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Donor conception and (dis)closure in the UK: siblingship, friendship and kinship Jeanette Edwards University of Manchester [email protected] Draft article for Special Issue of Sociologus: Imaginations and Bodily Substances: Making Kinship in Switzerland and Beyond Editors: Nolwenn Bühler and Anika König ABSTRACT As many aspects of assisted conception become familiar, others emerge not only as unfamiliar, but also unpredicted. This article focuses on a newly emergent kin figure the donor sibling. It suggests that the anthropology of friendship might have as much to tell us about the significance of the donor sibling in Euro-American kinship thinking as the anthropology of kinship. The article locates the donor-sibling in changes in UK legislation and policy that have increasingly promoted more transparency and ‘openness’ in donor conception. donor conception, donor sibling, friendship, kinship, siblingship 1 There has been a steady trend towards more openness and transparency in the field of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the UK. Away from an era when parents were told prosaically to 'go away, enjoy your child and forget the treatment', towards an insistence that children should be informed, at an early age, about the facts of their conception. This trend is exemplified in a 2004 amendment to The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990i that abolished anonymous gamete and embryo donation in the UK and entitled children conceived with donated gametes or embryos after 1 April 2005 to obtain identifying information about their donor when they reached the age of eighteen. Prior to this, donor-conceived adults could obtain non-identifying information about their donor (for example, age, ethnicity and occupation) from a central and compulsory register held, since 1991, by The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA).ii The kind and quality of information collected about donors differed markedly from clinic to clinic, and the HEFA have increasingly sought to improve and extend the biographical information that clinics obtain. Since 2003, its Codes of Practice place an expectation on clinics to provide as much information as possible about donors. The age at which donorconceived people can obtain non-identifying information about their donor was reduced from eighteen to sixteen in 2009. The changes that have occurred in legislation and the establishment, in 1991, of a compulsory register of all births from fertility treatment, including information about gamete donors, means that, at present, the situation in the UK of what donor-conceived people can know about their donor, and when, is uneven and complicated. As noted above, people born after 2005 will have access to the identity of their donor when they reach the age of eighteen and to non-identifying information when they are sixteen; people born after 1991 and before 2005 have access to non-identifying information about their donor but not usually their identity; and those born before 1991 are unable, for the most part, to obtain any details about their donor. This tripartite situation is complicated further by the emergence of voluntary registers. There is the possibility, for example, for those who were anonymous donors prior to 2004 to re-register with the HEFA and indicate that identifying information about them 2 can be released. In other words, they can waive their right to remain anonymous. Thus some donor-conceived people born after 1991 and before 2005 are able to obtain information about the identity of their donor if they seek it - although it is likely (from the few donors who have voluntarily re-registered thus far) that the numbers will remain small. As mentioned earlier, those born before 1991 do not have access to any information about their donors via the HFEA nor, for the most part, from clinics which, even if still operating, were not obliged to store records of donors in an accessible form indefinitely. However, in 2004 a voluntary register, then called DonorLink, was funded by the Department of Health to facilitate contact between donor-conceived adults (conceived prior to 1991) and donors, as well as between ‘half-siblings’.iii Donor Link was replaced by the Donor Conceived Register in 2013 and as of March 2015, 267 people were on the Register: 186 donor-conceived offspring, iv 78 donors, 1 daughter of a donor and 2 siblings of donor-conceived offspring.v This complicated and uneven terrain is made even more bumpy by the parallel possibilities for people seeking fertility services to travel abroad for treatment and consequently to use donated gametes or embryos that may be more, or less, anonymous than in the UK (see for example, Deech 2003; Whittaker and Speier 2010; Inhorn 2011; Pennings and Gurtin 2012),vi or to make informal arrangements to procure semen through personal networks or Internet connection sites.vii It is complicated even further by the burgeoning facilities for donor-conceived people, or their parents, to make their own extraclinical searches, via the Internet, for those who were, at the time, anonymous donors (Freeman et al. 2012). Much of the Internet activity, research and commentary on this latter phenomenon focuses on sperm donation rather than egg or embryo donation, and I will follow that lead and do the same here. However it is worth noting that the search for sperm donors appears to be more common and acute than the search for egg donors. Perhaps this is purely by virtue of numbers; there are, after all, many more sperm donor offspring than egg donor offspring and they are older.viii But I would argue that it is also shaped by the fact that kinship ties, in this kinship logic, are made to the paternal body through genetics (commonly rendered as ‘biological’) and/or through care 3 (‘social’), while motherhood is additionally forged through gestation (also rendered as ‘biological’) (see for example, Edwards 2000; Thompson 2001; Konrad 2005).ix It is in this context of a contested and unbounded, and perhaps unboundable, field that the UK’s Nuffield Council of Bioethics constituted a working party (WP) in 2012 to collate and consider the ethical issues surrounding 'disclosure’ and 'non-disclosure' in donor conception.x It carried out an extensive consultation exercise and published a report in 2013 entitled Donor Conception: ethical aspects of information sharing. In what follows, I use the idioms in which some of the arguments were aired without scare quotes, but note the particular ethos that idioms such as disclosure and non-disclosure reflect and shape. The strong case made to the WP for disclosure pivoted on the 'right' of children to know both the means of their conception and the identity of their donor. And calls were made for the state to step in and compel parents to tell their children that they were donor conceived, or to take the decision away from them: to insist, that is, on an imperative to disclose. This article highlights the limits to state regulation and looks at the increasingly available extra-clinical routes through which people can obtain information that was originally not intended to be available to them. Citizen-run networks, or voluntary registers such as the Donor Conceived Register in the UK, mentioned above, or the Donor Sibling Registry in the United States,xi or less formal and more personal searches on the Internet and through social media, are circumventing clinical, regulatory and administrative bodies. These together with the increasing availability of relatively low-cost genetic tests are giving 'citizens' the unprecedented means of doing their own research. Thus while the paper records for people conceived in the UK prior to 1991 may be inadequate for linking up donors with subsequent offspring, a match can be facilitated with an additional DNA reading. For example, applicants to the Donor Conceived Register are asked to lodge DNA samples which can then be used to confirm links between registrants (who, in this case, may be donors, donor-conceived ‘offspring’ and their ‘half-siblings’).xii It is increasingly possible for individuals to combine online DNA testing with the non-identifying information they have of 4 their donor and the information they can gather through their own searches on the Internet and via social media to identify connections that are not voluntarily or mutually sought.xiii This paper, then, is concerned with what cannot be contained within national legislation and policy: with what spills over and out of attempts at containment. It focuses on a new and emerging kin entity - the donor sibling - and suggests that an anthropology of friendship as much as kinship might help us understand the attraction of this new kin figure. I start by locating the donor sibling in anthropological kinship. In kinship It appears that even with pushes towards more openness and transparency and burgeoning means of identifying donors, the majority of parents in the UK, albeit a small majority, do not reveal the use of donated gametes to their donor-conceived children.xiv Whether or not parents tell or do not tell their children that they were conceived using donated gametes or embryos, and their reasons, is of anthropological interest.xv Marilyn Strathern, writes of how scientific knowledge is embedded in Euro-American kinship thinking and of how it has its own consequences. In certain contexts, it matters and can be used to verify who are and who are not kin. In her words: Knowledge about how persons are related to one another is acquired from, among other things, information about biological processes. With the new technologies have come new techniques of verifiability. Now such knowledge is integral to the recognition of persons as kin, and has its builtin impact on personal identity (Strathern 1999: 65). It is this built-in capacity that is of interest here. How 'facts about birth imply parentage' (Strathern 1999: 68) and how information about the means of one's conception can be constitutive of the self. However, we also know that there is more to Euro-American kinship than this and that it cannot be confined or delimited by the scientific facts about conception or birth. Kinship is also forged over time, with parental influence emerging not only through gestation but also before and after.xvi If the scientific and technological facts of conception do have 5 the potential to displace and demote the kind of kinship that is built over time through care and attention, then it is understandable that a significant number of parents of donor-conceived children are unwilling, reluctant or just not interested in telling their children that donated gametes were used in their conception. For campaigners lobbying for ‘full disclosure’, such reticence denies the rights of donor-conceived children to ‘know’ their origins and for them there is no reason to believe that such knowledge, gained appropriately and at the right time, will compromise the relationship between ‘non-genetic parents’ and their children.xvii At the same time as a majority of UK parents are not revealing the means of conception to their donor-conceived children, there is a counter move towards expanding kin networks by adding new kin figures such as donors and donor siblings. Donor siblings are genetically connected to each other via a donor in common and people are using the Internet, and more specifically ‘people finding sites’, to search for them. An addition to the numerous databases and indexes that allow people to find ancestors, old classmates, love matches and so on, are those which aim to match donors and donor conceived people, as well as the families of each. The Donor Conceived Register in the UK and the Donor Sibling Registry in the US are enabling individuals conceived with gametes from the same donor to locate each other, as well as the children of the donor. These kinds of searches for donor siblings do not require the permission of the clinic nor indeed the donor. In the US, where donor anonymity is preserved and where there is no federal obligation for sperm banks to report the number of donations from any one person, the code on each vial of semen that was used by the sperm bank to anonymise it is now being used to locate other people conceived from the same batch of semen (Hertz and Mattes 2011; Nelson et al. 2013): a move that some commentators describe as an unforeseen and unpredicted twist. It may seem, for some, a bit of