Although the findings are not based on a random sample, the desire among offspring surveyed here is for greater openness and contact with their donor. A variety of strategies are needed for offspring of heterosexual couples to benefit optimally from the general trend toward openness in gamete donation.
In this study, the author brings an empirical lens to bear on the transracial adoption debate. She observes infertility support group meetings and conducts face-to-face interviews with a group of White, economically privileged, infertile women. She explores how race relations shape women's responses to infertility. She asks if women view transracial adoption as a viable way to meet their parenting needs, and she explores how women negotiate and renegotiate their understanding of race as treatment options fail and as they encounter a shortage of healthy White infants. The author's findings complicate several of the assumptions that underscored the dominant discourse surrounding the 1994 passage of the Multi Ethnic Placement Act (MEPA) and its 1996 amendment the Interethnic Adoption Provision (IEP). Advocates of transracial adoption argue that the race-matching policies established by the National Association of Black Social Workers create placement delays. Grounded in a "best interest of the child" standard, the passage of the MEPA-IEP overturned racematching policies and made it illegal to consider race, ethnicity, or national origins when placing children for adoption. In situating the transracial adoption debate in a discourse of reverse discrimination, advocates advance a simplistic picture of race and adoption-an understanding that, the author argues, is based on faulty assumptions. Her findings generate a more complex picture of race and adoption.
Feminist scholarship has generated a large body of work that reveals that medical discourse encourages infertile women to embrace assisted reproductive technologies (ART) as a path to “normative” family formation. The role that religion plays in the decision-making process is absent from this body of scholarship. This study is part of a larger study on infertility. In this article, I explore how infertile women who profess some religious affinity utilize medicine and religion to achieve their reproductive goals. Findings, which are drawn from participant observation of RESOLVE meetings and face-to-face interviews with infertile women, suggest that religion intersects with gender in complex ways. For many of the women in this study, growing up in traditional “church-going” families coupled with their continued connection to mainstream religion reaffirmed their desire for a child-centered family. Most of the women in this study pursued some form of ART. This held even for those who affiliated with religions that opposed ART (e.g., the Catholic Church). When ART failed, some women drew on religious discourse to renegotiate their views on adoption. For a small number of women, religious experience moved them to adopt “hard to adopt” children. I draw on these findings to suggest strategies for future research on religion and infertility.
Assisted reproductive technologies have engendered new familial arrangements, some of which challenge traditional assumptions about the relationship between biology and social roles. In this article, we report on the first survey ever conducted of parents of former egg and sperm donors. Twenty-two men and women participated in a survey conducted by the Donor Sibling Registry, a worldwide registry facilitating mutualconsent contact among donor offspring, their gamete donors, and other family members. We report on their feelings and thoughts on learning that their child donated gametes and on learning that they have a grandchild (or grandchildren) via gamete donation. We also examine what type of relationship, if any, participants have formed with their donor-conceived grandchildren, as well as their advice to other parents of donors. We conclude with questions and suggestions for future research into this newly emerging terrain of family relations.
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