Families’ experiences of talking about donor-conception: How do
caregivers and children feel when they discuss their origin stories?
Abstract
New family forms have emerge with the inception of artificial
reproductive technology (ART) and one of these new forms are
donor-conceived families. These families challenge the traditional
definition of family but are also challenged to disclose origins to
their children. Developmental psychology has scarce evidence about how
these conversations unfold and how families feel about these instances
of origin storytelling. Therefore, this research explored how families
with donor-conceived children experience talking about conception
stories. This was achieved with a qualitative descriptive and
naturalistic approach with 17 donor-conceived families with children
between 3 and 8, living in Chile. Families were asked to record their
conversations, and later reflect about them. The main results show that
the experience of talking is diverse but share certain common features:
conversations are complex, intimate and co-constructed. Conception
stories are a multi-layered process ongoing throughout development. The
relevance of these results is that rescues the voices of the first
generation of children in Chile growing up in donor-conceived families.