ANONYMOUS SEMEN DONATION, GENETICS AND MEANINGS OF KINSHIP Jennifer M. Speirs ...

258 Pages·2009·1.3 MB·English

SECRETLY CONNECTED? ANONYMOUS SEMEN DONATION,
GENETICS AND MEANINGS OF KINSHIP

Jennifer M. Speirs

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Edinburgh

2007
Dedicated to the memory of
Izzy Speirs

a beloved wife, mother and sister,
a much loved and respected friend, kinswoman and
colleague,
and a stotter of a sister-in-law.

Stotter, stoater: excellent, admirable, exactly what is required (Scots, esp. Glasgow).
Acknowledgments

I am overawed by the number of people who have supported, exhorted, pushed,
pulled and accompanied me on the journey of producing this thesis. Many of them
will never have the occasion to read it, such as library staff across the length and
breadth of the UK who facilitated internet access whilst I was doing fieldwork, the
staff in the ticket centre of Edinburgh’s Waverley station who helped to plan my
travel, and the staff in the David Hume Tower Senses Cafe, particularly Joan who
made it her job to ensure that students eat cheaply but well.
For perseverance and (almost) unremitting cheerfulness the reward goes to
my principal supervisor Professor Janet Carsten and second supervisor Professor
Lynn Jamieson. Their encouragement to believe that I could write a PhD thesis, their
attention to detail, their kind but astute and prompt feedback, and their sharing of
practice wisdom and intellectual knowledge, were crucial to the achievement of the
project. I take this opportunity to thank also my thesis examiners, Professor Anthony
Good (Edinburgh) and Dr Bob Simpson (Durham) for their careful analysis of my
thesis and their interesting and thought-provoking comments and questions during
my viva. Over the years I have benefited from help and encouragement from many
other social anthropologists and I thank Soraya Tremayne (Oxford) and Monica
Konrad (Cambridge) for their invitations to present my work in progress, and
Jeanette Edwards who gifted me a copy of ‘Born and Bred’. Conversations with the
late Dr Jonathan Telfer in Adelaide about social anthropology, social work, Janet
Carsten’s research, and adoption, are a very precious memory.
It has been a privilege to be encouraged by members of the Department of
Social Anthropology in Edinburgh, and particularly by the late Dr Charles Jedrej, by
Professor Jonathan Spencer, course co-ordinator of the Scottish Training in
Anthropological Research (STAR) Advanced (post fieldwork) Course in 2007 and, I
suspect, of much else besides which was to my benefit, and by Dr Iris Jean-Klein
whose observation that Winnie the Pooh was not stupid, he just had a differently
constituted knowledge, has been a constant source of reassurance. I thank also the
patient university library staff and the admirable administrative staff of the Graduate
School office, especially Sue Grant, who all dealt with problems and queries with a
cheerful efficiency, and Ian McNeil, School Computing Officer, for whom no query
from me about computer problems was ever too stupid.
Funding for most of my fieldwork and writing-up costs came from an
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship tenable at the ESRC
Innogen Centre, for which I am most grateful. Members of Innogen’s academic and
administrative staff were all unfailingly encouraging about my research and my small
contribution to the programme of the centre. The ESRC funds the Post Graduate
Forum on Genetics and Society (PFGS), a multidisciplinary network of new
researchers working in and around areas of genetics and society, and my
participation in several PFGS workshops and conferences in the UK provided ideal
opportunities for presentation of work in progress. I heartily thank my fellow PFGS
students for their interest, conviviality, and robust discussions on these occasions.
Postgraduate students at Edinburgh University who also had study space in the
inspirational 18th century flats at 10 and 12 Buccleuch Place were a constant source
of intellectual and emotional support, especially Weining Cheng and Kelly Davis
(Social Anthropology), Ruth Lewis (CRFR), and additionally for I.T. lessons and
chocolate exchange, Lucia (“Comrade”) Siu (Sociology) and Michael (“Mr”) Ofori-
Mensah (African Studies).
Support from family and many friends both near and far were crucial by way
of providing hospitality during my fieldwork, and by showing that life continued
outside of my PhD project. In particular I thank my cousins Alison, Hilary,
Rosemary and Angus and their families, friends Arthur, Libby (and Marouf),
Elizabeth S, Elizabeth W, Lorna, Barry, Frances, Linn and family, Ruth and John,
Ann and Donald and also Dave and Brenda in Siabost bho Dheas, and ‘the ladies
who breakfast’ after the 9 a.m. service at St Andrews and St Georges Church. For
practical kinship, memorable food and wine, love, laughter and companionship in
sorrow, I thank my dear brothers John and Alasdair, my savvy sister-in-law Susan,
and my admirable nephews and nieces-in-law Andrew and Rachel, David and
Catherine, Sandy and Julie, and Tom and Kirsten. To the elders of the youngest
generation, Tasha and Magnus, thank you for making me feel special.
Many people working in the field of infertility, and many others keeping an
eye on what they are doing, were generous with the attention which they gave to my
research questions, and with advice, ideas, sharing of memories and access to
documents. I thank members of the British Fertility Society (BFS) and especially
members of its Executive Committee, other members of the medical, scientific and
nursing professions in the UK and Scandinavia, Gwen Skinner at the Department of
Health in London, and Peter Mills at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority. BFS conferences were sponsored and supported by pharmaceutical and
other commercial businesses whose representatives were always happy to discuss my
project and to keep me supplied with free ball point pens. Many thanks also to the
National Gamete Donation Trust Advisory Council, to colleagues in post-adoption
agencies, the British Infertility Counselling Association and the Scottish Infertility
Counselling Group, and to staff of Doctors.net.uk. For engaging discussions on
professional, personal, ethical and political aspects of donor-assisted conception I am
grateful to current and recent members of the British Association of Social Workers’
Project Group on Assisted Reproduction: Amanda, Ann, David, Elizabeth, Jennie,
Julia, Marilyn, Olivia, and especially Eric Blyth who demonstrated his faith in me by
providing a reference for my PhD application.
I am profoundly grateful for the information, personal stories, comments and
exasperations shared by people with a personal involvement in donor-assisted
conception as donors, donor-conceived individuals, family members of donors,
parents of donor-conceived children and young people, members of DC Network,
UK Donorlink and the Donor Conception Support Group of Australia. Finally I
acknowledge my great indebtedness to the semen donors who agreed to be
interviewed by me and to share their views, feelings, and memories, especially
because, having been socially obliterated, they were not supposed to exist as persons
at all. I hope that they will feel that their trust in me was worth their while.

