Kerry did not receive unqualified support for her decision to have a child using an anonymous donor: There were people who came to me and said, “Don’t do this. My father deserted my mother and it’s always been a lifelong thing for me that I never knew him.” And I thought, “Well, the mitigating factor […]

Abby’s experience points to the utility of blowing one’s biological parents in order to construct an identity. On one hand, the politics of anonymous donor — assisted families do not allow women to answer these fundamental questions of identity for their children.2 Humanizing an anonymous sperm donor can only be approached by using the child’s […]

Abby Pratt-Evans I sat on my living room floor with all these anonymous donor profiles around me. I had spent hours earlier that day downloading them from the Cryobank Web site. I was trying to look them over before my best friend from college came over to help me. Well, not really help me—she was […]

INTRODUCTION“Where Do We Fit?” By the time the ehild has trouble in life, you know, I’ll be dead. I’ll be long gone. By the time the kid’s out stealing cars, you know, Dad will be dead a few years. —David Letterman, late-night talk show host David Letterman used humor to shirk fatherhood’s responsibilities before his […]

The women I studied doggedly pursued secure employment while seeking out a partner, all the while holding their hopes for motherhood close. But when the search for a partner seemed as though it would block the possibility of mother­hood, these women stopped following the rules. Both gay and straight women had to push aside the […]

During the months they wait for their child to arrive, women take stock of a web of connections, strengthening bonds that they hope will cushion their new family.1^ They ask people to participate in their birthing classes and labor, see­ing this experience as a gift they want to share with those closest to them. Women […]

The choice of route to motherhood is also a decision about how women, and con­sequently their children, will answer to society. With the question “Who is your father?” so inescapable, women and children rehearse an answer. Those women least likely to break the rules of reproduction are the most likely to have a man to […]

Even for women who deviate from the norms of reproduction, the shadow of patriarchy and fathers’ rights permeates the whole decision-making process, regardless of the route to motherhood that is chosen, and so this new form of motherhood often requires contractual protection.9 Single motherhood has abandoned the marriage contract as its legal parameters for parenthood. […]

As Sophie, thirty-nine years old with a one-year-old, humorously points out, sperm is easy to come by: While I was thinking about donors, a friend of mine said, quoting from the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” because I was thinking, “Where am I going to go?” And she said, “You know, it’s just amazing. I […]

The idea that families can be created by women alone may not seem revolution­ary, but it changed the worlds of the women I interviewed, allowing them to imagine families crafted in new ways as both legitimate and valuable. Leaving the liminal state, these women claimed the right to motherhood because it represented a promise of […]