a stretch to call persons who have a sperm donor in common, but who are otherwise unrelated and unknown to each other, siblings. However the idiom alerts us to look closer at the social relationship that is being indexed by this term. In a recent and timely collection on the anthropology of sibling relations, we are reminded of how the relationship 6 between siblings is gendered, shaped by birth order and more or less significant in different parts of the world: the collection alerts us to the different ways in which meaningful siblingship is forged, maintained and broken (Alber et al. 2013). Siblings are such, we are told, through shared parentage, shared childhood experiences, or through mutual care and/or exchange, and the intensity and depth of sibling relationships may change through the life course and be marked as much by antipathy and competition as amity (and see also Lambek 2011). While siblings have emerged as central figures in the literature on South Asia and the Middle East, where the bonds between brothers and sisters are considered to be closer and stronger than conjugal relations, they have been noticeably absent from the ethnography of Europe and North America (Alber et al. 2013), where the focus has been more on the centrality of conjugal and parent-child relations. So what are we to make of the emergence of the donor sibling as a new kin figure in what I am referring to as Euro-American kinship (with all the caveats that such an idiom requires)? In the United States the kin term ‘dibling’ has been coined as an affectionate appellation for donor siblings who are understood as half brothers or sisters (and see Edwards 2013). Diblings are a distinct and distinctive category of kin: different not only from step-siblings (who are not, in this kind of kinship thinking, genetically related), but also from conventional half brothers or sisters who are genetically related via one of their parents. Diblings share neither a childhood, nor a household, nor live-in (or hands-on) parents, and they need not know their shared donor but trace their connection through him (Edwards, 2013). Furthermore, ‘donor-conceived families’ who identify with a donor in common are connecting themselves in a wider kinship collectivity that some are referring to as a clan.xviii While such clans appear to constitute themselves predominantly on the Internet, postings also describe, in warm and positive kinship terms, ‘family reunions’ and ‘clan get-togethers’.xix The use of this wellworn, and somewhat discredited concept in anthropology, is significant. In this instance it combines a genealogical connection with a family 'of choice' and, I argue, brings kinship back into the fold of friendship from where it originated (a point to which I return below). 7 Another variation on the theme is the 'batch sibling'. This refers to the siblingship between embryos that have been created at the same time, in the same petri-dish, and with gametes from the same persons. In the language of members of Snowflake, a Californian, Christian and pro-life organisation that matches 'spare embryos' and recipient parents, embryos are put up for ‘adoption’ rather than donated (Blyth et al. 2011; Collard and Kashmeri 2011). Some couples placing embryos created from either their own or donated gametes (or a mixture of the two) express a preference for 'their embryos' not to be dispersed too widely and for them to be placed together with just one other family. Their desire is to keep tabs on the genetically related siblings of their own children. At the same time, however, for other members of Snowflake, the full genetic siblingship between children in placing and adopting families is much less significant than the meta-siblingship they share as sons and daughters of God.xx In the words of Delia, a member of Snowflake: … [embryo adoption] is new and I’ve had a long time to think about this, and a lot of people would say that they are sisters and brothers, and, ok, let me tell you my take on that. When a placing family relinquishes, they are relinquishing parenthood and the child[,] … parenthood is both the responsibilities and the blessings . . . So what they have relinquished as well is sister, brother, aunt, uncle, mother, father. So, just because they share genes [-] you and I share genes (Collard and Kashmeri 2011: 316). For Delia, the genes that two embryos (with the same genetic parents) share become as irrelevant as the genes that unrelated people share when one of them is placed for adoption. In relinquishing the embryo, the parents also relinquish their kinship to the embryo and the tie that might otherwise have made the embryos siblings is broken. On first glance, the search for donor siblings and the use of the language of clanship to describe loose associations between nuclear families connected by a male genitor seems to support two central and commonly expressed ideas; the first, that Euro-American kinship is the cultural construction of natural facts and those natural facts form a biological substratum from which culture is 8 elaborated; the second, that the biological substratum of kinship is increasingly rendered as genetic. The first is the foil that anthropologists have been accused of using to reveal the alterity of other kinship systems across the world which do not privilege biology in the same way (Schneider 1984) and the second is recognisable from the important work of many social scientists who have tracked the privileging and increasing dominance of genetic explanation for all kinds of social phenomena (see for example, Lippman 1991, 1992; Finkler 2000; Schramm et al. 2012). I want to take up the first in this article and, regarding the second, point only to an extensive literature that questions the idea that genetics has become a dominant way of explaining social phenomena: literature, that is, that is critical of the geneticisation of social life thesis (see for example, Hedgecoe 1998; Edwards 2006; Hedgecoe 2006; Edwards and Salazar 2009; Egorova 2009; Wade et al. 2014). Marshall Sahlins, in his recent treatise on 'What kinship is ... and is not' (2013), argues strongly for kinship as culture, all culture, and nothing but culture. He draws on numerous ethnographic examples from