a child can be raised by two mothers, or that a heterosexual couple can use gamete donation to have a child, uncertainty still hovers over the status of the donor and the donor’s family, and also whether the child born of donor conception should have some kind of legally recognised relationship or kinship with the donor and his or her other kin.

When sperm donation started to become an accepted method of dealing with male infertility in the UK around the time of the Second World War, so threatening was the figure of the donor that doctors and parents colluded in order to write him out of history and basically allowed the husband to assume legal parenthood of any child born from the method (Daniels and Haimes, 1998; Richards et al., 2012). The potential claim of the genetic donor was simply defused in order that the receiving parents could feel secure in their status as ‘real’ parents and so that they could present themselves to a potentially hostile society as a proper family. The case of Rosie and Sally some 70 years later contains echoes of this same scenario where the looming donor can make claims to a child, even though the child is happy with the family they already have. The facts in our modern case are not quite as straightforward as this because Mark, the sperm donor, was also the acknowledged father figure (or daddy), but it was his genetic connection with the girls that allowed him to go to court and this shows how socially and legally powerful genetic relatedness can be. While, in the 1950s, it was heterosexual couples who feared that the sperm donor could undermine their family, in the 2010s it is lesbian couples who experience this fear. It may also be an apprehension shared by any parent of a donor conceived child where the donor is known to them and their family.

So in some circumstances genetic connections give rise to legal standing (the right to make a claim) and possibly legal status (having one’s claim recognised). But not all genetic connections do this. A brother cannot, for example, make claims on a sister who would be legally recognised and grandparents can only rarely make legal claims in relation to grandchildren. It is genetic connection through sperm, eggs or embryos that carries this particular social, legal and cultural power. The legal conflict between Rosie, Sally, Mark and Andrew reveals that there is no automatic assumption that donor conceived families will be treated in the same way as families comprising parents with their own genetic children. In such circumstances it is not surprising that the former are anxious still to be seen as ‘proper’ families (Nordqvist, 2012a).

The question that flows from this realisation is whether it is a good thing that as a society we are moving towards the recognition that a child can have multiple parents, each of whom has a ‘stake’ in the child and who brings to the child a wider kinship network, or whether it would be a better thing if social and legal values preserved the idea that there really should only ever be two acknowledged parents because this is what is expected of ‘proper’ families (Wallbank, 2002). There are no easy answers to this question. As we discuss in the chapters that follow, the parents of donor conceived children often feel very vulnerable and want to benefit from the perceived protections conferred on genetically related or ‘proper’ families. Yet at the same time many lesbian parents (like Rosie and Sally) actively seek out an involved father figure for their children and many heterosexual parents propose to tell their children about their donors. Some parents are therefore trying to reshape parenthood away from the familiar twosome model towards a different combination of adults, while insisting that this too is a proper family. Putting it simply, there is an ongoing contest between the traditional ideals of a ‘proper’ family and more emergent aspirations that proper families can take many different shapes.

Learning from adoption?

There are striking parallels between the story of adoption in the UK and the development of policy and principles governing donor conception. But the stories are not identical and it would be inappropriate to assume that donor conception should simply be forced into the tracks left behind from the arduous journey taken by adoption (Haimes, 1988). At all times it is vital to remember how much society has changed over the last century and to realise that some of the experiences that were so influential in the development of adoption policies may hold little relevance for donor conception.

In England and Wales we can readily identify when the practice of legal adoption as we recognise it today began. The Adoption Act of 1926 created a system in which parents wishing to relinquish their child or children could place them for adoption. Suitable adoptive parents would then be found and there would follow a legal process whereby birth parents gave up their legal parental rights, which were transferred to the adoptive parents. Once an adoption order was made birth parents could not change their minds and they could never have the child returned to them. They were absolved of any financial or legal responsibilities for the child and in effect were no longer regarded as kin. The adoptive parents became the sole parents and, if the child had been born illegitimate, the adoption order removed the legal stigma and the child became the legitimate child of his or her new parents. This policy firmly shaped the ‘proper’ adoptive family of the 1930s and subsequent decades into the increasingly dominant two-parent model. It is not clear how extensive this model was before 1926, however. As Jenny Keating (2009) and Sally Sales (2012) have shown, adoption did exist before 1926 but it was not regulated and it was referred to later as informal adoption to distinguish it from the state-regulated, legal variety. The most important difference between adoption pre- and post-1926 was that before the Adoption Act, birth parents could take their children back. They retained their kinship with their children and were expected to contribute financially towards the children’s upkeep. This latter policy was to prevent parents from lodging their children with adoptive parents while they were costly (and unproductive) infants only to claim them back as soon as they could earn a living. There is also evidence of informal intra-family adoption; for instance, an illegitimate child might be sent to be raised by an aunt and uncle, or a grandmother might simply assume the maternal role for an illegitimate child born to her daughter. In these latter cases children often never knew that the person they thought was their older sister was in fact their mother.³ The three extracts below, from the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University, were written in 2000 and show how the practice of informal and intra-family adoptions still exists in living memory:

I know one of the aunts had an unexpected baby but the little one just got tacked on to the large family of another aunt.

