Exploring the generational ordering of kinship through decisions about DNA testing and gamete donor conception: What’s the right age to know your donor relatives?

The development of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), in conjunction with social media, has had profound consequences for the management of information about donor conception. One outcome is that it is now possible to circumvent formal age-restrictions on accessing information about people related through donor conception. Consequently, many donor conceived people and their parents face questions regarding what is the ‘right age’ to seek out such connections with ‘donor relatives’.

In this paper, we share findings from 20 interviews with UK-based parents through donor conception, exploring how they grapple with such questions and possibilities. This involves parents reflecting on the meaning of childhood and its significance in processes of kinship. We identify three ontologies of childhood in participants’ reasoning: children as kinship catalysts, children as vulnerable to kinship risk and children as emerging kinship agents. We discuss what our findings tell us about the generational ordering (Alanen 2009) of kinship. We show that processes through which genetic relatedness is made to matter (or not) are understood to operate differently according to the generational position of those involved due to culturally-specific understandings of childhood. These ontologies of childhood, and their relationship to kinship, are (re)produced in and through parent-child relationships.