University of Edinburgh
Scotland
December 2007
ABSTRACT

The use of donated human semen in the UK was developed by medical practitioners
as a means of circumventing male infertility and helping childless women to achieve a
pregnancy. Uncertainty about the legal status of donor-conceived children and moral
concerns about the possible effects on the marital relationship of the recipients worked to
maintain donor insemination (DI) as a largely hidden practice in which the donors remained
anonymous to the recipients and unrevealed to any resulting donor offspring. Donors were
not expected or encouraged to take any interest in what became of their donations even after
the practice became subject to regulation by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act
1990.
This thesis is based on a set of unstructured interviews with medical practitioners
and other health professionals currently or formerly working in clinics providing DI services
in the UK, and with men who donated semen between the 1960s and early 1980s mostly
when they were medical students. Participant observation was carried out at conferences and
other meetings of organisations and individuals with professional or personal involvement in
donor-assisted conception, and a survey was made of infertility clinics’ policies concerning
the use of semen from donors known personally to recipients.
Discussions with donors revealed ambivalent and mixed feelings about their
involvement in providing semen, often for payment, and about their lack of information
regarding the outcome of their donations. The idea of possible contact with donor offspring
is influenced for these semen donors by their perceptions and experiences of what it means
to be a parent and by the significance attributed to physical resemblances between
genetically related people. In this situation of ambiguity and uncertain obligation, there is no
existing script for managing possible new kinds of kinship relation.
The historical tension in DI services between opportunity and risk because of
possible defects or disease in donated semen is now echoed in professional uncertainties
about whether to allow semen donation where the donor and recipient are known personally
to each other. I show that for some people, including donors, this brings the practice into a
kinship frame, whilst for others it confuses family boundaries because of the possible
fantasies between donor and recipient, and the involvement of the genetic father with the
donor-conceived child’s upbringing. Finally I show that disagreements in the UK over
whether to remove the legal provisions for anonymity turn on whether it is necessary to
protect donors from emotional and financial claims from their donor offspring, and on
perceptions about what constitutes a parent.
Contents
Chapter One: Introduction P.1

