Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception


Book Description

With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. Using in-depth interviews the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception and offer insights into the complexities of these new family relationships.




Random Families


Book Description

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 the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Sometimes this network of families form meaningful connections that blossom into longstanding groups, and close friendships. This book is about unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media and the human desire for belonging. Random Families asks: Do shared genes make you a family? What do couples do when they discover that their children shares half their DNA with a dozen or more other offspring from the same sperm donor? What do kids find in common with their donor siblings? What becomes of these chance networks once parents and donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28) and their parents 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.




Lived Realities of Solo Motherhood, Donor Conception and Medically Assisted Reproduction


Book Description

This book explores the empirical manifestations of the paradoxical features of reproductive technologies and provides in-depth understandings of solo motherhood through assisted reproduction and by recognising the complex experiences and the lived realities of forming donor-conceived families.




Supporting Vulnerable Babies and Young Children


Book Description

The diverse challenges that clinicians and children's workers tasked with safeguarding babies and young children face are complex, and this unique book looks at effective, practice-based and evidence-informed approaches to working across a wide range of issues. It outlines relevant theory and good practice, gathering case examples from around the world to illustrate what interventions look like in direct practice. Leading contributors address a wide range of challenges, including babies and very young children who have a serious illness, have complex diagnoses, or have been exposed to violence or adversity in early childhood. This is an essential guide for those who work to support and safeguard the welfare of babies and very young children, including professionals in health care, social work, mental health and child protection settings, as well as paediatricians, child psychologists and child psychiatrists.




Sociology of Personal Life


Book Description

What can sociology tell us about our personal lives, families and intimate relationships? This book explains how key theoretical perspectives and relevant contemporary research in the discipline can shed new light on even the most familiar areas of our everyday worlds. From friendships and pets, to political engagement and social legislation, the text shows how distinctions and connections can be drawn between our public and private lives. Each chapter explores a familiar topic that illustrates how individual relationships and lives can be shaped by social contexts, and how personal choices shape the wider social world. Using vivid case examples drawn from topical areas of debate, such as marriage rights and the role of social networking, the book is clearly laid out and easy to read. It gives useful explanations of theory and invaluable advice on how to carry out research on personal lives and relationships. This is essential reading for students of sociology interested in family, relationships and beyond. New to this Edition: - Pre-existing chapters have been fully re-written - Includes a number of new chapters on topics such as the body, home and personal life in public spaces. - Reformulated 'questions for discussion' at the end of each chapter.




Conceiving People


Book Description

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Each year, tens of thousands of children are conceived with donated gametes (sperm or eggs). By some estimates, there are over one million donor-conceived people in the United States and, of course, many more the world over. Some know they are donor-conceived. Some do not. Some know the identity of their donors. Others never will. Questions about what donor-conceived people should know about their genetic progenitors are hugely significant for literally millions of people, including donor-conceived people, their parents, and donors. But the practice of gamete donation also provides a vivid occasion for thinking about questions that matter to everyone. What is the value of knowing who your genetic progenitors are? How are our identities bound up with knowing where we come from? What obligations do parents have to their children? And what makes someone a parent in the first place? In Conceiving People: Identity, Genetics and Gamete Donation, Daniel Groll argues that people who plan to create a child with donated gametes should choose a donor whose identity will be made available to the resulting child. This is not, Groll argues, because having genetic knowledge is fundamentally important. Rather, it is because donor-conceived people are likely to develop a significant interest in having genetic knowledge and parents must help satisfy their children's significant interests. In other words, because a donor-conceived person is likely to care about having genetic knowledge, their parents should care too.




Research Handbook on Family Justice Systems


Book Description

Bringing together current research from a diverse range of jurisdictions on family law, the Research Handbook on Family Justice Systems addresses the aims and boundaries of family justice systems. Delineating the common purpose of family law to achieve fairness for groups of people who live or have lived together, this Research Handbook is concerned with the rules referred to as ‘family law’, but also with the institutions comprising the operating system.




Becoming Donor-Conceived


Book Description

While it has been argued that anonymity in gamete donation has been brought to an end by legal changes and technological developments, Amelie Baumann suggests that this is in fact still in transformation. By focusing on the narratives of those who were conceived with anonymously donated gametes in the UK and Germany, she examines this transformative process and the role which donor-conceived persons play in it. This book shows that it is not someone's decision to procreate that turns »being donor-conceived« into a meaningful categorisation. Rather, kinship knowledge gets activated by the donor-conceived in specific ways for »being donor-conceived« to become a powerful identification.




The Cambridge Handbook of Information Technology, Life Sciences and Human Rights


Book Description

Debates on the human-rights implications of new and emerging technologies have been hampered by the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework for the complex issues involved. This volume provides that framework, bringing a multidisciplinary and international perspective to the evolution of human rights in the digital and biotechnological era. It delves into the latest frontiers of technological innovation in the life sciences and information technology sectors, such as neurotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. Leading experts from the technological, medical, and social sciences as well as law, philosophy, and business share their extensive knowledge about the transformation of the rights framework in response to technological innovation. In addition to providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and international state-of-the art descriptive analysis, the volume also offers policy recommendations to protect and promote human rights in the context of emerging socio-technological trends.




The Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ+ Studies, 2nd Edition


Book Description

The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, 2nd Edition will be a broad, interdisciplinary product aimed at students and educators interested in an interdisciplinary perspective on LGBTQ issues. This far-reaching and contemporary set of volumes is meant to examine and provide understandings of the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals, with attention to the contexts and forces that shape their world. The volume will address questions such as: What are the key theories used to understand variations in sexual orientation and gender identity? How do LGBTQ+ people experience the transition to parenthood? How does sexual orientation intersect with other key social locations (e.g., race) to shape experience and identity? What does LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy look like? How have anti-LGBTQ ballot measures affected LGBTQ people? What are LGBTQ+ people’s experiences during COVID-19? How were LGBTQ+ people impacted by the Trump administration? What is life like for LGBTQ+ people living outside the United States? This encyclopedia will be a unique product on the market: a reference work that looks at LGBTQ issues and identity primarily through the lenses of psychology, human development, and sociology, and emphasizing queer, feminist, and ecological perspectives on this topic. Entries will be written by top researchers and clinicians across multiple fields—psychology, human development, gender/queer studies, sexuality studies, social work, nursing, cultural studies, education, family studies, medicine, public health, and sociology—contributing to approximately 450-500 signed entries. All entries will include cross-references and Further Readings.