Subjective impacts Method

During the period between March and November 1999, I undertook a total of nine semi-structured interviews with women and men who had sought access to licensed donor insemination following the enactment of the 1990 Act. The sample comprised three lesbian couples and one woman in a lesbian relationship whose partner did not attend the interview; two married heterosexual couples; and three single women (whom I will not be discussing in this chapter). Consequently, this small sample is intended to be illustrative rather than representative of the ‘popu­lation’ of users of licensed donor insemination in Britain. I established contact with this sample through the use of gatekeepers, notably Lisa Saffron, who has published widely on self-insemination in particular,[270] and the (then) Donor Insem­ination Network,[271] which has been re-named the Donor Conception Network.[272] All interviewees were aged between their late 20s and mid-40s, and most presented themselves as being middle class in terms of their current standard of living. All the women interviewed were white, although one woman indicated that her female partner (who was not present) was African Caribbean. In order to main­tain the anonymity of the accounts provided, all interviewees have been assigned pseudonyms.