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Chapter 6 - The Importance of Donor Siblings to Teens and Young Adults

Who Are We to One Another?

from Part II - Children’s and Adults’ Lived Experiences in Diverse Donor-Linked Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

By
Rosanna Hertz
Edited by
Fiona Kelly ,
Deborah Dempsey  and
Adrienne Byrt
Fiona Kelly
Affiliation:
La Trobe University, Victoria
Deborah Dempsey
Affiliation:
Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria
Adrienne Byrt
Affiliation:
Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria
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Summary

Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the Internet, can now locate each other and have contact. This chapter explores the new forms of relatedness that have emerged with the growing availability and use of donor gametes. Specifically, I ask: how do donor-conceived youth situate their donor siblings in relation to other important relationships in their lives, such as friends and siblings who also live in their nuclear families? How do they actively construct these new relationships with newfound donor siblings and where do they fit within their families? Based upon in-depth interviews with teens and young adults who live in the United States, the varied understanding of these relationships is explored, including filling voids around identity, resemblances and the wish for “siblings”, the difficulties of forming new relationships and how heteronormative understandings of the bounded-nuclear family have sometimes become more fluid.

Keywords

new kinshipdonor-linked familiesdonor-siblingssiblingsidentity-formationgenetic tiesintimates
Type
Chapter
Information
Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age
Relatedness and Regulation
 , pp. 103 - 119
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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