Medical Anthropology Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness
ISSN: 0145-9740 (Print) 1545-5882 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gmea20
Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness Sebastian Mohr To cite this article: Sebastian Mohr (2015) Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness, Medical Anthropology, 34:5, 470-484, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632
Accepted online: 29 Jan 2015.Published online: 29 Jan 2015.
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Date: 18 September 2015, At: 10:35
Medical Anthropology, 34: 470–484, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-9740 print/1545-5882 online DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632
Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 10:35 18 September 2015
Sebastian Mohr Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Danish sperm donors face a particular kind of kinship trouble: they find themselves in a cultural and organizational context that offers different and contrary ways of how to make connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful. Whereas Danish sperm banks and Danish law want sperm donors to regard these connections as contractual issues, the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark asks sperm donors to also consider them as family and kinship relations. Based on interviews with Danish sperm donors and participant observation at Danish sperm banks, I argue that Danish sperm donors make sense of connections to donor-conceived individuals as a particular kind of relatedness that cannot be reduced to either contractual or kinship relations. Making sense of these connections, sperm donors negotiate their social significance and thereby participate in opening a space which offers avenues for new kinds of sociality. Keywords Denmark, donor-assisted reproduction, kinship, reproductive technology, sperm donation
When a woman chooses to conceive with the help of donor semen in Denmark, the law regulating parenthood—børneloven—clearly states that paternal rights do not extend to the man who donated the semen (Folketinget 2014). Rather, the woman’s life partner is assigned parenthood if he or she decides to accept it. While female partners have to sign a declaration of co-motherhood before insemination, male partners automatically become fathers if their name is noted on the birth certificate. As a result, fatherhood is legally assigned to a man even though he has no biogenetic connections to the newborn. Within the first six months of the newborn’s life, his fatherhood can be contested by a possible third individual claiming fatherhood rights, but thereafter, even a test proving genetic fatherhood might be insufficient for gaining legal parenthood. Regulating fatherhood in Denmark is not only a matter of genetics. What comes to be understood as a legalized bond between a child and his or her father is based on an assessment of who is related to the child, with relatedness understood as something that may or may not come with genetic bonds. When donor semen is used, genetic relatedness is not deemed important. Yet what SEBASTIAN MOHR is an ethnographer of reproductive health and biomedicine at the intersections of personhood, gender, sexuality, and technology; his dissertation research focused on the practices and experiences of donating semen in Denmark. Address correspondence to Sebastian Mohr, Department of Education, Aarhus University, Campus Emdrup, Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]
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the law states—no parental rights for men who donate their semen—and what daily life looks like are quite different. Where the law sees no rightful connections, men who donate their semen might still find themselves pondering questions of kinship and relatedness. In this article, I explore how Danish sperm donors make sense of connections to donorconceived individuals. This sense making is embedded in a cultural, legal, and organizational context, which offers different interpretations of connections between donors and donorconceived individuals. Whereas Danish law and sperm banks see only contractual relations, the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark begs donors to make these connections meaningful in terms of family and kinship. Danish sperm donors make sense of these connections as a particular kind of relatedness. Negotiating the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals, Danish sperm donors do relatedness in a particular way characteristic for donorassisted reproduction. Being a donor is about making sense of the kinship trouble set into motion through reproductive donation. In the following, I consider how the legal and organizational particularities of donating semen in Denmark frame connections between donors and their offspring, and what that means for Danish sperm donors’ sense making of these connections. I then address how Danish sperm donors confront the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals by trying to name these connections and determine what kind of responsibilities they carry. I argue that sperm donors’ sense making of connections to donor-conceived individuals is pioneering work in doing relatedness in a landscape of emerging forms of sociality.
THINKING KINSHIP AND RELATEDNESS The trouble with kinship is that it carries social significance. Kinship develops social dynamics regardless of whether it is understood as the result of conception and birth, or the social practices that follow these events, or both. In Denmark, this social significance becomes performative in bodies of law regulating parent-child relationships. As illustrated in prior research, concerns about family ties and kinship are not so easily dealt with (e.g., Becker, Butler, and Nachtigall 2005; Harrington, Becker, and Nachtigall 2008; Klotz 2014; Nordqvist and Smart 2014). When a heterosexual couple uses donor semen, the father’s role especially can be contested, since male anxieties surrounding the use of donor semen stem from the inability to reproduce and norms around fatherhood that deem genetic connections between child and father important (e.g., Goldberg 2010; Inhorn 2006; Tjørnhøj-Thomsen 2009). Single women and lesbian couples using donor semen also face questions of legitimate parenthood, but here the absence of a father, rather than the presence of a second, disturbs what these women themselves regard as family (e.g., Graham 2012; Layne 2013; Mamo 2007). What comes to count as real kinship and kin relatedness thus not only often relies on biogenetic connections but also on a ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990) binding kinship to heterosexual lust and desire. The social significance of kinship also occupies anthropology. For a long time, kinship was the primary analytical lens applied to understand the social formation of any society (Holy 1996), but the ‘new kinship studies’ instead attend to ‘how’ relatedness is ‘constructed’ through ‘continuous practices’ in specific ‘local contexts’ (e.g., Carsten 1995, 2000; Edwards et al. 1993; Franklin 1997; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a; Strathern 1992, 1995a; Weston 1997). The shift from kinship systems and structures to practices and doings of relatedness occurred at a time when anthropologists studied reproductive technologies with a particular interest in
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“the transformation of familiar concepts as they are refracted through a range of novel sites of kinship production” (Franklin and McKinnon 2001b:7). This shift involved both a change in vocabulary and a change in how ethnographers understand kinship and relatedness as analytical categories. Whereas kinship as a fundamental social structure understands social life and human agency as being modelled after this structure, kinship as specific local and continuous practices of relatedness means to see human agency as constructing kinship as a meaningful way of being related. This shift allows for recognizing kinship as a specific Western phenomenon characteristic of Euro-American societies and ethnographers. Currently, a variety of ways of living relatedness exist, with different suggestions for how to best understand kinship and relatedness as categories of ethnographic analysis. Linda Stone defines kinship as both “relationships between persons based on descent or marriage” which “entail the idea of rights and obligations,” and as “an ideology of human relationships,” which “involves cultural ideas about how humans are created and the nature and meaning of their biological and moral connections to others” (2014:8–9). Kinship is thus not only something ethnographers might analyze but is also something that ethnographers are and embody, since they are part of contexts which already have established conceptualizations of what kinship is (Strathern 1995b). In his two comprehensive essays about ‘what kinship is and is not,’ Marshall Sahlins understands kinship as “the mutuality of being”: “Kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another” (2013:ix). Jeannette Edwards and Marilyn Strathern instead suggest that Euro-American kinship is a distinctive “division and combination of social and biological facts” (2000:159), which can be analyzed as “merographic connections”: connections “made between parts in a way that sustain[s] the individuality of each” (Strathern 1995a:72). Sarah Franklin goes further, and asks us to consider kinship as a technology that “organize[s], facilitate[s], and activate[s] human reproductivity” (2013:29). Following this, kinship and relatedness can be understood as different but mutually intertwined analytical categories. Whereas ‘relatedness’ might be understood as any combination of elements (e.g., biological material, symbolism, affective relations, everyday practices) with the capacity to generate meanings and experiences of being related, ‘kinship’ is best understood as a particular type of relatedness characteristic for Euro-American societies, in which a particular combination and division of the biological and the social generates particular meanings and experiences of being related.
THE PARTICULARITIES OF DONOR-ASSISTED RELATEDNESS It is in this way of differentiating between relatedness and kinship that Danish sperm donors’ sense making of connections to donor-conceived individuals has to be understood. Men who donate their semen in Denmark find themselves embedded in a cultural context that assigns social meaning to biogenetic connections. The social significance of biogenetic connections is so important that laws are set into place to establish lawful relations between parents and children where they are missing. Simultaneously, Danish sperm donors also find themselves in the organizational context of sperm banks that regards connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals as negligible. How sperm donors make sense of the separation of biogenetic and social fatherhood thus draws on notions of kinship as a particular way of being related, while also employing other, nonkinship notions of relatedness.