across the world to make his point and his argument rests on various assumptions about the nature of Euro-American kinship. It is only Euro-Americans he suggests that 'understand themselves to be constructed upon - or in fundamental ways, against - some biological-corporeal substratum' (Sahlins 2013: 77). He draws eloquently and evocatively on a number of ethnographic examples, especially from Papua New Guinea to make his point. I borrow three of them here to make a different point. The Ku Wara people of PNG know that siblings are related as much through the food they share - food, that is, from the same ancestral lands - as through the parents they share (Merlan and Rumsey 1991). For them the generative substance of kapong is transmitted from the land in sweet potatoes and pork as well as in father's semen and mother's milk and not only grows persons but connects them to each other. The ethnographers make their point by contrasting Ku Waru and Western kinship ideologies: in the West, they argue, 'real' siblingship ‘is determined entirely by prenatal influences: by the fact that the corporeal existence of each sibling began with an event of conception at 9 which genetic substance was contributed by the same two individuals' (Merlan and Rumsey 1991, cited in Sahlins 2013: 67). The point they underline is that for Ku Waru, amongst others, there are no differences between pre and post-natal influences and both make people what they are. There is a co-substantiality between Ku Waru siblings not only 'because they took their pre-natal kopong from the same parents, but equally importantly, because they suckled from the same breast, eat produce from the same gardens, and otherwise share food together. Thus siblingship is not just a matter of immutable pedigree, but something which requires work to sustain and develop' (1991: 43). Similarly, for To Pamona people, parentage is 'rooted in nurturance and shared consumption rather than narrowly defined biological filiation ... To Pamona parents and children see the recognition of parentage as emergent through time and effort' (Schrauwers 1999: 311, cited in Sahlins 2013: 3). Again the West, and its presumed fixation with narrowly defined biological filiation, acts as the foil which reveals the special characteristics of, in this case, To Pamona kinship. All well and good, but the foil requires us to ignore the complexity and diversity of kinships that fall under the rubric of the West. It also belies the active and intentional forging of kinship through care, attention and nurture which are not only, nor always, built upon biological filiation. We could extend the model of Western kinship provided by these ethnographers of PNG to donor siblings and agree that their relatedness has been determined at the moment of conception. But we can only do this if we accept that Western kinship is genetic and purely genetic. This might explain the efforts that some people are making to trace their donor siblings - to seek out, acknowledge and forge that relationship - but it diminishes and impoverishes their efforts. The search for donor siblings by donor-conceived people is geared towards igniting a spark that would otherwise lay dormant, inactive and nonsociable. It does not necessarily compromise nor displace the fact that their parents are those who fed and fashioned them. Sandra Bamford, also writing from PNG, shows how gestation is at the heart of siblingship amongst Kamea people. Persons born of the same womb are considered to be of one blood (jinya avaka) regardless of who the father is 10 (Bamford 2007).xxi This is not about filiation nor about a 'blood' relationship between parents and their children - it is exclusively about having come from the same woman’s womb (Bamford 2007: 61). Thinking of surrogacy, many people with whom I have spoken about ARTs in the north of England are emphatic that there would not only be a 'blood' relationship between the gestating mother and foetus, but also that children born from the same womb would be related, whether genetically related to the gestating mother or not (Edwards 2000). The point to make is that the assumption that 'Western' kinship is based on narrowly defined biological connection is not born out ethnographically and that when anthropologists refer to it they often do so as a foil to illuminate the 'otherness' and complexity of the other and in so doing run the danger of screening out the complexity of the familiar. We do not know whether all donor siblings will pursue their siblingship over time and whether the same efforts put into finding the donor sibling will be put into maintaining the relationship between them. In some cases, and without face-to-face responsibilities of mutual care, it is likely that the relationship will become too tenuous to stand the test of time. In others, the 'spark of recognition' or the way in which one 'clicks' with some family members and not others will presage an enduring tie. The level and tenacity of connectedness between donor siblings are ethnographic questions, not ones that we can assume we know the answer to because we believe that Euro-American kinship is built on a 'biological-corporeal substratum'. In friendship Tabitha Freeman and colleagues at the Centre for Family Research in Cambridge interviewed parents of donor-conceived children. They write: Parents [of donor-conceived persons] commonly framed the relationships between members of donor sibling families in terms of ‘family’ and ‘friendship’: for example, by using phrases such as ‘extended family’, ‘we are all now one big family’, ‘a family of close friends’ and ‘our small nuclear family is connected to a larger community’. Such references served to 11 emphasize the intensity and endurance of these bonds (Freeman et al. 2009: 512; cited in Edwards 2013). It is the interweaving of family and friendship that is of interest here. Saajk van der Geest draws our attention to the distinction often presumed between siblingship and friendship. He writes that '[f]riendship seems voluntary and kinship ascribed' and comparatively 'friendship appears to us as a relatively free attachment, which is admired and cherished universally because of its disinterested and untainted character' (Geest 2013: 