Chapter Two: The development of donor insemination P.37

Chapter Three: Semen donors: the business of recruitment and donating P.71

Chapter Four: Reflections on/from the gene P.93

Chapter Five: ‘A man never really knows, does he?’ P.117

Chapter Six: Unscripted connections P.139

Chapter Seven: Risky Kinship P.163

Chapter Eight Keeping it secret? P.191

Chapter Nine Summary and conclusion P.221

References P.231

Appendix 1 Questionnaire P.249

Glossary P.251
Chapter One: Introduction
The use of anonymously-donated semen as a strategy for circumventing human male
infertility has been practised in the UK for over sixty years. Donated semen has also
been used to help couples to avoid passing on a genetic problem from the otherwise
fertile male partner, and more recently it has been used to enable a woman without a
male partner to conceive and bear a child. It has been estimated that approximately
12,000 babies were born from donated semen and ova before the practice became
regulated by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act which came into force in
1991 (Department of Health 2003b). There were an estimated 1,800 births after
donation of semen up to 1978 and a further 4,369 births up to 1981 (Newton 1985).
Despite the extent of the practice, however, little is known about what effect there is
in the long term for men who donated semen, and ‘in this vacuum, it is simply
assumed that the act of donation has little or no significance for them’ (Crawshaw
2000:17). Scant information has been available about whether semen donors held, or
developed, any sense of connection to their donor offspring, nor whether they were
aware of a difference in their perception and perspectives between the time of their
donation and the present. A stereotypical donor was a young medical student who
donated in return for cash, without any apparent interest in the implications for
himself and for any donor-conceived children resulting from his donations (Snowden
and Mitchell 1983). The possibility was seldom acknowledged that there might be
long term physical problems in donor-conceived children and psychological
problems in the parents. No mention was made of possible long term outcomes for
donors although after the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act was
implemented they were supposed to be encouraged to think of the implications of
donating (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 1992:39).
With a few exceptions, the social aspects of semen donation have not been
specifically researched within social anthropology and other social sciences. The
contrast with ova donation is striking and remarkable. The association of semen
donation with human male infertility may be a significant reason, given the more
serious stigma attached to male infertility in comparison to female infertility (Lasker
1998:25), and the ‘elision between potency and genetic reproduction for men’
(Thompson 2005:121). Another reason may be the requirement for the use of
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complex drug regimes and technological systems in the process of ova donation, and
these ‘new reproductive technologies’ elicited interest and concern in social
anthropology about the possible risks to and exploitation of, the women who donated
ova. As Lasker points out, however, the use of anonymously donated semen long
predates the use of technology (Lasker 1998), yet the possibility that the young men
who donated semen might be in a similar situation of risk and exploitation as ova
donors was overlooked in the presumption that donating semen involved no
inconvenience and no physical or emotional difficulties for the donors. Good
(1996:312) suggests that social anthropology has been concerned in the past with
emic views about physical relationships and not with genetic relationships in
themselves, but this has changed with the development of academic debate about
genetic knowledge as kinship knowledge (Finkler 2001; Strathern 1999). Yet semen
donation both as a bodily practice and as a means to help to achieve a pregnancy
raises issues which are highly relevant to social anthropology, including public
policy making, gendered attitudes about procreation, concerns about
commodification of gifts, and indigenous UK notions about social and genetic
parenthood.
Origins of research project
The idea of investigating the field of anonymous semen donation developed out of
my previous professional experience in social work, and a coincidence of several
events involving the topic. Although the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act
1990 provided for the identity of semen and ova donors to remain anonymous to the
recipients and donor offspring, there was an increasing amount of questioning
throughout the 1990s about whether the law should be amended. Particularly from
the late 1990s, there was discussion about the sharing and exchange of personal and
identifying information between donors, donor offspring and their parents, and also
about whether there should or could be contact between the parties. Discussions
included contested views about similarities to adoption, about the right to have
access to information about one’s genetic origins, and about the commodification of
