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Beyond secrecy and openness: telling a relational story about children’s best interests in donor-conceived families

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Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been increasing demand for openness in policy and practice relating to donor-conceived families. With the benefits of openness now widely discussed, and often legally mandated, it is timely to explore the challenges families face in enacting openness when donor assisted conception is still a complex legal and social issue. Our premise is that the difficulties associated with enacting openness should be subject to at least as much scrutiny as the secrecy of past practices. To make our case, we draw on qualitative, socio-legal and sociological research with same-sex, sole parent and heterosexual donor-conceived families in the UK and Australia. We argue that exhortations to openness about donor conception ignore important relational considerations of families if they rely on a moral discourse that being open is the right thing to do, devoid of any context about how, when and by whom this is achieved. Demands for openness need to take into account the situated care relationships of family members, the timing of and manner in which information is imparted, and the fact that this information can fundamentally disrupt or transform the family lives of those to whom it is revealed.

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Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to our research participants in both the UK and in Australia, as well as the ESRC and the Australian Research Council for funding research into donor-conceived families (DP180100188). We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Swinburne University Research Sabbatical Program and the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester for making our collaboration possible. We are very grateful to Ashley Barnwell and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and generous feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Hawthorn, VIC, 3122, Australia

    Deborah Dempsey

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Petra Nordqvist

  3. School of Law, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Fiona Kelly

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  1. Deborah Dempsey
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Correspondence to Deborah Dempsey.

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Dempsey, D., Nordqvist, P. & Kelly, F. Beyond secrecy and openness: telling a relational story about children’s best interests in donor-conceived families. BioSocieties 17, 527–548 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00225-9

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