51): not too different, I would argue, from the way in which the 'perfect' sibling, untainted by the strictures and duties of filiation, is described in the case of donor siblings. Listen to sociologists Margaret Nelson and Rosanna Hertz and the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry, Wendy Kramer: ... unlike sisters and brothers who grow up together, these siblings are “perfect” – related just to them (and not to their parents) and no immediate threat to parental love, resources, or time. Therefore, they are imagined – or already known – as being “cool”, “fun” and “neat”; they are people who “understand them” (Nelson et al. 2013). Imagined I would argue as friends often are - as the same generation, with overlapping interests and free of obligation and duty. We should keep in mind that only some donor siblings choose to find each other, make contact and forge, in some cases, amicable and mutually enjoyable relationships, and many do not. This is a kinship link that is both involuntary (given through the circumstances of one's conception) and entirely voluntary and which may or may not stand the test of time. Nelson and colleagues draw some intriguing conclusions from their comparison of lesbian-parent and heterosexual-parent families in the United States in terms of parental interest in identifying donors and donor siblings. Donor-conceived children and adults of both lesbian and heterosexual parents are, they argue, generally more enthusiastic about meeting donor siblings than they are about meeting donors (a point made also by Freeman et al. 2009). There 12 are significant differences, however, between lesbian and heterosexual parents in what they perceive to be the optimum place of donors in the lives of their families. While the survey material available to the researchers is limited, they nevertheless conclude that lesbian parents are more likely to ignore or play down the role of the donor than heterosexual parents. According to Nelson et al. this is because lesbian parents need to shore up elements of a relatively conservative model of the 'nuclear family' because of what is at stake for them in terms of legitimacy and recognition within a wider heteronormative society (and see Nordqvist 2012). For these researchers, keeping the donor at bay acts to 'normalise' the parental roles of both parents. Lesbian couples might well have good “political” reasons for wanting to appear more like the heterosexual family of old ... By being like “everybody else” they may garner greater sympathy for the causes of same-sex marriage and second parent adoption. And by being like “everybody else” a second parent who has not been able to adopt her child can more easily fly under the radar of threatened loss (Nelson et al. 2013: 30). Broadly speaking, then, in this account, heterosexual parents appear to be more interested than lesbian parents in identifying donors and including them and any donor siblings within their kin networks. For Nelson and colleagues this is merely an extension of the changes that have already happened to the traditional, mid-20th century nuclear family. For them, the boundaries of the heterosexual-two-parent family have already been breached and extended through adoption, divorce and remarriage and such families already include adoptive, step and 'half' family figures: donors and donor siblings constitute just another kinsperson by choice. Other research, however, shows that lone parents and lesbian mothers are more likely than two and heterosexual parents to make contact with donor siblings and their families. Furthermore, parents of a single child growing up without siblings are more likely than parents of more than one child to seek out donor siblings (Freeman et al. 2009). The divergent findings from the empirical studies thus far warn us of the danger of homogenising the experiences of 13 ‘donor-conceived families’ according to broad stroke categories of, in this case, sexuality. With ethnography, the terrain appears less uniform. Anne Cadoret, for example, provides evocative and detailed ethnographic examples from France which show the complex choreography deployed by specific homoparental families (her term) in the making, categorising and naming of their significant kin, which may or may not include their donors (Cadoret 2009). Choice, of course, is what was supposed to have marked off friends from kin: with friendship defined by voluntarism, egalitarianism, choice and the ability to end it if need be, and with kinship ascribed, dominated by obligation, involuntary and 'for life'. xxii The ethnographic record, however, belies such a simple contrast and 'the distinction between "voluntary" versus "ascribed" is too schematic' to be taken at face value (Geest 2013: 67). Questioning the common separation between kinship as ascribed and friendship as voluntary, the authors in Amit Desai and Evan Killick’s (2010) timely collection on the anthropology of friendship present examples of where kinship and friendship are mutually exclusive domains, as well as where they are interwoven and, at times, inseparable. There are also examples of where friendship is marked by hierarchy and inequality (Killick 2010); and where it is dominated by obligation and duty (Obeid 2010). Desai and Killick argue that if friendship is not prematurely defined, but rather left open to embrace what is ethnographically salient, then a much more varied picture presents itself, not only of what constitutes friendship, but also of how it contrasts, or not, with kinship. This allows them to include under friendship ‘relationships that might be considered as kinship’ and to emphasise also that ‘relationships of friendship do not necessarily map neatly onto local conceptions of kin and non-kin’ (Desai and Killick 2010: 1). Despite the interplay between kinship and friendship that is at the core of their book, Desai and Killick reject the concept of ‘relatedness’ as analytically useful. They argue that it runs the danger of screening out or obscuring the distinctions between different kinds of social relationships that people themselves think significant. Nor, they argue, is it powerful enough to explain the ways in which friendship is constituted in different places. 