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In her comparison of American egg and sperm donors, Rene Almeling argues that men who donate their semen make connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful through kinship (2011). As Almeling reports, sperm donors referred to themselves as fathers of donor-conceived individuals. This particular sense making is the result of how fatherhood is defined and of how sperm banks framed donating semen. In the United States, fatherhood is conventionally established through a man’s biogenetic connections to children, and since donating semen establishes biogenetic connections between donors and their offspring, sperm donors are likely to talk about themselves as fathers. In addition, Almeling reasons, the sperm banks that she studied focused on nonanonymous donations and encouraged men to regard connections to donor-conceived individuals as kinship relations: “Men cannot help but see themselves as fathers, because they are providing sperm in a culture that equates male genetics with parenthood” (2011:164). Almeling’s (2011) argument—that the organizational framework of sperm donation has repercussions for how men conceive of connections to donor-conceived individuals—is important. In Denmark, donors can choose to be either anonymous or nonanonymous. Yet the particular organizational structure of sperm banking in Denmark marks connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals as unimportant, and as a result, Danish sperm donors make sense of these connections differently than do their American counterparts. Danish sperm donors’ way of making sense of connections to donor-conceived individuals is a particular kind of relatedness that is characteristic of donor-assisted reproduction and goes beyond doing kinship. Danish sperm donors make sense of biogenetic connections to donor-conceived individuals with reference to but also beyond kin relatedness. Maren Klotz calls these kinds of connections “wayward relations,” which she defined as relations that reaffirm “notions of kinship as genetically grounded” while also lacking social precedence since they go beyond geneticization (2014:229). They do not simply mimic EuroAmerican kinship; rather they are ‘complementary relations’ that exist alongside and together with existing family and kinship relations. Since they do not simply represent kinship relations, wayward relations lack social scripts for how they should be made meaningful, and making them meaningful is thus the task of those who are connected through them. The experiences of anonymous sperm donors in Australia support this analytical approach. In their study of anonymous sperm donors in Australia, Maggie Kirkman and colleagues (2014) provided evidence that connections between donor-conceived individuals and sperm donors might best be understood as practices of relatedness particular to donor-assisted reproduction rather than relatedness characteristic of Euro-American kinship generally. Men who sought connections to donor-conceived offspring, despite their initial anonymity, did so out of a concern about having done the right thing and out of concern for the well-being of donor-conceived children. Rather than establishing fatherhood relations, they were engaged in particular practices of relatedness by acting on what they thought were socially significant connections, founding even a support group for men with similar experiences (Kate Bourne, personal communication). Damien Riggs (2009) makes a similar point in his work on sperm donors in Australia. While he mostly interviewed men who had donated semen to friends, the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals was similarly recognized by men in his sample who donated semen to sperm banks. Donors reported persisting concerns about the health and physical wellbeing of children born with donor semen. A survey of sperm donors registered with the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), a privately run and voluntary register for gamete donors and donorconceived individuals, supports this finding: over half of all donors reported having distress, with
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concerns about the welfare of donor-conceived children being the most prominent reason for distress (Jadva et al. 2011). Distress also figures among Danish donors. In one survey, 7% regretted their decision to become a donor at least sometimes, and more than 50% were not completely open about being a donor and had either only told a selected group of individuals or no one at all (Bay et al. 2014). These numbers indicate that sperm donors meet particular challenges and have to find their own ways of dealing with them. In this article, I explore how Danish sperm donors confront questions of kinship and relatedness. Facing a disordered kinship landscape, sperm donors have to negotiate the social significance of biogenetic connections to donor-conceived individuals, and the obligations and responsibilities that follow with them. They do so in a cultural, legal, and organizational setting, which offers different interpretations: Danish law and Danish sperm banks see biogenetic connections between donors and donor-conceived individuals as contractual relations; the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark sees these connections as part of kinship and family relations. Next, I consider how Danish sperm donors address this discrepancy and how they make sense of donor-assisted reproduction’s disordered kinship landscape, by employing particular kinds of relatedness.
BACKGROUND Between 2011 and 2013, I conducted participant observation in Denmark at two sperm banks, Andersen and Jensen Sperm Bank, and in the United States, at Jensen Sperm Bank’s American location (all names are pseudonyms). Beyond observing the working practices at the laboratories, I also participated in donor candidate interviews and physical examinations by physicians. Of the 26 men I interviewed, 23 had donated their semen at either Andersen or Jensen Sperm Bank; they had contacted me after they had received an email from their sperm bank informing them about my research project. Three men donated semen as private arrangements with women who they had met online; one of these men was also a former donor at a sperm bank. These men contacted me after having read an entry that I had posted on the contact site with which they were registered. The timespan between the first email contact and the day of the interview varied from weeks to several months. The youngest man was 18 years, the oldest 44, and just under half of all men were either married or in a relationship. Eleven men had their own children. Nine were still full-time students, one unemployed, and the remaining employed. Most men self-identified as heterosexual, although three acknowledged bisexual interests. Binding guidelines by the Danish Health Authority demand the exclusion of men who have sex with men as sperm donors. However, the control regime at Danish sperm banks, which marks homosexuality as irresponsible sexual conduct and undesirable for sperm donors, additionally supports self-screening among donor candidates based on sexuality (Mohr 2010, 2014b). All donors at Danish sperm banks are compensated. On average, men receive between 40 and 80 Euros per sample if it passes quality assessments. Monetary compensation cannot, however, be reduced to an all-determining incentive. Rather, money becomes part of a larger moral and gendered universe, which demands certain roles from men (Mohr 2014a). Danish sperm banks offer the opportunity for men to become anonymous and nonanonymous donors. Over half of the men (14) had chosen to be nonanonymous and thus can be contacted by donor-conceived
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individuals once they are 18 years. In a recent survey of Danish sperm donors, only 30% were nonanonymous (Bay et al. 2014); my higher rate of recruitment of nonanonymous donors might be because these donors are more willing to participate in interviews. However, when I asked men why they participated in my research, all explained that participation in research was part of being a donor and an obligation in regards to recipients and donor-conceived children, and participation gave them an opportunity to think about and reflect on the decision to become a donor. This suggests that donors assign social significance to the connections that are established through donor-assisted reproduction. Articulating why one wants to be a sperm donor is part of the screening process at Danish sperm banks: donors are asked to verbalize why they want to donate semen (Mohr 2014a). However, conversations with me went beyond their usual talk about donating semen. Rather than being interested in their medical history, as was the focus of Danish sperm banks, or joking about being a sperm donor, as some donors reported doing with their friends, I talked with them about the meaning of connections established through donor-assisted reproduction. This particular framework of course has certain limitations: all narratives presented here are the result of an interactive process between interviewees and me. Therefore, the narratives have to be understood as situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) in the sense that they are the result of a particular scholarly interest in connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals and men’s particular ways of narrating these connections.
REGULATING RELATEDNESS Commercial sperm banking in Denmark sets a particular framework for how to understand connections between donor-conceived individuals and sperm donors. These biogenetic connections, which are likely to be understood in terms of kinship outside the context of donor-assisted reproduction, are cast as contractual issues. At both Andersen and Jensen Sperm Bank, men have to sign a contract that binds them to either donating four semen samples per month for at least one year or to donating an overall minimum number of semen samples. As part of this contract, donors accept that they may not be compensated if the semen samples fail to meet quality requirements such as sperm count or volume. Furthermore, donors can be held liable for the expenses incurred by the sperm banks if they violate the contract, for example, by registering with online platforms like the DSR. In addition, Danish sperm banks neither inform donors how many children are born with their semen nor whether their semen is used at all, and sperm donors transfer all rights to their semen to the sperm bank and waive any fatherhood claims to possible offspring. The organizational framework of commercial sperm banking in Denmark thereby sets clear terms: donors are contractual partners, not family members. Supported by Danish law, connections to possible offspring are not considered kinship or family matters, and the threat of monetary sanctions is used to enforce compliance with these terms. This is reflected in the way that biogenetic connections are formulated during donor candidate interviews and in the way interviewees talked about being a sperm donor. Donor candidate interviews take place once an applicant’s semen quality is assessed as ‘good enough.’ The objective of these interviews is straightforward from the sperm banks’ perspective. Interviews generate a biogenetic profile of the applicant’s family connections, which helps in either admitting or dismissing an applicant as a donor. However, seen as part of the contractual
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relations in which donors enter with a sperm bank, these interviews can also be understood as a space where donors are asked to display their compliance with contractual obligations, by making their biogenetic connections to family members available for assessment and by dismissing the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals beyond contractual relations. Dominic was a donor candidate who did not comply with these objectives. He could not account for biogenetic connections to family members; neither did he want to ignore the social significance of biogenetic connections between donors and donor-conceived individuals. Before his interview with Stine, Jensen Sperm Bank’s donor coordinator, Dominic filled out a medical questionnaire. I overheard him making numerous phone calls to different relatives for detailed information on his family medical history, a sign that he took the task of answering medical questionnaires seriously. As other donors told me, this is not always the case. Some men admitted that they simply stated that neither they nor family members had a specific disease/disorder if they did not recognize the specific condition. It is thus not necessarily accuracy that makes a good donor, but rather the consistency of a donor’s answers. Dominic was not able to answer consistently. When Stine inquired about his father’s medical history, Dominic replied that he had cut off relations with his father a long time ago. He was able to answer basic questions about his mother’s health, but admitted that contact with her was also very limited. His biogenetic kinship knowledge was thus not sufficiently consistent for him to be considered a safe donor candidate. When Stine later asked Dominic whether he wanted to join as an anonymous or nonanonymous donor, he paused for a moment, then asked Stine what possible contact to donor-conceived children would look like. Stine explained to him that should a child want to contact him, he would hear from Jensen Sperm Bank. She also added that not all children knew that they were donorconceived. Dominic seemed appalled: “But the children have certain rights as well! What do you do in order to make sure that the children know?” Stine answered tersely: “It is not our task to ensure that parents explain this to their children.” After the interview was over, Stine expressed to me that she thought that Dominic had been “weird,” and when I met Dominic coincidently about a year later, he told me that he had been dismissed as a donor. Besides his inconsistent knowledge about biogenetic connections, his expressed interest in the well-being of donor offspring was deemed inappropriate for sperm donors. His contractual obligations required of him the reverse: knowledge about biogenetic connections and dismissal of the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals. How this particular framing of connections becomes part of Danish sperm donors’ own narratives was reflected in interviewees’ discussions of their experiences as sperm donors. Men like Malthe, married with two children, in his late 30s and donor for five years, talked about being a “supplier” (leverandør). He saw his task as delivering a quality product—semen (see also Almeling 2011). Men like Noah, single without children, and in his mid-20s, and donor for about a year, said that to him, semen first became valuable after he started as a sperm donor. When I asked him whether semen meant something different when masturbating at the sperm bank compared with masturbating at home, he said: Not completely, but it does in regards to the fact that you have to hit the cup, otherwise, I mean at home it is just something that you clean up, but there it has value, there I know that I am supposed to deliver it, and I also want to donate the best possible. So in this regard, it is a different approach.
