Clearly, marriage does not a mother or father make. Women in this chapter who chance pregnancy by using inconsistent contraception believe, however, that if it does not take a marriage to become a mom, the same logic should apply to the fathers of their children. The cultural climate has changed, and children, not marriage, determine […]

Father Involvement Outside of Marriage Ellen Hammond I spent my twenties bouncing around Europe. I met someone, got married in Amsterdam, and just in time for my twenty-third birthday, I got pregnant. I wasn’t ready to be a mom at that point, to tell you the truth… so I, we, aborted the pregnancy. Two years […]

Even as mothers affirm some important ties—most prominently, kinship by blood—they undermine others by separating reproduction from marriage, inter­course, and love. The intimate accounts of these women afford glimpses into how these mothers and their children experience the contested terrain over family life, namely, the power of a two-parent ideology. In part motivated by a […]

Despite contractual agreements, the relationship between the known donor and the child may escalate. These known donors become “bio dads.” That is to say, fatherhood grows out of their genetic contribution to the child; being a dad, the social part of fatherhood, is an afterthought. They set out to become not dads but fathers in […]

The known donor becomes a more complicated figure once the child is born. The mother, through her talk, can help her child navigate the challenge of the “looking-glass self.” However, when a physical person enters and leaves their lives, certain contradictions arise and have to be dealt with by the mothers. These include terms or […]

I know when we were doing the contract, you sit there and you talk about these things, but everything is so abstract and that’s kind of what this feels like. It’s so abstract; you’re talking about this being that’s not even there. And until it actually happens, you just can’t really think about what it’s […]

Women usually purchase enough vials of sperm for six months’ worth of attempts. Earlier, other women may have purchased this same donor’s sperm, and addit­ional vials may be purchased by a third or a fourth woman, or even more. When Abby chose donor 180, the line that read “other children” did not factor into her […]

Privacy: The Rights of the Anonymous Donor Politically, these mothers believe that children have the right to meet their gen­etic fathers, but they have reached this conclusion only upon realizing that sperm is not just a product but also an aspect of a person and a part of their children’s identities. Sperm donors, however, do […]

From the partial information women have about their donors we can see how they construct a notion of a whole man—the fantasy father. Instead of denying or remaining silent about him, women make him present in everyday life and conversation. Often these mothers think of their children as “half adopted,” a term used by one […]

In most of these women’s narratives, anonymous donors have not rejected their offspring but have instead given the mothers the most awesome gift of their lives. The anonymous donor is not the “bad dad” who walked out (e. g., divorced fathers or birth fathers), but a “good man” who helped the mother and child become […]