14 … by subsuming friendship under a general category of relatedness, we miss what friendship does differently to kinship for the people who practice it, and the different ways in which the two general forms of relationship might be constituted in a particular society (Desai and Killick 2010: 5). I share their concern about how far ‘relatedness’ might cover over the cracks between friendship and kinship that are significant to our informants, and about whether replacing one overarching concept - ‘kinship’ - with another ‘relatedness’ - will get us out of some of our more entrenched theoretical impasses. But I return to the point below that it may, nevertheless, have some purchase in explaining certain resonances between kinship and friendship: resonances that I see, for example, in the successful search for the donor sibling. For many scholars of kinship, kinship relations involve degrees of amity (for which read friendship) and within kinship, personal preferences and affinities play a role in the bonds that come to matter. Bettina Beer and Don Gardner, in a wonderfully comprehensive review of the anthropology of friendship (starting with Aristotle), carefully tease out the tensions resulting from Meyer Fortes’ choice of ‘amity’ (Fortes 1969) as central to kinship (Beer and Gardner 2015).xxiii They show how his student, Julian Pitt-Rivers, remained equivocal: on the one hand, assimilating friendship to ‘primordial/familial’ kinship (arguing that both belonged to the domain of sentiment and that both were ruled by ‘the heart’), and on the other, stressing how friendship, based on ‘personal, moral feelings’, was unsullied by the politico-jural demands of kinship (Pitt-Rivers 1968, 1973). Pitt-Rivers also eloquently identified a particular kind of social relationship that had the properties of both kinship and friendship: a ‘non-kin amity’ that ‘masquerade[s] as kinship’ (Pitt -Rivers 1973: 90, cited in Bell and Coleman 1999: 7). Could it be that Pitt-Rivers, rather than equivocating, was pointing to the common ground of both friendship and kinship? We know that friendship is often couched in kinship terms which convey its enduring and affective qualities. Michelle Obeid, writing of the town of Arsal on the Lebanese side of the border with Syria, remarks that while 'Arsalis idolize 15 friendship as a relationship that is ‘free’ of the oppressive obligations dictated by kinship', that is, as an autonomous social realm, it is nevertheless 'modelled on the same rules of reciprocity and exchange, sentiment and permanence that govern kinship relations' (Obeid 2010: 94-95). She argues that rather than seeing friendship as masquerading as kinship, we see both as contained within an overarching 'ideology of sociality' with each subject to the same local rules and ethics of proper and appropriate social relations. Similarly, I would argue, ideology aside, that both the friendship and the kinship with which this paper has been concerned, draw on an overarching cultural logic of how significant and intimate social relations are made and broken. Both can be ascribed (fixed and undeniable), or nurtured (developed through care and attention). One mother of a donor-conceived child imagines that donor siblings will inevitably see their relationship as 'more of a choice than a requirement'. In her words: Family can be defined in many ways: relationships are the most important. Sometimes families click, other times they don't. As the saying goes, “you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives,” so I think they [donor siblings] would all feel more like the relationship was more of a choice than a requirement (Freeman et al. 2014: 291). In the Southern Chinese province of Guangdong same-year siblingship is celebrated. It is thought that those of the same sex and born in the same year have a special bond and this is explained as a 'mutual compatability' (Santos 2010). Same-year siblings are not the same as the better known institution of 'sworn siblinghood' which does not have the same age restriction and is often the basis for larger corporate or political groupings in China, although both entail noisy, costly and public celebrations with 'blood oaths' and feasting. Same-year siblingship tends to be dyadic and is created between people of the same sex (albeit more brothers than sisters) and same age. Villagers themselves distinguish between sworn and same-year siblingship. The friendship celebrated in the idiom of same-year siblingship is important and ubiquitous. Santos writes of how in Brightpath, a region of Northern Guangdong, it can be instituted before marriage between age mates who are already 'good friends' and it will ensure that their friendship is reinforced and protected as they move into the next stage 16 of life with different and additional responsibilities. It can also be self- or familyinitiated between would-be siblings who have not yet met. Here the hope is that instituting the relationship will lead to a strong and 'good' friendship and attendant mutual support (Santos 2010: 33). For Santos the co-existence of these two forms of same-year siblingship, which he calls restricted and extended, demonstrates the high social value placed on ‘good friendships’ which in turn explains, both instrumentally and affectively, why the institution of ‘same-year siblingship’ exists in the first place. This leads him to conclude that ‘friendship constitutes a major form of individual and/or collective alliance which is marked by frequent, voluntary displays of mutual generosity and trust that can be more or less instrumental but that are always based on both affective and practical reasons’ (Santos 2010: 22). Such ethnographic examples of what appear, at first glance, to be conversions of friendship into a kinship idiom, but which have at their core the social value of intimate and 'good' friendship, appear far removed from the donor siblingship mediated in the West by biomedical and information technologies. But through them we can discern similar practical and affective ties, albeit forged in very different ways. It is not incidental that people brought up by single parents in households without siblings are well represented in the search for donor siblings, and nor is it accidental