This chapter evaluates agreements about parentage, for example, surrogacy agreements, agreements with gamete donors, agreements about the division of embryos, coparenting agreements, and equitable parent doctrines. The text explores the states reluctance to delegate power over this legal status.

Information on genetic relations, gamete donors and donor-related siblings, can now be located within two very different systems: ‘official’ regulatory systems; and emerging digital online systems, including direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), ancestry sites and internet groups. The possibilities of finding genetic relatives through these online systems has risen dramatically in recent years, leading to claims that donor anonymity is dead regardless of which jurisdiction you live in. In this chapter, we explore how online systems have impacted on donor conception. We use UK examples to explore the social-cultural contexts, including the activism of donor-conceived people, which have shaped, and continue to shape, both systems. We consider the ethical, legal and social-emotional challenges for donor-conceived people in these new landscapes, especially in relation to their agency, as these different systems collide and interact, creating new spaces of sociality and challenges to existing power structures.

For many years, donor conception treatment was seen as a “solution” to involuntary childlessness, marked by pregnancy. Through awareness-raising by mental health professionals and especially donor-conceived people themselves, it is now increasingly recognized as the start of a family-building process with an ongoing story that unfolds over the family life-span and beyond. This chapter shows how parents’ abilities to adjust their prior beliefs about the meaning of “family” and “genetic relationships” become critical in the shift from “building a family” to “being a family” and onwards. Moreover, they are not alone anymore: various story-tellers in the new family system, including children, grandparents and others, each have their own unfolding understandings to voice and manage, separately and together. Throughout this creative and challenging process, the donor(s) has a presence, regardless of whether all are aware of their involvement. The complexity of disclosure is considered alongside the need for openness itself to be ongoing and interactive if it is to healthily accommodate shifts in understanding and power balances as children grow. Families do not exist in a vacuum, so wider networks and societal developments can also influence the permeability of their boundaries. Finally, the role of professional and peer support is considered.