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Men like Malthe and Noah were aware that their contractual relations with sperm banks came with certain expectations, which they had to honor. The contractual framework at Danish sperm banks, and the monetary compensation that they received, thus have a performative effect in as far as they change how sperm donors think about obligations, responsibilities, and connections. Yet the ascribed role as a contractor can also be dissatisfying to some men, leaving them wondering whether their contribution would make a difference. Haldor, in his late 30s and married with two children, had been donating semen for two years and still speculated about what actually happened with his semen: “When you have been up there and donated, then you come out of this room and you wonder, will this be used for anything or will it just sit there in the freezer until it is thrown out.” This constant uncertainty was reason enough for some interviewees to look for other alternatives. Magnus, in his early 40s and living with his life partner and her son, had been a sperm donor for more than five years before he also started to donate semen privately to women who he meets through internet contact sites. Because he could not connect to recipients and their children when he was with a sperm bank, he decided to break the contract and started to donate through informal arrangements: I saw that there was a demand [behov], and I also thought that it could be interesting [lidt sjovt] to meet the children later on and meet those people that receive my semen, what kind of people are they. I actually met a lesbian couple, who would have really liked to have a nonanonymous donor, but that wasn’t legal at the time. There was actually just one clinic which offered that because it was run by midwifes who had found a niche which had not been regulated. So, I felt there was a market. And it turns out that there also was a market, there are people who actually want to meet and get along [forliges med] with the person who provides the semen. When you look at the sperm banks’ donor catalogues, you will read that they [the donors] are tall and blond and handsome and have an IQ of over 200. But that is not true, that is not what the world actually looks like. But of course, that is the product brochure [handelskatalog], that’s what they live off, selling semen. But I like to actually meet those people for whom I provide semen, and it seems as if recipients also think that that is a good idea.
What makes Magnus’ reflection especially interesting is his way of wording things. While criticizing the sperm banks’ business approach, he talked about ‘demands’ that he helps to meet and ‘markets’ that he has identified. While he prefers a personal relationship with the recipients and donor-conceived children, he presents the sperm banks’ commercial strategy as misleading since it misrepresents donors and their concerns. At the same time, he sees himself as someone who offers a real connection, someone who recipients can connect to and get along with, someone who they can meet and relate to. Casting connections between sperm donors and recipients, and sperm donors and donorconceived individuals, as contractual relations may thus lead some men to reclaim these connections as socially significant. Sperm donors such as Magnus, who register with registries like the American DSR or the European Scandinavian Seed Siblings, illustrate that sperm donors’ sense of obligation and responsibility for connections established through sperm donation cannot just be disregarded. On the other hand, acknowledging this social significance, as Magnus did, does not necessarily mean that these connections are comparable to building a family. Applying a market vocabulary, men like Magnus think of these connections as a particular kind of relatedness, which only donor-assisted reproduction brings about, and which demands particular obligations and responsibilities. Connecting to recipients and donor-conceived children made
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Magnus feel more at ease with his choice of being a sperm donor. Whereas he felt inadequately set aside while donating semen at a sperm bank, arranging donor-assisted reproduction directly with recipients satisfied the sense of responsibility he felt as a sperm donor. As also identified in a recent survey of former sperm donors registered with the DSR (Daniels and Kramer 2013), sperm donors feel a responsibility for recipients and donor-offspring, and want to act on this sense of responsibility. However, organizational and legal frameworks often prevent them from doing so.
NAMING CONNECTIONS Being left with the feeling that connections to donor-conceived individuals have social significance, while simultaneously being asked by Danish sperm banks and Danish law to dismiss this significance, sperm donors find themselves alone when trying to negotiate the obligations and responsibilities that might be asked of them by donor-conceived individuals. Felix, a sperm donor in his early 20s and single, downplayed the significance of donor-offspring connections, yet simultaneously also acknowledged that they made a difference. Talking about how he understood connections to donor-conceived individuals, he said: Well, I don’t think this bothers me. Of course they are not my own children, because they are not in any way. But it is somehow more a part of me, I mean more than if they were just some random children. There is no emotional bond with them; it is just the biological bond in some way. But I mean, there still is a bond in some way, I don’t know how I should describe this. But it doesn’t really mean anything. I am looking forward to having a cup of coffee with them, if they want to meet me once or so, and talk about how their life has been. That is fine.
Similarly Oscar, single and in his early 30s, and donating semen for about a year and a half, said: I kept thinking about that there will be a little copy of me going around somewhere without me knowing about him or her, which was a little bit provocative at the beginning. Because, I mean, in some sense they are, well, they are not my children, but they are my biology if you can say it in that way.
Connections to donor-conceived individuals are, as Felix pointed out, only biogenetic, and donorconceived individuals thus do not qualify as children. Yet the connections also carry a particular social significance for which both Felix and Oscar struggled to find words. In addition to the difficulties naming connections to donor-conceived offspring, donors found it challenging to put into words the obligations they might have in relation to donor-conceived individuals. Despite the fact that Danish law and sperm banks assume sperm donors to be contractual partners with no rights and obligations beyond those determined in the contract, sperm donors wondered if thinking of their obligations in contractual terms was actually appropriate. But just as they lacked vocabulary to describe connections to their possible donor-offspring, donors also were uncertain about what these connections demand from them. Without guidance about how to handle responsibilities as sperm donors, men made their own judgments about justifiable (and unreasonable) obligations. William, in a relationship and in his mid-20s, told me that he would have difficulties finding the right way of handling possible requests from donor-conceived individuals: I am also an organ donor. If anything happens to me, if I happen to have a traffic accident, then I think it is wonderful that I can help others. But to possibly be contacted by some children in 20 years’ time,
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I am afraid about, I am bad at being emotionally distanced. Some people are good at this, distancing themselves: I don’t have anything to do with this. But I am afraid that I won’t be able to do that. I think, in that situation, I will start to have, I don’t think I could not have a relation to them. [ . . . ] I can just feel that I would not be able to close the door in their face and say: leave. They would probably come to fill more than I am maybe ready for.
August, in his early 20s and single, was more distanced. He saw no emotional obligations to possible donor-offspring, yet also he seemed unsure whether connections to donor-conceived individuals might be significant in the future. He explained to me why his possible donoroffspring should know that he has no responsibility for them: So that they don’t blame me for anything and so that they don’t blame their parents for anything either. I mean, this is how the world works [som verden nu engang er indrettet], that you can do this, that there is this possibility, and that they maybe should just be happy about that they are here. But maybe this is also just to make it easier for me in the future, I don’t know. This is just hypothetical to think about. Maybe I won’t even survive the next 20 years, who knows.
Jeppe, single and in his late teens, had a particular way of finding out what his obligations as a sperm donor were. He envisioned what possible meetings with donor-offspring would be like and how he would react: Well, I started with the most obvious scenario, that someone would approach me and say that they are related to me, and how I would handle this situation. Would I say: I don’t have anything to do with you; or would I say: okay, let us talk about it and see what will happen. That was the original, how should I phrase this, almost the worst case scenario, to imagine how one would react to this kind of situation. But I also thought about, that this is not only about me, this is also about my family, these are also their genes. So another priority for me was, what they think about all of this. I asked them about their opinion, and they told me that this is nothing that they are absolutely crazy about, but if I thought that this will not be a problem, then I should go ahead and do it.
Noah, who had originally chosen to donate semen anonymously but then changed his mind, had similar thoughts. As other men who had chosen to donate nonanonymously, he saw his obligations as a sperm donor in providing donor-conceived individuals with the opportunity to find out more about their biogenetic heritage. Reasoning about donor anonymity, he said: I first thought that it would be strange that there are children out there that I didn’t know. Being anonymous seemed like a solution, since I would be more distanced, but I have changed my mind in this regard. I am an open donor now because I thought, if there are children, there are some children that one has heard about, those children grow up and then all of a sudden lack something, want to know where their genetic father is. So, if it means something to them, then it might as well be okay with me.
While Danish sperm donors have difficulties determining what their obligations are regarding donor-conceived individuals besides providing them with an opportunity to get answers to questions regarding their biogenetic heritage how Noah explained, Danish sperm donors are very clear about their responsibilities to their life partners, possible own children, and immediate family. Donors were concerned about interference by donor-conceived individuals and their parents, and they felt the need to protect their own families against this. Whereas one might assume that a donor’s choice for anonymity or nonanonymity would be directly related to his concerns about
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outside interference, interviewees’ choices of anonymity or nonanonymity may rather be understood as two equal possible options to achieve the same objective. Some men wanted to protect their families from outside interferences by choosing to be anonymous; others protected their families by choosing to be nonanonymous. Mathias had chosen to be anonymous in order to provide protection for himself and his envisioned future family. In his 20s and in a long-term relationship, he had been donating semen for about a year. I asked him why he had chosen to be anonymous: Mathias: Well, I wanted to be anonymous so that I can be sure that there are no consequences for me later on. Sebastian: In regards to? Mathias: Well, that could be, I don’t know, if there should be 18 children all of a sudden, who all want to know who their father is, then I have to suddenly deal with that situation when I am 50 or so. So that’s why I chose to be anonymous.