that young and technologically savvy adults pursue the intimacy of friendship in the medium of the Internet. Simon Coleman notes appreciatively that the ethnographic examples of friendship in the collection edited by Desai and Killick (2010) give a strong sense of friendship that is ‘acted out or located in the public realm, and not merely an occasion for the private or secret’ (Coleman 2010: 204). I would argue that there is also a strong celebratory and public aspect to the successful search for donor siblings, which is also acted out in the public realm: both the encounter and the kinship celebrate what could have been a secret. Carving kinship out of friendship In a current project to excavate the changing connotations of the concept of the relation in Western thought, Strathern remarks on a migration of meaning 17 from the relation as an object of knowledge to the relation as a kinsperson: from causal and logical links to kin folk.xxiv Some time during the 17th century, she writes, kin were hived off from the generic category of friend (Strathern n.d.). Prior to this, the old English term 'freond' was used for both kin and non-kin and specifically for those relationships that made a difference - for people who could be relied upon: those who we might now call 'close'.xxv This chimes with recent and compelling historical research that has been tracking shifts in European kinship from the Middle Ages to the present (Sabean et al. 2007; Christopher and Sabean 2011; Johnson et al. 2013). Simon Teuscher and colleagues note that up to the late Middle Ages, kinship included a broad constituency, in their idiom ‘an extended network’, of living people connected by both marriage and descent. Such networks had little generational depth and their definition was not particularly concerned with keeping agnates and cognates or consanguines and affines apart; in the vernaculars these were often all indistinctively referred to as amis or fründe (Teuscher 2013: 100). Strathern argues that when 'the relative' emerged as a distinctive category of person, friends lost their corporeal connotations: no longer perceived as giving their bodies to each other or, as sworn friends, laid to rest side by side. Conceptualising kin as relatives (close or distant) lent them a generic quality: providing a generalised and unspecified category from which the specific could be carved out when relevant. The donor siblings we know about describe a relationship that does not require proximity. Like friends who are forged in the social medium of Facebook, for example, shared interests, 'likes' and capacities are made explicit. Donor siblings look for family and corporeal resemblances and emphasise the likemindedness and shared interests they find in their donor siblings. These are interpersonal relationships enacted at a distance but with a shared corporeality. Donor conceived people and/or their parents are looking for and finding genetic half-siblings: siblingship, in this formulation, requires no face to face contact, nor shared parenting, nor even knowing the identity of the donor through whom you trace your connection. From the limited evidence available, donor conceived 18 people and their parents appear, generally speaking, to be more interested in the identity of donor siblings than donors: more interested, that is, in a relationship that evokes equality and voluntarism. It also seems that where a large number of donor siblings are found, donor-conceived people and their parents, as well as donors, are selective and exercise choice or personal preference in deciding with whom they maintain contact. The language of affinity and affection, and the ephemeral quality of what it means to 'click' with some people (relatives or friends), and not others, are significant elements in the kinship repertoire not only of donor siblings, but also of Euro-American kinsfolk more broadly. We could argue that these siblings exist anyway - whether they are found or not: that they are there and waiting to be discovered. The discovery of genetic relatedness has, as we have already noted, consequences: it cannot be undone. But the point to make is that it need not be activated, and it can also drop out of significance. The interpersonal relationship between donor siblings is forged both in the imagination and in the practices of excavating the relationship. In the search and finding of the donor sibling, flesh is layered onto a genetic connection. I have sought to show how the relationships of both kinship and friendship are fleshed out and how the anthropology of friendship, as much as that of kinship, might help us understand this newly emergent kin figure. Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to Wilimijn de Jong for her invitation to the workshop ‘Contesting Fertilities, Families and Sexualities’ in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich, where an earlier version of this paper was presented, and to the organisers and participants of that workshop for especially stimulating conversations. I would also like to thank Shirin Garmoudi and Enric Porqueres for their friendship and encouragement. 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Speier. 2010. “Cycling Overseas”: Care, Commodification, and Stratification in Cross-Border Reproductive Travel. Medical Anthropology 29 (4):363-383. i The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Disclosure of Donor Information) Regulations 2004. ii The HEFA is the statutory body which has responsibility for implementing the Act including the licensing of fertility clinics and overseeing their conduct. iii See http://www.hfea.gov.uk/5524.html (last accessed 29/03/2015). http://www.donorconceivedregister.org.uk/ (last accessed 29/03/2015). The ‘half-siblings’ of the donor conceived-person include both other people conceived using gametes from the same donor, and the donor’s own children. iv In the language of the Register, and of the National Gamete Trust. 