Constructing and enacting kinship in sister-to-sister egg donation families: a multi-family member interview study

Abstract

Although intra-familial egg donation has been practiced for more than 15 years in several countries, little is known about family relationships in this family type. Framed within the new kinship studies, this article focuses on the experiential dimension of kinship in sister-to-sister egg donation families: how is kinship ‘unpacked’ and ‘reconstructed’ in this specific family constellation? Qualitative data analysis of interviews with receiving parents, their donating sisters and the donor children revealed six themes: (1) being connected as an extended family; (2) disambiguating motherhood; (3) giving and receiving as structuring processes; (4) acknowledging and managing the ‘special’ link between donor and child; (5) making sense of the union between father and donor; and (6) kinship constructions being challenged. This study showed the complex and continuous balancing of meanings related to the mother-child dyad, the donor-child dyad and the donor-father dyad. What stood out was the complexity of, on the one hand cherishing the genetic link with the child allowed by the sisters’ egg donation, while, on the other, managing the meanings related to this link, by, for instance, acknowledging, downsizing, symbolising, and differentiating it from the mother-child bond. (A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA).