Constructing and enacting kinship in sister-to-sister egg donation families: a multi-family member interview studyShow others and affiliations
2017 (English)In: Sociology of Health and Illness, ISSN 0141-9889, E-ISSN 1467-9566, Vol. 39, no 6, p. 847-862Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Although intra-familial egg donation has been practiced for more than 15 years in several countries, little is known about family relationships in this family type. Framed within the new kinship studies, this article focuses on the experiential dimension of kinship in sister-to-sister egg donation families: how is kinship unpacked and reconstructed in this specific family constellation? Qualitative data analysis of interviews with receiving parents, their donating sisters and the donor children revealed six themes: (1) being connected as an extended family; (2)disambiguating motherhood; (3) giving and receiving as structuring processes; (4) acknowledging and managing the special link between donor and child; (5)making sense of the union between father and donor; and (6) kinship constructions being challenged. This study showed the complex and continuous balancing of meanings related to the mother-child dyad, the donor-child dyad and the donor-father dyad. What stood out was the complexity of, on the one hand cherishing the genetic link with the child allowed by the sisters egg donation, while, on the other, managing the meanings related to this link, by, for instance, acknowledging, downsizing, symbolising, and differentiating it from the mother-child bond. (A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA))
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2017. Vol. 39, no 6, p. 847-862
Keywords [en]
family/kinship; fertility; reproductive technology; interviewing (qualitative); qualitative methods generally
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-139618DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.12533ISI: 000404960800004PubMedID: 27917504Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85006415965OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-139618DiVA, id: diva2:1130411
Note
Funding Agencies|Ghent University, Belgium; Flemish Fund for scientific research (FWO-Vlaanderen)
2017-08-092017-08-092021-12-29Bibliographically approved