Being a donor-child: wishes for parental support, peer support and counseling

Abstract

Objectives: We aimed at exploring the wishes of Dutch donor-conceived offspring for parental support, peer support and counseling and sought to contribute to the improvement of health care for all parties involved with assisted reproductive technologies. Methods: We held semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 donor-conceived offspring (Mage = 26.9, range 17–41) born within father–mother, two-mother and single mother families. The majority of the donor offspring was conceived with semen of anonymous donors. All offspring were recruited by network organizations and snowball sampling. The interviews were fully transcribed and analyzed using the constant comparative method. Results: Donor-conceived offspring wished that their parents had talked openly about donor conception and had missed parental support. They wished that their parents would have received counseling before donor sperm treatment on how to talk with their children about donor conception in several stages of life. They valued the availability of peer contact to exchange stories with other donor-conceived offspring and would have liked assistance in getting access to trustworthy information about characteristics and identifying information of their donor. Donor-conceived offspring wished to know where to find specialist counseling when needed. Conclusions: Peer support and counseling by professionals for donor-conceived offspring should be available for those who need it. The findings also support professional counseling for intended parents before treatment to improve parental support for donor-children.

Keywords

• donor sperm treatment
• donor-conceived offspring
• disclosure
• peer support
• counseling