Invoking the ideal of a nuclear family for his own future family life throughout the interview, Mathias had started to donate semen only when his life partner was able to accept him being a sperm donor. As he told me, his partner had had difficulties accepting that there were children born with his semen that would not be theirs: “But after I had explained to her that this decision did not have anything to do with the two of us, and that it would not have an influence on our life, she just accepted it.” Donors like Mathias took care of their life partners, wives, and children by assuming responsibilities that came about through being a sperm donor and that demanded particular decisions as life partners, husbands, and fathers. They acted out of a sense of responsibility bestowed upon them through sperm donation, and for Mathias, choosing to be anonymous was a way of acting on this sense of responsibility. Emil, sperm donor for roughly two years, married, and in his late 30s, with two children, had made a different choice. He had chosen to be nonanonymous for similar reasons as Noah, so that donor-conceived individuals could access information about their biogenetic heritage. But while Noah had primarily considered his obligations toward donor-conceived individuals when making the decision to be nonanonymous, Emil had chosen to be nonanonymous in order to protect his own family from possible outside interference. Thus in Emil’s narrative, nonanonymity provided for the same kind of protection that Mathias sought through anonymity. For Emil, nonanonymity gave him the opportunity to define who was part of his family and who was not. We talked about the difficulty of telling his own children that he was a sperm donor: Well, those are delicate topics and especially at that age, right now they would not be able to understand any of this, I am pretty sure. But once they are old enough to understand, well, whether I am going to tell them will probably also depend on if there is a situation where someone says: you are actually my dad in a physical sense [min fysiske far]. Well, in that situation, my children would deserve to know. On the other hand, I don’t want my children to regard that person as some kind of sister or brother because that is not what they are, at least I think so.
Both Mathias and Emil sought to be responsible. But while Mathias chose anonymity, Emil saw nonanonymity as the only way to live up to his obligations as a father and a donor. For him, being a responsible sperm donor meant that he donated semen nonanonymously, so providing donor-conceived individuals with the chance of retracing their biogenetic connections. In addition, nonanonymity provided him with the opportunity to be a good father, since it was a way of defining who was and who was not part of his family.
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Faced with making sense of connections for which there are no established social scripts, sperm donors choose different pathways to assume the responsibility they saw bestowed upon them, and to honor the social significance of biogenetic connections that are neither just contractual nor kinship relations. Sperm donors have to make sense of connections which do not fit into ready-made kinship categories, and thus engage in practices of relatedness particular to donor-assisted reproduction.
THE PIONEERING WORK OF SPERM DONORS When men who donate semen in Denmark ponder questions of kinship and relatedness, they do so as part of a cultural and organizational context with established modes for how to think about kinship and relatedness. Their narratives rely on how biogenetic connections are understood as part of Danish culture and on how they are understood by Danish sperm banks and Danish legislation. These are not the same. Further, as I have argued, Danish sperm donors employ ways of doing relatedness that go beyond doing kinship. Sperm donors are aware of the social significance of biogenetic connections to donorconceived individuals, despite regulatory and organizational attempts to make sperm donors regard these connections as purely contractual matters. Although Danish sperm donors have difficulties naming connections to donor-conceived individuals, and although they might find it hard to determine which obligations these connections demand, sperm donors nonetheless have a clear sense of responsibility on which they wish to act. For some donors, this means donating semen nonanonymously, so providing donor-conceived individuals with the opportunity to retrace their biogenetic connections. Others take initiatives to contact recipients and donor-offspring, or even seek out ways to donate semen that enable them to determine themselves how engagements with recipients and donor-conceived individuals might look like. However men choose to act on the sense of responsibility, they do so because these connections have significance. This significance partly arises out of the meaning with which biogenetic connections between individuals are imbued in Euro-American societies. But as the narratives presented here illustrate, this significance also arises out of sperm donation’s particularities. Being a sperm donor demands specific obligations as sperm donors, not as fathers, for donor-conceived individuals. What these obligations look like has to be negotiated by each individual donor. Danish sperm donors cannot rely on an established repertoire of practices, legal or familial, as is the case for father-child relations. They share this challenge with recipients of donor semen and donorconceived individuals (Klotz 2014; Nordqvist and Smart 2014). They have to come up with their own ways of acknowledging the social significance of the biogenetic connections established through donor insemination. They walk unexplored territory, not really knowing how to ascribe meaning to connections that defy existing classifications of kinship. Experiencing these insecurities first hand, Danish sperm donors participate in pioneering work of doing relatedness. Legal regulation and sperm bank practices in Denmark disregard their concerns by reducing matters of relatedness to contractual issues. Thus, sperm donors themselves have to confront the horizons of a disordered kinship universe and live the contemporary condition of being related in an era of reproductive technology. Their experiences reflect the potential of reproductive substance (semen, DNA) to act as a technology of social contract, and the potential of reproductive technologies to act as reproductive substance by (re)producing social relations
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(Franklin 2006a, 2006b). Naming connections and determining obligations, sperm donors engage reflectively in an intricate play of connecting and disconnecting the social and the biological. Tinkering with connections to individuals to whom one is genetically connected yet socially disconnected accentuates the ways in which relatedness and kinship are done and forces sperm donors to make active decisions about how to treat these types of connections. Whereas this kind of kinship trouble is often portrayed as negative or a disturbance, I see a space emerging that might open avenues for new types of sociality not grounded in traditional concepts of being related. As the narratives presented here suggest, traditional kinship terms such as father and parent do not capture what sperm donors themselves feel makes connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful, and although donors might not be able to find adequate vocabulary to name these connections, they live them as socially meaningful connections alongside or complementary to established ways of living kin relatedness. This warrants one important point for anthropological debates: it is only by paying close attention to the particularities of how people do relatedness that scholars will begin to understand the scope of doing relatedness as an ordering mechanism of contemporary sociality. If the question is whether anthropological scholarship can elevate the analysis of kinship above the individual experience of kinship and relatedness in order to understand contemporary kinship trouble, then empirical examples such as this one serve as a reminder that it is exactly the individual experience itself that holds the key to understanding what doing kinship and relatedness is all about. Honoring the social significance of biogenetic connections, men who donate semen in Denmark take on responsibilities as sperm donors. New forms of relatedness are created as part of which scripts for conduct, obligations, and connectedness are written at the same time as they are lived, making sperm donors into pioneers of reproductive donation relatedness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to the men who were willing to share their stories with me and to the sperm bank staff who allowed me to join their daily work. My former colleagues at the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen helped me to find my own analytical voice—thank you to all of you, but especially to Klaus Høyer. I am also grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this article by Marcia Inhorn, Rene Almeling, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Stine Adrian, Ayo Wahlberg, and Ulrika Dahl. Finally, the input by three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal made all the difference: thank you.
FUNDING Funding for my dissertation research at the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen was provided by the Danish Council for Independent Research as part of the research project “Body and Person: Governing Exchange in 21st Century Biomedicine.”
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REFERENCES Almeling, R. 2011 Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bay, B., P. B. Larsen, U. S. Kesmodel, and H. J. Ingerslev 2014 Danish sperm donors across three decades: Motivations and attitudes. Fertility and Sterility 101(1):252–257. Becker, G., A. Butler, and R. D. Nachtigall 2005 Resemblance talk: A challenge for parents whose children were conceived with donor gametes in the US. Social Science & Medicine 61(6):1300–1309. Butler, J. 1990 Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Carsten, J. 1995 The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: Feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist 22(2):223–241. ———. 2000 Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, K. R. and W. Kramer 2013 Genetic and health issues emerging from sperm donation—The experiences and views of donors. Advances in Reproductive Sciences 1(3):15–20. Edwards, J., S. Franklin, E. Hirsch, F. Price, and M. Strathern 1993 Technologies of Procreation. Kinship in the Age of Assisted Reproduction. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Edwards, J. and M. Strathern 2000 Including our own. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. J. Carsten, ed. Pp. 149–166. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Folketinget 2014 Børneloven, LBK Nr. 1097 af 07/10/2014. Franklin, S. 1997 Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006a Origin stories revisited: IVF as an anthropological project. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 30(4):547–555. ———. 2006b The cyborg embryo. Our path to transbiology. Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8):167–187. ———. 2013 Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Franklin, S. and S. McKinnon 2001a Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2001b Introduction. Relative values: Reconfiguring kinship studies. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, eds. Pp. 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldberg, H. 2010 The man in the sperm: Kinship and fatherhood in light of male infertility in Israel. In Kin, Gene, Community. Reproductive Technologies among Jewish Israelis. D. Birenbaum-Carmeli and Y. S. Carmeli, eds. Pp. 84–106. New York: Berghahn. Graham, S. 2012 Choosing single motherhood? Single women negotiating the nuclear family ideal. In Families—Beyond the Nuclear Ideal. D. Cutas and S. Chan, eds. Pp. 97–109. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Haraway, D. 1988 Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3):575–599. Harrington, J., G. Becker, and R. Nachtigall 2008 Nonreproductive technologies: Remediating kin structure with donor gametes. Science, Technology & Human Values 33(3):393–418.
