Sibling Relationships Across Families Created Through Assisted Reproduction

Abstract

Third-party reproduction refers to assisted reproductive treatments involving the use of donor gametes or surrogacy. Children born through surrogacy or gamete donation may form strong familial relationships with other children raised in separate families with whom they share a genetic or gestational connection, using terms such as brother, sister, or half-brother, half-sister to describe these sibling-like relationships. Some families who have used surrogacy to conceive their child continue to see the surrogate after the birth and maintain close relationships as the child grows up. The children in these families therefore also grow up knowing each other and can form close relationships to one another. The chapter will draw from interview data carried out with 36 children of surrogates. They were aged 12–25 years and differed in terms of whether they had contact with the children their mothers had given birth to. In addition some surrogates had used their own egg for the pregnancy (traditional surrogacy) which meant their children were genetically related to the surrogacy born child. The chapter will explore how surrogates’ own children defined these relationships and how these relationships developed over-time. It will compare these findings to studies of individuals born through sperm donation who seek out others conceived using the same donor. The chapter will thus highlight the individual variation in the significance of these genetic or gestational connections. It will also discuss the limitations of our understanding of these new relationships as well as the limitations of the terminology used for defining these new connections.