5 Towards an Understanding of Embryo Donation ... 127necessarily translate into greater numbers of recipients telling their chil-
dren. On the other hand, there is an inherent contradiction in asserting
the psychosocial importance of genealogy, and the rights of offspring to
access their genetic knowledge, in the absence of mechanisms to ensure
that this occurs (Allan 2010 ).
Recipients likewise drew strong parallels with adoption, which helped
them to make sense of ED and enabled it as a family-building option,
a finding also reported in Collard and Kashmeri’s ( 2011 ) study. Several
made reference to their familiarity with adoption in the New Zealand
context, or discussed their experiences of adoption courses and their
counsellors’ support of these courses. The adoption metaphor provided
a way for recipients to accept the parenting of a non-genetic child and
for asserting the social role in parenting. At the same time, recipients
acknowledged the importance of openness and the needs and rights of
their children to have access to their genetic knowledge. In this way,
they too regarded ED as a relational practice. While recipients clearly
saw the children as theirs, they also made reference to their children’s
‘other family’.
For recipients, however, the metaphor was also one of ‘adoption with
benefits’, including advantages referenced in other research, such as
fewer bureaucratic processes, the opportunity to experience pregnancy,
childbirth, and parenting from birth, as well as the ability to appear
more like ‘other’ families (Blyth et al. 2011 ; Check et al. 2004 ; Hill and
Freeman 2011 ; Johnson 2003 ; Keenan et al. 2012 ). Recipients placed
a great deal of value on the role of gestation in promoting attachment
and bonding [as was the case in MacCallum ( 2009 ) and as reported by
MacCallum and Widdows ( 2012 )]. They also saw gestation as a way
to have input into the child’s prenatal development, even potentially
affecting genetic makeup. Hargreaves ( 2006 ) has observed that physical
resemblance between child and parents locates a child as part of a kin
group. By seeing gestation as influencing genetic makeup and thus the
manifest characteristics of the child, recipients were able to further draw
the offspring into the recipient family. Further, while recipients referred
to characteristics that the child shared with donors, as was the case in
Kirkman’s ( 2008 ) study, recipients tended to relegate these to the back-
ground, or reinterpreted the break in genetic continuity, formulating it
http://www.ebook3000.com