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Holy, L. 1996 Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. Chicago: Pluto Press. Inhorn, M. C. 2006 “He won’t be my son”: Middle Eastern men’s discourses of adoption and gamete donation. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 20(1):94–120. Jadva, V., T. Freeman, W. Kramer, and S. Golombok 2011 Sperm and oocyte donors’ experiences of anonymous donation and subsequent contact with their donor offspring. Human Reproduction 26(3):638–645. Kirkman, M., K. Bourne, J. Fisher, L. Johnson, and K. Hammarberg 2014 Gamete donors’ expectations and experiences of contact with their donor offspring. Human Reproduction 29(4):731–738. Klotz, M. 2014 [K]information. Gamete Donation and Kinship Knowledge in Germany and Britain. Frankfurt: Campus. Layne, L. L. 2013 ‘Creepy,’ ‘freaky,’ and ‘strange’: How the ‘uncanny’ can illuminate the experience of single mothers by choice and lesbian couples who buy ‘dad.’ Journal of Consumer Culture 13(2):140–159. Mamo, L. 2007 Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mohr, S. 2010 What does one wear to a sperm bank? Negotiations of sexuality in sperm donation. kuckuck. Notizen Zur Alltagskultur 25(2):36–42. ———. 2014a Beyond motivation: On what it means to be a sperm donor in Denmark. Anthropology & Medicine 21(2):162–173. ———. 2014b Containing sperm—Managing legitimacy. Lust, disgust, and hybridity at Danish sperm banks. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. doi:10.1177/0891241614558517. Nordqvist, P. and C. Smart 2014 Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Riggs, D. W. 2009 The health and well-being implications of emotion work undertaken by gay sperm donors. Feminism & Psychology 19(4):517–533. Sahlins, M. 2013 What Kinship is—And is not. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Stone, L. 2014 Kinship and Gender: An Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Strathern, M. 1992 Reproducing the Future. Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ———. 1995a After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995b Displacing knowledge: Technology and the consequences for kinship. In Conceiving the New World Order. The Global Politics of Reproduction. F .D. Ginsburg and R. Rapp, eds. Pp. 346–363. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, T. 2009 “It’s a bit unmanly in a way”: Men and infertility in Denmark. In Reconceiving the Second Sex. Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction. M. C. Inhorn, T. Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, H. Goldberg, and M. L. C. Mosegaard, eds. Pp. 226–252. New York: Berghahn Books. Weston, K. 1997 Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.
ISSN: 0145-9740 (Print) 1545-5882 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gmea20
Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness Sebastian Mohr To cite this article: Sebastian Mohr (2015) Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness, Medical Anthropology, 34:5, 470-484, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632
Accepted online: 29 Jan 2015.Published online: 29 Jan 2015.
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Medical Anthropology, 34: 470–484, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-9740 print/1545-5882 online DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1008632
Living Kinship Trouble: Danish Sperm Donors’ Narratives of Relatedness Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 10:35 18 September 2015
Sebastian Mohr Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Danish sperm donors face a particular kind of kinship trouble: they find themselves in a cultural and organizational context that offers different and contrary ways of how to make connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful. Whereas Danish sperm banks and Danish law want sperm donors to regard these connections as contractual issues, the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark asks sperm donors to also consider them as family and kinship relations. Based on interviews with Danish sperm donors and participant observation at Danish sperm banks, I argue that Danish sperm donors make sense of connections to donor-conceived individuals as a particular kind of relatedness that cannot be reduced to either contractual or kinship relations. Making sense of these connections, sperm donors negotiate their social significance and thereby participate in opening a space which offers avenues for new kinds of sociality. Keywords Denmark, donor-assisted reproduction, kinship, reproductive technology, sperm donation
When a woman chooses to conceive with the help of donor semen in Denmark, the law regulating parenthood—børneloven—clearly states that paternal rights do not extend to the man who donated the semen (Folketinget 2014). Rather, the woman’s life partner is assigned parenthood if he or she decides to accept it. While female partners have to sign a declaration of co-motherhood before insemination, male partners automatically become fathers if their name is noted on the birth certificate. As a result, fatherhood is legally assigned to a man even though he has no biogenetic connections to the newborn. Within the first six months of the newborn’s life, his fatherhood can be contested by a possible third individual claiming fatherhood rights, but thereafter, even a test proving genetic fatherhood might be insufficient for gaining legal parenthood. Regulating fatherhood in Denmark is not only a matter of genetics. What comes to be understood as a legalized bond between a child and his or her father is based on an assessment of who is related to the child, with relatedness understood as something that may or may not come with genetic bonds. When donor semen is used, genetic relatedness is not deemed important. Yet what SEBASTIAN MOHR is an ethnographer of reproductive health and biomedicine at the intersections of personhood, gender, sexuality, and technology; his dissertation research focused on the practices and experiences of donating semen in Denmark. Address correspondence to Sebastian Mohr, Department of Education, Aarhus University, Campus Emdrup, Tuborgvej 164, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]
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the law states—no parental rights for men who donate their semen—and what daily life looks like are quite different. Where the law sees no rightful connections, men who donate their semen might still find themselves pondering questions of kinship and relatedness. In this article, I explore how Danish sperm donors make sense of connections to donorconceived individuals. This sense making is embedded in a cultural, legal, and organizational context, which offers different interpretations of connections between donors and donorconceived individuals. Whereas Danish law and sperm banks see only contractual relations, the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark begs donors to make these connections meaningful in terms of family and kinship. Danish sperm donors make sense of these connections as a particular kind of relatedness. Negotiating the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals, Danish sperm donors do relatedness in a particular way characteristic for donorassisted reproduction. Being a donor is about making sense of the kinship trouble set into motion through reproductive donation. In the following, I consider how the legal and organizational particularities of donating semen in Denmark frame connections between donors and their offspring, and what that means for Danish sperm donors’ sense making of these connections. I then address how Danish sperm donors confront the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals by trying to name these connections and determine what kind of responsibilities they carry. I argue that sperm donors’ sense making of connections to donor-conceived individuals is pioneering work in doing relatedness in a landscape of emerging forms of sociality.
THINKING KINSHIP AND RELATEDNESS The trouble with kinship is that it carries social significance. Kinship develops social dynamics regardless of whether it is understood as the result of conception and birth, or the social practices that follow these events, or both. In Denmark, this social significance becomes performative in bodies of law regulating parent-child relationships. As illustrated in prior research, concerns about family ties and kinship are not so easily dealt with (e.g., Becker, Butler, and Nachtigall 2005; Harrington, Becker, and Nachtigall 2008; Klotz 2014; Nordqvist and Smart 2014). When a heterosexual couple uses donor semen, the father’s role especially can be contested, since male anxieties surrounding the use of donor semen stem from the inability to reproduce and norms around fatherhood that deem genetic connections between child and father important (e.g., Goldberg 2010; Inhorn 2006; Tjørnhøj-Thomsen 2009). Single women and lesbian couples using donor semen also face questions of legitimate parenthood, but here the absence of a father, rather than the presence of a second, disturbs what these women themselves regard as family (e.g., Graham 2012; Layne 2013; Mamo 2007). What comes to count as real kinship and kin relatedness thus not only often relies on biogenetic connections but also on a ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990) binding kinship to heterosexual lust and desire. The social significance of kinship also occupies anthropology. For a long time, kinship was the primary analytical lens applied to understand the social formation of any society (Holy 1996), but the ‘new kinship studies’ instead attend to ‘how’ relatedness is ‘constructed’ through ‘continuous practices’ in specific ‘local contexts’ (e.g., Carsten 1995, 2000; Edwards et al. 1993; Franklin 1997; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a; Strathern 1992, 1995a; Weston 1997). The shift from kinship systems and structures to practices and doings of relatedness occurred at a time when anthropologists studied reproductive technologies with a particular interest in
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“the transformation of familiar concepts as they are refracted through a range of novel sites of kinship production” (Franklin and McKinnon 2001b:7). This shift involved both a change in vocabulary and a change in how ethnographers understand kinship and relatedness as analytical categories. Whereas kinship as a fundamental social structure understands social life and human agency as being modelled after this structure, kinship as specific local and continuous practices of relatedness means to see human agency as constructing kinship as a meaningful way of being related. This shift allows for recognizing kinship as a specific Western phenomenon characteristic of Euro-American societies and ethnographers. Currently, a variety of ways of living relatedness exist, with different suggestions for how to best understand kinship and relatedness as categories of ethnographic analysis. Linda Stone defines kinship as both “relationships between persons based on descent or marriage” which “entail the idea of rights and obligations,” and as “an ideology of human relationships,” which “involves cultural ideas about how humans are created and the nature and meaning of their biological and moral connections to others” (2014:8–9). Kinship is thus not only something ethnographers might analyze but is also something that ethnographers are and embody, since they are part of contexts which already have established conceptualizations of what kinship is (Strathern 1995b). In his two comprehensive essays about ‘what kinship is and is not,’ Marshall Sahlins understands kinship as “the mutuality of being”: “Kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another” (2013:ix). Jeannette Edwards and Marilyn Strathern instead suggest that Euro-American kinship is a distinctive “division and combination of social and biological facts” (2000:159), which can be analyzed as “merographic connections”: connections “made between parts in a way that sustain[s] the individuality of each” (Strathern 1995a:72). Sarah Franklin goes further, and asks us to consider kinship as a technology that “organize[s], facilitate[s], and activate[s] human reproductivity” (2013:29). Following this, kinship and relatedness can be understood as different but mutually intertwined analytical categories. Whereas ‘relatedness’ might be understood as any combination of elements (e.g., biological material, symbolism, affective relations, everyday practices) with the capacity to generate meanings and experiences of being related, ‘kinship’ is best understood as a particular type of relatedness characteristic for Euro-American societies, in which a particular combination and division of the biological and the social generates particular meanings and experiences of being related.
