Clinic staff, parents, and donor-conceived adults view sperm donors through different time perspectives

Sprouting sideways: queer temporalities and kinship in donor conception (Andreassen, 2025)

Andreassen, R., Newton, G., & Dahl, U. (2025). Sprouting sideways: queer temporalities and kinship in donor conception. Culture, Health & Sexuality. DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2024.2446260

Geographic Region: Denmark, Sweden, and Australia

Research Question: How does donor conception challenge traditional ideas about how families are supposed to form?

Design: Qualitative comparative study across three countries (Denmark, Sweden, and Australia). Semi-structured face-to-face and Zoom interviews were conducted between 2021 and 2024, lasting 1-3 hours each. Participants were recruited through Facebook groups, snowball sampling, fertility organizations, and social media platforms. The researchers employed a joint thematic analysis, focusing on temporal themes and iteratively exploring shared and divergent patterns of meaning related to temporality in donor conception experiences.

Sample: The study included 73 participants across three countries with different regulatory contexts. In Denmark, 25 people participated: 15 health professionals and 10 parents (2 solo mothers and 8 lesbian/queer families). The health professionals were doctors, nurses, midwives, embryologists from public and private fertility clinics. In Sweden, 30 people participated: 10 health professionals and 20 parents (all solo mother and lesbian/queer families; majority people of color and/or mixed race couples). In Australia, 28 donor-conceived adults participated, ranging in age from 18 to 40 years old (23 women, 4 men, 1 non-binary person). Most had been raised in heterosexual families, though some were from solo-mother or lesbian families. They had learned about their donor conception at different ages: 10 before age 13, 9 between ages 13-25, and 9 between ages 26-39.

Key Findings

• Clinic staff consistently referred to "gametes, sperm cells and reproductive cells" rather than donors as people, treating them as "a product" needed only at the moment of conception - they exist in a "static present"

• Parents described donors as real people with rich histories, talking about their childhood, character, education, and family backgrounds - "the donor's past is integrated into the present"

• Donor-conceived adults situated donors "within fragile futurities," hoping to build future relationships despite knowing these connections might not work out

• Parents often "fell in love" with donors through online profiles, creating emotional attachments that clinic staff warned against; some parents found this process uncomfortable, with one couple comparing it to "ordering from a pizza menu" and another parent saying the sperm bank website "looks like Tinder"

• DNA testing enables "sideways temporalities" where family trees "sprout laterally" through discovering multiple donor siblings, disrupting traditional linear family structures

• One donor-conceived person described finding a genetic sibling as "I feel like I've birthed a brother" - illustrating how "traditional kinship may be transformed by assisted reproduction, via the growth of families across horizontal planes"

• The study proposes "sideways temporality" as a concept where "the kinship line extends not only backwards (towards the past) and forwards (towards the future), but also sideways with newly discovered donor offspring"

• Different countries' regulations create different temporal experiences - Denmark's online donor selection versus Sweden's staff-matching system shape how people experience donor relationships over time

Limitations: Study design involved three independent researchers in different contexts, limiting direct comparisons. Selection bias toward families who have disclosed donor conception. Self-selected participants may be more engaged with donor conception communities. Limited to high-income countries with similar healthcare systems.

Applications: Recognition that different stakeholders experience donor relationships through different temporal frameworks could require tailored counseling approaches. Healthcare providers and gamete providers should understand that reducing donors to biological material may not align with how families and donor-conceived people experience these relationships.

Funding Source: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE), Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, and Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW Sydney.

Lead Author: Rikke Andreassen is a researcher in the Department of Arts and Communication at Roskilde University in Denmark, specializing in studies of mediated kinship, gender, race, and sexuality in donor families. No personal connection to donor conception was identified.

Regulatory Context

• Denmark: Allows both anonymous and identity-release donation; no restrictions on donor compensation; lesbian couples gained access in 2006, single women in 2016; large international sperm banking industry.

• Sweden: Banned anonymous donation in 1985, making it the first country worldwide to do so; identity-release only; lesbian couples gained access in 2005, single women in 2016; donors must consent to identity release.

• Australia: National guidelines since 2004 mandate donor identifiability; each state has own laws; most states moved away from anonymous donation in early 2000s; some states allow retrospective identity release regardless of original donor consent.

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• Family dynamics factor in donor identity search process (Widbom, 2024)