semen and ova donation (Haimes 1992; Blyth et al 2001). As a founding member of
a special interest project group of the British Association of Social Workers known
as PROGAR (Project Group on Assisted Reproduction), I was involved in many of
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these discussions as well as in media briefings. PROGAR was set up originally at the
time of the Warnock Inquiry in the 1980s, taking forward work carried out by a
predecessor group which had submitted evidence to that Inquiry on behalf of the
Association. I also was privileged to be able to network with donor conceived adults
and with the parents of donor conceived children and young people living in the UK,
America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
In 2001 the UK government consulted publicly as to what information about
people who had donated semen, ova or embryos should be given to people born as a
result of their donations (Department of Health 2001). At the time, the Human
Fertilization and Embryology Act did not permit identifying information about
donors to be provided to donor offspring unless the donor was being sued for liability
for genetically inherited medical problems. A consultation on the matter had been
promised in 1995 during the parliamentary debate in the House of Lords on the
Children (Scotland) Bill (Hansard 1995) but was postponed due to a change of
government shortly afterwards and the perceived controversial nature of the
consultation. In 1998 the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)
carried out a public consultation on how to implement a new policy concerning
payment to gamete donors. Some of the responses, which I studied as part of
research for an MSc dissertation (Speirs 1999), touched on issues to do with the
broader matter of anonymous donation as a practice. For example, the response on
behalf of the Medical Research Council Reproductive Biology Unit expressed
opposition to unpaid donation by friends or relatives of patients, which would not be
anonymous, suggesting that that kind of arrangement might be coercive.
Increasingly, the topic of the anonymity of gamete donors became central to a
number of conferences organised by pro-life groups and by professional social work,
medical and legal groups in the UK. The British Infertility Counselling Association
produced a report, to which I contributed, on the likely future counselling needs of
donor conceived people and their family members. The report was produced (British
Infertility Counselling Association 2003) with the participation of, and consultation
with, people with a personal and/or professional involvement in donor-assisted
conception, adoption, reconstituted families and genetic counselling.
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On a personal level, I had become interested in the phenomenon of the
suppression of information about genetic parents to donor conceived people through
my previous professional location in social work with its interest in human rights,
identity formation and family functioning. I became one of a growing number of
social workers both surprised and concerned to learn about the deceit and secrecy
which appeared to be embedded in the practice of anonymous semen donation. The
concern did not derive from personal and professional views that genetic parenthood
was superior to social parenthood. Social workers are used to promoting the values
of and acknowledging the problems in both, and to recognising that the one word
‘parent’ is inadequate for encompassing the various roles encompassed by the term
‘parent’ in our society (see Goody 1982). My own experience as a social worker
involved daily negotiations about the rights, responsibilities and affective ties of
parenthood as claimed and disclaimed by biological family members, the state, and
non-family carers such as friends and neighbours. What required explanation, and
what encouraged me towards doctoral research, was the need to understand how
semen donors themselves were experiencing the culture of secrecy surrounding
donation, and the fact that they were consigned to obscurity by others after donating.
Despite the long period of time in which anonymous semen donation has been
practised in the UK, when I embarked upon my project the only completed research
with semen donors in the UK had been initiated by a social work academic from
New Zealand (Daniels et al 1997).
I became interested also in the way in which the voices of donors were
seldom heard. Their views were represented by others, as if the views were being
reported. One example from the time when there was increasing speculation in the
media about the possibility of a change to the donor anonymity provision in the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, came from the then President of the
National Union of Students Scotland. He was quoted as saying about anonymous
semen donation:
A lot of students do this because they are so desperate for cash. They have the
choice of doing something like this or dropping out because of debt. Students
will do anything for money. But they certainly don’t expect to be traced later
by a child with whom they had no intention of having any contact at all
(Daily Record 1999)
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