THE PARTICULARITIES OF DONOR-ASSISTED RELATEDNESS It is in this way of differentiating between relatedness and kinship that Danish sperm donors’ sense making of connections to donor-conceived individuals has to be understood. Men who donate their semen in Denmark find themselves embedded in a cultural context that assigns social meaning to biogenetic connections. The social significance of biogenetic connections is so important that laws are set into place to establish lawful relations between parents and children where they are missing. Simultaneously, Danish sperm donors also find themselves in the organizational context of sperm banks that regards connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals as negligible. How sperm donors make sense of the separation of biogenetic and social fatherhood thus draws on notions of kinship as a particular way of being related, while also employing other, nonkinship notions of relatedness.
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In her comparison of American egg and sperm donors, Rene Almeling argues that men who donate their semen make connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful through kinship (2011). As Almeling reports, sperm donors referred to themselves as fathers of donor-conceived individuals. This particular sense making is the result of how fatherhood is defined and of how sperm banks framed donating semen. In the United States, fatherhood is conventionally established through a man’s biogenetic connections to children, and since donating semen establishes biogenetic connections between donors and their offspring, sperm donors are likely to talk about themselves as fathers. In addition, Almeling reasons, the sperm banks that she studied focused on nonanonymous donations and encouraged men to regard connections to donor-conceived individuals as kinship relations: “Men cannot help but see themselves as fathers, because they are providing sperm in a culture that equates male genetics with parenthood” (2011:164). Almeling’s (2011) argument—that the organizational framework of sperm donation has repercussions for how men conceive of connections to donor-conceived individuals—is important. In Denmark, donors can choose to be either anonymous or nonanonymous. Yet the particular organizational structure of sperm banking in Denmark marks connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals as unimportant, and as a result, Danish sperm donors make sense of these connections differently than do their American counterparts. Danish sperm donors’ way of making sense of connections to donor-conceived individuals is a particular kind of relatedness that is characteristic of donor-assisted reproduction and goes beyond doing kinship. Danish sperm donors make sense of biogenetic connections to donor-conceived individuals with reference to but also beyond kin relatedness. Maren Klotz calls these kinds of connections “wayward relations,” which she defined as relations that reaffirm “notions of kinship as genetically grounded” while also lacking social precedence since they go beyond geneticization (2014:229). They do not simply mimic EuroAmerican kinship; rather they are ‘complementary relations’ that exist alongside and together with existing family and kinship relations. Since they do not simply represent kinship relations, wayward relations lack social scripts for how they should be made meaningful, and making them meaningful is thus the task of those who are connected through them. The experiences of anonymous sperm donors in Australia support this analytical approach. In their study of anonymous sperm donors in Australia, Maggie Kirkman and colleagues (2014) provided evidence that connections between donor-conceived individuals and sperm donors might best be understood as practices of relatedness particular to donor-assisted reproduction rather than relatedness characteristic of Euro-American kinship generally. Men who sought connections to donor-conceived offspring, despite their initial anonymity, did so out of a concern about having done the right thing and out of concern for the well-being of donor-conceived children. Rather than establishing fatherhood relations, they were engaged in particular practices of relatedness by acting on what they thought were socially significant connections, founding even a support group for men with similar experiences (Kate Bourne, personal communication). Damien Riggs (2009) makes a similar point in his work on sperm donors in Australia. While he mostly interviewed men who had donated semen to friends, the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals was similarly recognized by men in his sample who donated semen to sperm banks. Donors reported persisting concerns about the health and physical wellbeing of children born with donor semen. A survey of sperm donors registered with the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), a privately run and voluntary register for gamete donors and donorconceived individuals, supports this finding: over half of all donors reported having distress, with
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concerns about the welfare of donor-conceived children being the most prominent reason for distress (Jadva et al. 2011). Distress also figures among Danish donors. In one survey, 7% regretted their decision to become a donor at least sometimes, and more than 50% were not completely open about being a donor and had either only told a selected group of individuals or no one at all (Bay et al. 2014). These numbers indicate that sperm donors meet particular challenges and have to find their own ways of dealing with them. In this article, I explore how Danish sperm donors confront questions of kinship and relatedness. Facing a disordered kinship landscape, sperm donors have to negotiate the social significance of biogenetic connections to donor-conceived individuals, and the obligations and responsibilities that follow with them. They do so in a cultural, legal, and organizational setting, which offers different interpretations: Danish law and Danish sperm banks see biogenetic connections between donors and donor-conceived individuals as contractual relations; the dominant kinship narrative in Denmark sees these connections as part of kinship and family relations. Next, I consider how Danish sperm donors address this discrepancy and how they make sense of donor-assisted reproduction’s disordered kinship landscape, by employing particular kinds of relatedness.
BACKGROUND Between 2011 and 2013, I conducted participant observation in Denmark at two sperm banks, Andersen and Jensen Sperm Bank, and in the United States, at Jensen Sperm Bank’s American location (all names are pseudonyms). Beyond observing the working practices at the laboratories, I also participated in donor candidate interviews and physical examinations by physicians. Of the 26 men I interviewed, 23 had donated their semen at either Andersen or Jensen Sperm Bank; they had contacted me after they had received an email from their sperm bank informing them about my research project. Three men donated semen as private arrangements with women who they had met online; one of these men was also a former donor at a sperm bank. These men contacted me after having read an entry that I had posted on the contact site with which they were registered. The timespan between the first email contact and the day of the interview varied from weeks to several months. The youngest man was 18 years, the oldest 44, and just under half of all men were either married or in a relationship. Eleven men had their own children. Nine were still full-time students, one unemployed, and the remaining employed. Most men self-identified as heterosexual, although three acknowledged bisexual interests. Binding guidelines by the Danish Health Authority demand the exclusion of men who have sex with men as sperm donors. However, the control regime at Danish sperm banks, which marks homosexuality as irresponsible sexual conduct and undesirable for sperm donors, additionally supports self-screening among donor candidates based on sexuality (Mohr 2010, 2014b). All donors at Danish sperm banks are compensated. On average, men receive between 40 and 80 Euros per sample if it passes quality assessments. Monetary compensation cannot, however, be reduced to an all-determining incentive. Rather, money becomes part of a larger moral and gendered universe, which demands certain roles from men (Mohr 2014a). Danish sperm banks offer the opportunity for men to become anonymous and nonanonymous donors. Over half of the men (14) had chosen to be nonanonymous and thus can be contacted by donor-conceived
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individuals once they are 18 years. In a recent survey of Danish sperm donors, only 30% were nonanonymous (Bay et al. 2014); my higher rate of recruitment of nonanonymous donors might be because these donors are more willing to participate in interviews. However, when I asked men why they participated in my research, all explained that participation in research was part of being a donor and an obligation in regards to recipients and donor-conceived children, and participation gave them an opportunity to think about and reflect on the decision to become a donor. This suggests that donors assign social significance to the connections that are established through donor-assisted reproduction. Articulating why one wants to be a sperm donor is part of the screening process at Danish sperm banks: donors are asked to verbalize why they want to donate semen (Mohr 2014a). However, conversations with me went beyond their usual talk about donating semen. Rather than being interested in their medical history, as was the focus of Danish sperm banks, or joking about being a sperm donor, as some donors reported doing with their friends, I talked with them about the meaning of connections established through donor-assisted reproduction. This particular framework of course has certain limitations: all narratives presented here are the result of an interactive process between interviewees and me. Therefore, the narratives have to be understood as situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) in the sense that they are the result of a particular scholarly interest in connections between sperm donors and donor-conceived individuals and men’s particular ways of narrating these connections.
