Reviewed by  Melissa Ludtke*

Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation Of New Kin
By Rosanna Hertz & Margaret K. Nelson
Published by Oxford University Press, 2018, 312 pp

Shiny steel stirrups held my bare feet separated and elevated. Lying on the infertility clinic’s examining table, my head was slightly raised by a thin pillow. A Whitney Houston song played in my ears, as I depended on her to get me through my first insemination using sperm from a man I knew I’d never meet. The nurse standing next to me held up a catheter to show me what she’d soon insert inside of me to create an expressway for the sperm to travel to get to my uterus. I’d selected sperm from the clinic’s catalog that provided only limited information about the various men paid to produce it who’d been promised anonymity. The generic of what I’d purchased was clearly a misnomer since no man “donated” his spermatozoa. They sold it, I’d bought it, and one of the ones contained in this batch might help me to create a child. The no-longer-secret lives of children conceived with donor sperm.

“It won’t hurt,” the nurse told me, though she cautioned that I could expect slight cramping. With that, she proceeded to thread the catheter into my vagina. As sperm swam, she left, though not before urging me to remain flat and still for a while. Whitney helped me do that. Physically, I’d felt nothing, but now the weight of loneliness sat hard on me. I cried. I was missing the presence of the man who until a few months ago I believed would become the father to my child. I’d left him when he’d convinced me that he meant it when he said he did not want to have a child. In my late 30s, I’d decided I wanted a child more than I did a marriage.

So here I was with an anonymous man’s sperm heading for a possible rendezvous with one of several hormone-stimulated eggs the doctor said I’d made. On grey walls surrounding me hung three framed medical degrees and a large poster with a caricatured doctor’s bulging eyes peering out from between a woman’s draped, elevated legs.

Here’s what I knew about the man whose sperm I’d selected, summed up in five data points, without me making note of some of the inherited maladies that ran in his family:

O+ blood

Irish/German

5’ 11”, 167 pounds

College graduate: Economics

Blond hair, fair skinned, blue eyes

My donor was not at all like the short, balding, brown-haired small-town lawyer I’d left after three years of trying to create a family with him.

Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin surfaced memories I long ago buried of that July morning in 1989. For nearly a year after that, I returned many times to this room for more donor inseminations. Over time, in an attempt to up my chances, my doctor upped the hormones I received until one month when both my mind and body were shaken by the side effects, I quit.

In those days I could not imagine that a potential son or daughter of mine might one day go online — there was no “online” to go to in those days — type in the donor’s ID number and learn the names of other children conceived with this same man’s sperm and find ways to contact. Yet as Rosanna Hertz & Margaret K. Nelson’s illuminating and groundbreaking book reveals, it’s commonplace now for children conceived through donor insemination to join “sperm donor networks.” Some of them, they discovered by interviewing many parents and children, are eager to form a network or join an existing one, while with others the curiosity extends little farther than knowing of its existence. Children, with parents’ help, often meet in person, calling it a “reunion.” Yet, as the authors note, “unlike people joining together at a reunion of kinfolk, they have no shared memories or family traditions on which to draw.”

Once they meet, the formation of social relationships among the children (and parents) depends on a number of factors. To be connected biologically does not guarantee friendship. For some networks, an event or activity that the group experiences together bonds them, as it did for one donor’s offspring. It’s more likely, though, for a child to befriend one or two of the children after they moved on from initial wonderment at their physical or temperamental similarities. As happens with social strangers, the discovery of aligned interests or areas of shared concerns usually builds the foundation for enduring friendships.

In fact, in their book’s subtitle, the authors call these DNA acquaintances “genetic strangers.” As their research attests, sharing the same DNA is not enough, by itself, to cement close, lasting social bonds, even though it presents an intriguing start. Here’s how Hertz and Nelson explain this term and why they chose to use it:

“We refer to donors, donor siblings, and their families as ‘genetic strangers’ as a way to bind together something that usually connotes familiarity with something that symbolizes the opposite. On the one hand, nothing could be more familiar than the notion that kinship is created by the genes that flow in the blood (or are contained in a vial of sperm). On the other hand, nothing could be more peculiar than to learn (in some cases suddenly) that one member of a family shares half her genes with a gaggle of unknown ‘others’ who cannot be placed on any known shape of a family tree. And this is precisely the case here: before interaction, the members of these networks are bound by genes and are strangers to one another. … We also intentionally use the generic term ‘network’ rather than the term ‘extended family’ as a starting point to describe the groups that emerge.”

As the authors point out toward the end of the book, the language that’s been developed around family and kinship fails when it is called upon to describe these new genetic relationships. The children “have no conceptual apparatus with which to distinguish the ‘merely’ biological from the social;  the understanding of kinship in the United States provides no lexicon,” the authors observe. “[These children] also have no conceptual apparatus with which to describe the parents of their donor siblings; once again, language fails.”

In one of several sperm donor networks featured in the book, its members, so far, are only parents since the children are still too young to be included. In their Facebook group, the discussion focused for a while on finding the best word to give their children to help them describe how they are related to one another. As Hertz and Nelson write:

“Ultimately, the members of this network adopted a special language. The term they chose — ‘dibling’ — indicates a donor connection (with the d) while dropping the s to indicate that the children are not conventional siblings. … [T]he parents who embrace the lexicon of ‘diblings’ want to acknowledge links among children while avoiding assumptions about how important those links will be.”

In this discussion, along with others in this book, I kept picking up distinct echoes from my own parenting life after donor insemination did not produce a pregnancy for me. When I was 46 years old, six years after I’d quit trying donor insemination, I adopted my daughter in China and raised her on my own. Out of our experiences and thinking, I discovered uncanny overlaps as I read Random Families.

*Melissa Ludtke, a veteran journalist, wrote the 1997 book, “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America,” and is writing a memoir about her 1977 lawsuit, Ludtke v. Kuhn, against Major League Baseball in which she gained equal access to locker rooms for women reporters.