Book contents
- Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age
- Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Donor-Conceived Families
- Part I ‘DIY’ Donor Linking: Issues and Implications
- Part II Children’s and Adults’ Lived Experiences in Diverse Donor-Linked Families
- Chapter 6 The Importance of Donor Siblings to Teens and Young Adults
- Chapter 7 The Experiences of Donor-Conceived People Making Contact with Same-Donor Offspring through Fiom’s Group Meetings
- Chapter 8 ‘It’s All on Their Terms’
- Chapter 9 On Familial Haunting
- Chapter 10 Assisted Reproduction and Making Kin Connections between Māori and Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand
- Chapter 11 ‘Spunkles’, Donors, and Fathers
- Part III Institutionalised Resistance to Openness
- Index
- References
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
- Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age
- Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Donor-Conceived Families
- Part I ‘DIY’ Donor Linking: Issues and Implications
- Part II Children’s and Adults’ Lived Experiences in Diverse Donor-Linked Families
- Chapter 6 The Importance of Donor Siblings to Teens and Young Adults
- Chapter 7 The Experiences of Donor-Conceived People Making Contact with Same-Donor Offspring through Fiom’s Group Meetings
- Chapter 8 ‘It’s All on Their Terms’
- Chapter 9 On Familial Haunting
- Chapter 10 Assisted Reproduction and Making Kin Connections between Māori and Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand
- Chapter 11 ‘Spunkles’, Donors, and Fathers
- Part III Institutionalised Resistance to Openness
- Index
- References
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
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Donor-Linked Families in the Digital AgeRelatedness and Regulation, pp. 103 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023