REGULATING RELATEDNESS Commercial sperm banking in Denmark sets a particular framework for how to understand connections between donor-conceived individuals and sperm donors. These biogenetic connections, which are likely to be understood in terms of kinship outside the context of donor-assisted reproduction, are cast as contractual issues. At both Andersen and Jensen Sperm Bank, men have to sign a contract that binds them to either donating four semen samples per month for at least one year or to donating an overall minimum number of semen samples. As part of this contract, donors accept that they may not be compensated if the semen samples fail to meet quality requirements such as sperm count or volume. Furthermore, donors can be held liable for the expenses incurred by the sperm banks if they violate the contract, for example, by registering with online platforms like the DSR. In addition, Danish sperm banks neither inform donors how many children are born with their semen nor whether their semen is used at all, and sperm donors transfer all rights to their semen to the sperm bank and waive any fatherhood claims to possible offspring. The organizational framework of commercial sperm banking in Denmark thereby sets clear terms: donors are contractual partners, not family members. Supported by Danish law, connections to possible offspring are not considered kinship or family matters, and the threat of monetary sanctions is used to enforce compliance with these terms. This is reflected in the way that biogenetic connections are formulated during donor candidate interviews and in the way interviewees talked about being a sperm donor. Donor candidate interviews take place once an applicant’s semen quality is assessed as ‘good enough.’ The objective of these interviews is straightforward from the sperm banks’ perspective. Interviews generate a biogenetic profile of the applicant’s family connections, which helps in either admitting or dismissing an applicant as a donor. However, seen as part of the contractual
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relations in which donors enter with a sperm bank, these interviews can also be understood as a space where donors are asked to display their compliance with contractual obligations, by making their biogenetic connections to family members available for assessment and by dismissing the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals beyond contractual relations. Dominic was a donor candidate who did not comply with these objectives. He could not account for biogenetic connections to family members; neither did he want to ignore the social significance of biogenetic connections between donors and donor-conceived individuals. Before his interview with Stine, Jensen Sperm Bank’s donor coordinator, Dominic filled out a medical questionnaire. I overheard him making numerous phone calls to different relatives for detailed information on his family medical history, a sign that he took the task of answering medical questionnaires seriously. As other donors told me, this is not always the case. Some men admitted that they simply stated that neither they nor family members had a specific disease/disorder if they did not recognize the specific condition. It is thus not necessarily accuracy that makes a good donor, but rather the consistency of a donor’s answers. Dominic was not able to answer consistently. When Stine inquired about his father’s medical history, Dominic replied that he had cut off relations with his father a long time ago. He was able to answer basic questions about his mother’s health, but admitted that contact with her was also very limited. His biogenetic kinship knowledge was thus not sufficiently consistent for him to be considered a safe donor candidate. When Stine later asked Dominic whether he wanted to join as an anonymous or nonanonymous donor, he paused for a moment, then asked Stine what possible contact to donor-conceived children would look like. Stine explained to him that should a child want to contact him, he would hear from Jensen Sperm Bank. She also added that not all children knew that they were donorconceived. Dominic seemed appalled: “But the children have certain rights as well! What do you do in order to make sure that the children know?” Stine answered tersely: “It is not our task to ensure that parents explain this to their children.” After the interview was over, Stine expressed to me that she thought that Dominic had been “weird,” and when I met Dominic coincidently about a year later, he told me that he had been dismissed as a donor. Besides his inconsistent knowledge about biogenetic connections, his expressed interest in the well-being of donor offspring was deemed inappropriate for sperm donors. His contractual obligations required of him the reverse: knowledge about biogenetic connections and dismissal of the social significance of connections to donor-conceived individuals. How this particular framing of connections becomes part of Danish sperm donors’ own narratives was reflected in interviewees’ discussions of their experiences as sperm donors. Men like Malthe, married with two children, in his late 30s and donor for five years, talked about being a “supplier” (leverandør). He saw his task as delivering a quality product—semen (see also Almeling 2011). Men like Noah, single without children, and in his mid-20s, and donor for about a year, said that to him, semen first became valuable after he started as a sperm donor. When I asked him whether semen meant something different when masturbating at the sperm bank compared with masturbating at home, he said: Not completely, but it does in regards to the fact that you have to hit the cup, otherwise, I mean at home it is just something that you clean up, but there it has value, there I know that I am supposed to deliver it, and I also want to donate the best possible. So in this regard, it is a different approach.
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Men like Malthe and Noah were aware that their contractual relations with sperm banks came with certain expectations, which they had to honor. The contractual framework at Danish sperm banks, and the monetary compensation that they received, thus have a performative effect in as far as they change how sperm donors think about obligations, responsibilities, and connections. Yet the ascribed role as a contractor can also be dissatisfying to some men, leaving them wondering whether their contribution would make a difference. Haldor, in his late 30s and married with two children, had been donating semen for two years and still speculated about what actually happened with his semen: “When you have been up there and donated, then you come out of this room and you wonder, will this be used for anything or will it just sit there in the freezer until it is thrown out.” This constant uncertainty was reason enough for some interviewees to look for other alternatives. Magnus, in his early 40s and living with his life partner and her son, had been a sperm donor for more than five years before he also started to donate semen privately to women who he meets through internet contact sites. Because he could not connect to recipients and their children when he was with a sperm bank, he decided to break the contract and started to donate through informal arrangements: I saw that there was a demand [behov], and I also thought that it could be interesting [lidt sjovt] to meet the children later on and meet those people that receive my semen, what kind of people are they. I actually met a lesbian couple, who would have really liked to have a nonanonymous donor, but that wasn’t legal at the time. There was actually just one clinic which offered that because it was run by midwifes who had found a niche which had not been regulated. So, I felt there was a market. And it turns out that there also was a market, there are people who actually want to meet and get along [forliges med] with the person who provides the semen. When you look at the sperm banks’ donor catalogues, you will read that they [the donors] are tall and blond and handsome and have an IQ of over 200. But that is not true, that is not what the world actually looks like. But of course, that is the product brochure [handelskatalog], that’s what they live off, selling semen. But I like to actually meet those people for whom I provide semen, and it seems as if recipients also think that that is a good idea.
What makes Magnus’ reflection especially interesting is his way of wording things. While criticizing the sperm banks’ business approach, he talked about ‘demands’ that he helps to meet and ‘markets’ that he has identified. While he prefers a personal relationship with the recipients and donor-conceived children, he presents the sperm banks’ commercial strategy as misleading since it misrepresents donors and their concerns. At the same time, he sees himself as someone who offers a real connection, someone who recipients can connect to and get along with, someone who they can meet and relate to. Casting connections between sperm donors and recipients, and sperm donors and donorconceived individuals, as contractual relations may thus lead some men to reclaim these connections as socially significant. Sperm donors such as Magnus, who register with registries like the American DSR or the European Scandinavian Seed Siblings, illustrate that sperm donors’ sense of obligation and responsibility for connections established through sperm donation cannot just be disregarded. On the other hand, acknowledging this social significance, as Magnus did, does not necessarily mean that these connections are comparable to building a family. Applying a market vocabulary, men like Magnus think of these connections as a particular kind of relatedness, which only donor-assisted reproduction brings about, and which demands particular obligations and responsibilities. Connecting to recipients and donor-conceived children made
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Magnus feel more at ease with his choice of being a sperm donor. Whereas he felt inadequately set aside while donating semen at a sperm bank, arranging donor-assisted reproduction directly with recipients satisfied the sense of responsibility he felt as a sperm donor. As also identified in a recent survey of former sperm donors registered with the DSR (Daniels and Kramer 2013), sperm donors feel a responsibility for recipients and donor-offspring, and want to act on this sense of responsibility. However, organizational and legal frameworks often prevent them from doing so.
NAMING CONNECTIONS Being left with the feeling that connections to donor-conceived individuals have social significance, while simultaneously being asked by Danish sperm banks and Danish law to dismiss this significance, sperm donors find themselves alone when trying to negotiate the obligations and responsibilities that might be asked of them by donor-conceived individuals. Felix, a sperm donor in his early 20s and single, downplayed the significance of donor-offspring connections, yet simultaneously also acknowledged that they made a difference. Talking about how he understood connections to donor-conceived individuals, he said: Well, I don’t think this bothers me. Of course they are not my own children, because they are not in any way. But it is somehow more a part of me, I mean more than if they were just some random children. There is no emotional bond with them; it is just the biological bond in some way. But I mean, there still is a bond in some way, I don’t know how I should describe this. But it doesn’t really mean anything. I am looking forward to having a cup of coffee with them, if they want to meet me once or so, and talk about how their life has been. That is fine.
Similarly Oscar, single and in his early 30s, and donating semen for about a year and a half, said: I kept thinking about that there will be a little copy of me going around somewhere without me knowing about him or her, which was a little bit provocative at the beginning. Because, I mean, in some sense they are, well, they are not my children, but they are my biology if you can say it in that way.
Connections to donor-conceived individuals are, as Felix pointed out, only biogenetic, and donorconceived individuals thus do not qualify as children. Yet the connections also carry a particular social significance for which both Felix and Oscar struggled to find words. In addition to the difficulties naming connections to donor-conceived offspring, donors found it challenging to put into words the obligations they might have in relation to donor-conceived individuals. Despite the fact that Danish law and sperm banks assume sperm donors to be contractual partners with no rights and obligations beyond those determined in the contract, sperm donors wondered if thinking of their obligations in contractual terms was actually appropriate. But just as they lacked vocabulary to describe connections to their possible donor-offspring, donors also were uncertain about what these connections demand from them. Without guidance about how to handle responsibilities as sperm donors, men made their own judgments about justifiable (and unreasonable) obligations. William, in a relationship and in his mid-20s, told me that he would have difficulties finding the right way of handling possible requests from donor-conceived individuals: I am also an organ donor. If anything happens to me, if I happen to have a traffic accident, then I think it is wonderful that I can help others. But to possibly be contacted by some children in 20 years’ time,
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I am afraid about, I am bad at being emotionally distanced. Some people are good at this, distancing themselves: I don’t have anything to do with this. But I am afraid that I won’t be able to do that. I think, in that situation, I will start to have, I don’t think I could not have a relation to them. [ . . . ] I can just feel that I would not be able to close the door in their face and say: leave. They would probably come to fill more than I am maybe ready for.
August, in his early 20s and single, was more distanced. He saw no emotional obligations to possible donor-offspring, yet also he seemed unsure whether connections to donor-conceived individuals might be significant in the future. He explained to me why his possible donoroffspring should know that he has no responsibility for them: So that they don’t blame me for anything and so that they don’t blame their parents for anything either. I mean, this is how the world works [som verden nu engang er indrettet], that you can do this, that there is this possibility, and that they maybe should just be happy about that they are here. But maybe this is also just to make it easier for me in the future, I don’t know. This is just hypothetical to think about. Maybe I won’t even survive the next 20 years, who knows.
