Download Donor conception and (dis)closure in the UK: siblingship, friendship

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
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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
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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
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(‘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
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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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
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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
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(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
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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
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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
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‘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.
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… 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
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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. This paper has benefitted from the clever editorial advice of
Nolwenn Bühler and Anika König, the keen anthropological eye of Tony Simpson,
and the perceptive and incisive comments of three anonymous referees; the
19
flaws that remain are mine.
20
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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