(P425 Female, aged 62, ex-nurse, married)

I understand that [my aunt] pretty well dumped the child on her own mother. This cousin was pushed from pillar to post and lived with me and my parents for a short while. All three offspring went to university, held commissions in the services and are solid and respectable citizens to my knowledge. The illegitimate child (who is more or less an age with me) seems to have done well enough.

(B2238 Male, aged 76, retired clergyman, married)

One thing that has always fascinated me about my own and my wife’s fairly recent ancestors is the level of pre-marital sex that clearly occurred, if you compare birth and marriage certificates, and the casual way children were treated. It seems to me that the early part of the Century, despite the prudishness associated with it, was full of illicit relations and illegal adoptions . . . . My grandfather once told me about Doris. She was child number 10 or 11 and my grandmother couldn’t cope. Doris was given to a nearby neighbour and brought up by them not knowing who her real parents were until she was going to get married and needed her father to sign an agreement. Only then did she discover, in a state of complete shock, that ‘uncle’ Bill was her dad.

(P2759 Male, 50, married, director, S. Wales)

There is no way of knowing how many of these informal adoptions there were; nor can we ascertain whether they were kept secret or were more like open secrets that families lived with. But it is quite clear that such practices were acceptable and even essential (when illegitimacy and lone motherhood were so reviled) giving rise to situations where immediate kin could be spread across different households and not kept within the confines of the two-parent, nuclear family. The rise of state-regulated adoption gradually changed these practices and, combined with the lessening of the stigma of lone motherhood, the abolition of the legal status of illegitimacy and the rise of birth control, it meant that by the end of the twentieth century the whole practice of adoption had been transformed. The era of mother-and-baby homes, where young pregnant women were sent to have their babies in clandestine surroundings and to put them up secretly for adoption (Spensky, 1992), occupied a relatively short period of time in the longer history of adoption in England. In the 1950s and 1960s young women often reluctantly relinquished their babies and, once they had done so, they were never allowed to see them again. Moreover, during those decades there was a surplus of babies available for adoption and so adoptive parents were at a premium and their desire to be unencumbered by the potential ghost of the birth mother influenced adoption societies to promote adoption policies which de-kinned birth parents from their children (Sales, 2012).

This policy of secret adoptions (where children were not told they were adopted and where birth parents were completely cut off) fell into disrepute by the end of the century. There were a number of factors involved in this changed mindset. The numbers of babies available for adoption fell and children who became available for adoption were increasingly those who had been removed from their families by the local authority because of neglect or mistreatment. These were older children who often had problems but who also knew who their birth parents were. Sometimes they had spent periods of time in a children’s home or in foster care and so their adoptive parents were not in a position to ‘pretend’ to be their birth parents. As Jane Lewis (2004) has shown, the other important change to adoption across the second half of the twentieth century was that it ceased to be a way of providing babies for childless couples and instead became a part of the state’s child care system. Adoption became a solution for children, not for parents who did not want another child, nor for would-be parents who wanted a child to complete their family. Most significantly, in the UK the state retains an overarching role in the practice of adoption and, through the offices of local authority social workers, has the power to decide who is deemed to be a suitable adoptive parent.

The history of assisted reproduction maps onto some of these historical trends imperfectly. While we know little about sperm donation before the Second World War, in the post-war decades it seems...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Proper Families? Cultural Expectations and Donor Conception
• 2. Uncharted Territories: Donor Conception in Personal Life
• 3. Ripples through the Family
• 4. Keeping It Close: Sensitivities and Secrecy
• 5. Opening Up: Disclosure, Information and Family Relationships
• 6. Relating to Donors: Strangers, Boundaries and Tantalising Knowledge
• 7. (Not) One of Us: Genes and Belonging in Everyday Life
• 8. Relative Strangers and the Paradoxes of Genetic Kinship
• Appendix I: Researching Donor Conception and Family Relationships
• Appendix II: Index of Participants
• Appendix III: Glossary of terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index