Jeppe, single and in his late teens, had a particular way of finding out what his obligations as a sperm donor were. He envisioned what possible meetings with donor-offspring would be like and how he would react: Well, I started with the most obvious scenario, that someone would approach me and say that they are related to me, and how I would handle this situation. Would I say: I don’t have anything to do with you; or would I say: okay, let us talk about it and see what will happen. That was the original, how should I phrase this, almost the worst case scenario, to imagine how one would react to this kind of situation. But I also thought about, that this is not only about me, this is also about my family, these are also their genes. So another priority for me was, what they think about all of this. I asked them about their opinion, and they told me that this is nothing that they are absolutely crazy about, but if I thought that this will not be a problem, then I should go ahead and do it.
Noah, who had originally chosen to donate semen anonymously but then changed his mind, had similar thoughts. As other men who had chosen to donate nonanonymously, he saw his obligations as a sperm donor in providing donor-conceived individuals with the opportunity to find out more about their biogenetic heritage. Reasoning about donor anonymity, he said: I first thought that it would be strange that there are children out there that I didn’t know. Being anonymous seemed like a solution, since I would be more distanced, but I have changed my mind in this regard. I am an open donor now because I thought, if there are children, there are some children that one has heard about, those children grow up and then all of a sudden lack something, want to know where their genetic father is. So, if it means something to them, then it might as well be okay with me.
While Danish sperm donors have difficulties determining what their obligations are regarding donor-conceived individuals besides providing them with an opportunity to get answers to questions regarding their biogenetic heritage how Noah explained, Danish sperm donors are very clear about their responsibilities to their life partners, possible own children, and immediate family. Donors were concerned about interference by donor-conceived individuals and their parents, and they felt the need to protect their own families against this. Whereas one might assume that a donor’s choice for anonymity or nonanonymity would be directly related to his concerns about
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outside interference, interviewees’ choices of anonymity or nonanonymity may rather be understood as two equal possible options to achieve the same objective. Some men wanted to protect their families from outside interferences by choosing to be anonymous; others protected their families by choosing to be nonanonymous. Mathias had chosen to be anonymous in order to provide protection for himself and his envisioned future family. In his 20s and in a long-term relationship, he had been donating semen for about a year. I asked him why he had chosen to be anonymous: Mathias: Well, I wanted to be anonymous so that I can be sure that there are no consequences for me later on. Sebastian: In regards to? Mathias: Well, that could be, I don’t know, if there should be 18 children all of a sudden, who all want to know who their father is, then I have to suddenly deal with that situation when I am 50 or so. So that’s why I chose to be anonymous.
Invoking the ideal of a nuclear family for his own future family life throughout the interview, Mathias had started to donate semen only when his life partner was able to accept him being a sperm donor. As he told me, his partner had had difficulties accepting that there were children born with his semen that would not be theirs: “But after I had explained to her that this decision did not have anything to do with the two of us, and that it would not have an influence on our life, she just accepted it.” Donors like Mathias took care of their life partners, wives, and children by assuming responsibilities that came about through being a sperm donor and that demanded particular decisions as life partners, husbands, and fathers. They acted out of a sense of responsibility bestowed upon them through sperm donation, and for Mathias, choosing to be anonymous was a way of acting on this sense of responsibility. Emil, sperm donor for roughly two years, married, and in his late 30s, with two children, had made a different choice. He had chosen to be nonanonymous for similar reasons as Noah, so that donor-conceived individuals could access information about their biogenetic heritage. But while Noah had primarily considered his obligations toward donor-conceived individuals when making the decision to be nonanonymous, Emil had chosen to be nonanonymous in order to protect his own family from possible outside interference. Thus in Emil’s narrative, nonanonymity provided for the same kind of protection that Mathias sought through anonymity. For Emil, nonanonymity gave him the opportunity to define who was part of his family and who was not. We talked about the difficulty of telling his own children that he was a sperm donor: Well, those are delicate topics and especially at that age, right now they would not be able to understand any of this, I am pretty sure. But once they are old enough to understand, well, whether I am going to tell them will probably also depend on if there is a situation where someone says: you are actually my dad in a physical sense [min fysiske far]. Well, in that situation, my children would deserve to know. On the other hand, I don’t want my children to regard that person as some kind of sister or brother because that is not what they are, at least I think so.
Both Mathias and Emil sought to be responsible. But while Mathias chose anonymity, Emil saw nonanonymity as the only way to live up to his obligations as a father and a donor. For him, being a responsible sperm donor meant that he donated semen nonanonymously, so providing donor-conceived individuals with the chance of retracing their biogenetic connections. In addition, nonanonymity provided him with the opportunity to be a good father, since it was a way of defining who was and who was not part of his family.
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Faced with making sense of connections for which there are no established social scripts, sperm donors choose different pathways to assume the responsibility they saw bestowed upon them, and to honor the social significance of biogenetic connections that are neither just contractual nor kinship relations. Sperm donors have to make sense of connections which do not fit into ready-made kinship categories, and thus engage in practices of relatedness particular to donor-assisted reproduction.
THE PIONEERING WORK OF SPERM DONORS When men who donate semen in Denmark ponder questions of kinship and relatedness, they do so as part of a cultural and organizational context with established modes for how to think about kinship and relatedness. Their narratives rely on how biogenetic connections are understood as part of Danish culture and on how they are understood by Danish sperm banks and Danish legislation. These are not the same. Further, as I have argued, Danish sperm donors employ ways of doing relatedness that go beyond doing kinship. Sperm donors are aware of the social significance of biogenetic connections to donorconceived individuals, despite regulatory and organizational attempts to make sperm donors regard these connections as purely contractual matters. Although Danish sperm donors have difficulties naming connections to donor-conceived individuals, and although they might find it hard to determine which obligations these connections demand, sperm donors nonetheless have a clear sense of responsibility on which they wish to act. For some donors, this means donating semen nonanonymously, so providing donor-conceived individuals with the opportunity to retrace their biogenetic connections. Others take initiatives to contact recipients and donor-offspring, or even seek out ways to donate semen that enable them to determine themselves how engagements with recipients and donor-conceived individuals might look like. However men choose to act on the sense of responsibility, they do so because these connections have significance. This significance partly arises out of the meaning with which biogenetic connections between individuals are imbued in Euro-American societies. But as the narratives presented here illustrate, this significance also arises out of sperm donation’s particularities. Being a sperm donor demands specific obligations as sperm donors, not as fathers, for donor-conceived individuals. What these obligations look like has to be negotiated by each individual donor. Danish sperm donors cannot rely on an established repertoire of practices, legal or familial, as is the case for father-child relations. They share this challenge with recipients of donor semen and donorconceived individuals (Klotz 2014; Nordqvist and Smart 2014). They have to come up with their own ways of acknowledging the social significance of the biogenetic connections established through donor insemination. They walk unexplored territory, not really knowing how to ascribe meaning to connections that defy existing classifications of kinship. Experiencing these insecurities first hand, Danish sperm donors participate in pioneering work of doing relatedness. Legal regulation and sperm bank practices in Denmark disregard their concerns by reducing matters of relatedness to contractual issues. Thus, sperm donors themselves have to confront the horizons of a disordered kinship universe and live the contemporary condition of being related in an era of reproductive technology. Their experiences reflect the potential of reproductive substance (semen, DNA) to act as a technology of social contract, and the potential of reproductive technologies to act as reproductive substance by (re)producing social relations
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(Franklin 2006a, 2006b). Naming connections and determining obligations, sperm donors engage reflectively in an intricate play of connecting and disconnecting the social and the biological. Tinkering with connections to individuals to whom one is genetically connected yet socially disconnected accentuates the ways in which relatedness and kinship are done and forces sperm donors to make active decisions about how to treat these types of connections. Whereas this kind of kinship trouble is often portrayed as negative or a disturbance, I see a space emerging that might open avenues for new types of sociality not grounded in traditional concepts of being related. As the narratives presented here suggest, traditional kinship terms such as father and parent do not capture what sperm donors themselves feel makes connections to donor-conceived individuals meaningful, and although donors might not be able to find adequate vocabulary to name these connections, they live them as socially meaningful connections alongside or complementary to established ways of living kin relatedness. This warrants one important point for anthropological debates: it is only by paying close attention to the particularities of how people do relatedness that scholars will begin to understand the scope of doing relatedness as an ordering mechanism of contemporary sociality. If the question is whether anthropological scholarship can elevate the analysis of kinship above the individual experience of kinship and relatedness in order to understand contemporary kinship trouble, then empirical examples such as this one serve as a reminder that it is exactly the individual experience itself that holds the key to understanding what doing kinship and relatedness is all about. Honoring the social significance of biogenetic connections, men who donate semen in Denmark take on responsibilities as sperm donors. New forms of relatedness are created as part of which scripts for conduct, obligations, and connectedness are written at the same time as they are lived, making sperm donors into pioneers of reproductive donation relatedness.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to the men who were willing to share their stories with me and to the sperm bank staff who allowed me to join their daily work. My former colleagues at the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen helped me to find my own analytical voice—thank you to all of you, but especially to Klaus Høyer. I am also grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this article by Marcia Inhorn, Rene Almeling, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Stine Adrian, Ayo Wahlberg, and Ulrika Dahl. Finally, the input by three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal made all the difference: thank you.
FUNDING Funding for my dissertation research at the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen was provided by the Danish Council for Independent Research as part of the research project “Body and Person: Governing Exchange in 21st Century Biomedicine.”
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