26 v By the end of June 2012, six links between donors and donor-conceived adults had been made, with 35 'probable sibling links' (Nuffield Council 2013: 25; more recent data is unavailable). vi There are a wide range of approaches to donor conception and anonymity across the world. The USA and Canada allow for both anonymous and identity release donation, while New Zealand, a number of Australian States and seven European countries have formally prohibited anonymous donation (Blyth and Frith 2009). Currently Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain legally protect donor anonymity (Nuffield Council 2013: 32). Pertinent here are also the countries that at present encourage ‘fertility tourism’ and which may not have relevant legislation but allow for donor anonymity, for example, Lebanon, Indonesia, India and Russia (Inhorn et al. 2011; Sven Bergmann 2011). vii See, for example, Pride Angel: http://www.prideangel.com/ viii The procedures of egg donation are much newer than sperm donation (the first child was conceived using donated eggs in 1984). Furthermore, one sperm donor also has the potential of contributing to many more conceptions than one egg donor. My interest here, however, is less on sheer numbers and more on how the cultural definitions of motherhood and fatherhood impact on the relevance of donation for both donors and donor-conceived persons and their families. Almeling (2014), for example, shows that in the US egg donors rarely consider themselves to be the mother of the ensuing child, whereas sperm donors generally have a more ‘straightforward view of themselves as fathers’ (Almeling 2014: 148). ix I am interested here in the cultural logic; in practice, these categories of connection are not usually discrete but rather overlap and bleed into one another. But the point is that they can be, and are, pulled apart and differentiated for different purposes. In the UK, the legal mother is the woman who gives birth to the child (see McCandless and Sheldon 2014 for a concise discussion of legal definitions of motherhood and fatherhood in the context of ART). 27 x I was a member of the Nuffield Council Working Party (WP) and this paper is partly a reflection on that experience and on the evidence presented to the WP. I do not write here, however, as a member of the WP, and this paper does not represent the views of the WP. I am very grateful, however, to the other members of the WP, the Nuffield Council, and respondents to the various calls for evidence, for teaching me a great deal. I draw here on publicly available material, and the analysis and its flaws are my own. xi Initiated by Wendy Kramer and her donor-conceived son in 2000. xii See http://www.donorconceivedregister.org.uk/. xiii There was a widely reported case in 2005 of a teenager tracing his anonymous sperm donor by lodging a DNA sample on an online genealogical site and then doing further research on the family name that emerged as a match from the DNA database, together with what he already knew about the age and place of birth of the donor. This example, amongst others, points to the links between the tracing of donors and donor siblings and current practices of tracing ancestors and tracking genealogies. Both are taking place in a fecund cultural milieu which combines DNA testing, social media and people searching sites. xiv While this appears to be gradually changing (Golombok et al. 2011), the WP heard concerns and frustration, in its fact-finding sessions, about the slow rate of change (see, for example, the response from the Project Group on Assisted Reproduction (PROGAR), British Association of Social Workers http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/PROGAR.pdf). xv I am grateful to the reminder from one anonymous reviewer of this article of the continuities with pre-ART concerns. What used to be, for example, the stigma attached to illegitimacy and the concern of parents to keep from their children the means of their conception when it involved adulterous or incestuous relationships. ‘Family secrets’ are clearly not a new phenomenon, and studies of the precise continuities and discontinuities between pre and post-ART concerns are overdue. 28 Recent anthropological studies of adoption in Europe are significant here (see xvi for example, Carsten 2004; Howell 2006; Marre and Bestard 2009). See for example the aims of the Donor Conception Network succinctly xvii articulated in their mission statement at http://www.dcnetwork.org/dcnmission-statement. Also see Maren Klotz for a rich account of their role in advocating and supporting parental disclosure of donor conception (Klotz 2014). xviii Similarly, the donor siblings interviewed by Eric Blyth also identified themselves as a clan: in this case as clan X, with X being the name of the sperm donor they had in common (Blyth 2012). Hertz and Mattes describe these as 'donor sib clans' and as 'large groups xix composed of several smaller families' that offer 'socioemotional ties' and support (Hertz and Mattes 2011: 1130). xx Aubrey, a mother of two boys, decided to relinquish all of her own 19 embryos to just one couple. Only one child was conceived from the donated embryos and it turned out, much to the distress of Aubrey, that after the birth of their son, the adoptive parents were not interested in keeping a relationship alive between their son and his batch sibling (Collard and Kashmeri 2011). xxi And as one anonymous reviewer of this article emphasised: ‘Just as Kamea fathered by the same man (regardless of who the mother is) are “one bone”’. xxii Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman, in their influential (dare I say seminal) edited collection on the anthropology of friendship, nuance this distinction by locating it within a ‘powerful, Western (and in particular a middle-class) ideology’ (Bell and Coleman 1999: 14) but not limiting nor confining it to the West. xxiii I am very grateful to the authors for allowing me to read an early and pre- published draft of their article (a shorter version of which is due to appear in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Science). xxiv Strathern is interested in 'interpersonal relations' that are 'simultaneously suggestive of bodily presence and enactable at a distance' (Strathern n.d.). 29 xxv Perhaps more to the point the origins of ‘friend’ are to be found in the old Germanic verb ‘to love’ and ‘its cognates in other northern European languages continue to designate kin rather than friends’ (Beer and Gardner n.d.). 30