Strategies to Personalize and to Depersonalize Donors in Parental Narratives of Children’s Genetic / Gestational Origins (Spain)

Abstract

What strategies do parents who resort to ‘third-party’ reproduction use to deal with donors in the conversations they have with their children on the topic? Few studies deal with the images and representations that families build of donors and transmit to their children through stories about their origins, strategies that vary according to the family model and the type of donation. A qualitative investigation was carried out in Spain between 2013 and 2015 on the dissemination of their genetic or gestational origins to children conceived through assisted reproduction with donors. This article studies families in favor of disclosure who were contacted through associations, blogs, online forums, and the snowball method. The analysis has revealed strategies of depersonalization (concealing one of the donors, treating the donor as an object, pluralization, transformation into a magical and evanescent character, individualization) and personalization (the personalized construction, naming the donor and visualizing him or her, pluriparentality) that have the effect (and purpose) of de-kinning the children from the donors while kinning them with the social parents and their extended families. Thus, the strategies of de-kinning that we find in the stories about origins are the necessary preparatory step to kin the child to the non-genetic parent and to manage intervention by third parties in the production of children that challenges the exclusivity of the motherhood / paternity characteristic of our cultural kinship system. The dissociation between biogenetic, social and legal links as a result of the intervention of third parties opens the possibility of generating new parental connections that exceed the hegemonic model of biparentality.