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The ready availability of donated sperm and eggs has made possible an entirely new form of family. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of social media and the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Based on over 350 interviews with children and parents, Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson share how these remarkable relationships woven from tenuous bits of information and fueled by intense curiosity are expanding the possibilities for kinship.
Random Families is a highly readable account of life at the intersection of reproductive technology, social media, and the human desire for intimacy and identity.
List of contents
- Introduction: Unprecedented Relationships
- Part I: Making Sense of the Donor and Donor Siblings
- Chapter 1. Choosing Donors
- Chapter 2. Inventing the Donor / Inventing the Self
- Chapter 3. Parents Make Contact with Genetic Strangers
- Chapter 4. The Surprise of donor siblings
- Part II: Networks of Donor Siblings
- Chapter 5. Michael's Clan: The Arrival of the Father
- Chapter 6. 7008 Builders: We are Family
- Chapter 7. The Tourists: Just Related Strangers
- Chapter 8. Connected Soul Mates: Emotional Ties
- Chapter 9. The Social Capitalists: Joining The Preschoolers Group
- Chapter 10. Donor Sibling Networks: Continuity and Change
- Conclusion: Choice in Donor Sibling Networks
- Appendix A: Respondents
- Appendix B: Interviews, Virtual Ethnography And Language In The Book
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
About the author
Rosanna Hertz is the 1919 50th Reunion Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She authored the widely acclaimed Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, a path-breaking study of women who choose parenthood without marriage. She is frequently sought out by national media on issues related to women, work and changing families in contemporary society.
Margaret K. Nelson is the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita at Middlebury College where she taught for four decades. Her books include Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America (with Joan Smith), and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.
Summary
Random Families is about the unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media, and the human desire for belonging. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28), their parents and related donors from all over the U.S., Random Families chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make from what donor to use to how to participate (or not) in donor sibling networks. Children reveal their understanding of a donor, the donor's spot on the family tree and the meaning of their donor siblings. Through rich first-person accounts of network membership, the book illustrates how these extraordinary relationships-woven from bits of online information and shared genetic ties-are transformed into new possibilities for kinship. Random Families offers down-to-earth stories from real families to highlight just how truly distinctive these contemporary new forms of family are.
Additional text
Hertz and Nelson's approach is a welcome addition to the scholarship on searching for genetic relations among donor-conceived people and their parents . . . Random Families is an intellectually honest account of the complexity, and diversity, of same-donor networks . . . What becomes of these [donor network] possibilities remains to be seen, but for bringing them to light, Random Families deserves recognition.
