Donor Family Matters

Donor Family Matters PDF Author: Wendy Kramer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578633374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
This is the story of Wendy Kramer and her donor-conceived child, Ryan, who eventually found his biological father and 19 half-siblings. Wendy and Ryan created the Donor Sibling Registry, the world's largest platform for mutual-consent contact of sperm, egg, and embryo donors, donor-conceived children and adults, and their parents.

Donor Family Matters

Donor Family Matters PDF Author: Wendy Kramer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578633374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
This is the story of Wendy Kramer and her donor-conceived child, Ryan, who eventually found his biological father and 19 half-siblings. Wendy and Ryan created the Donor Sibling Registry, the world's largest platform for mutual-consent contact of sperm, egg, and embryo donors, donor-conceived children and adults, and their parents.

Finding Our Families

Finding Our Families PDF Author: Wendy Kramer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101612479
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The first comprehensive book that offers invaluable step-by-step advice for families with donor-conceived children. Wendy Kramer, founder and director of the Donor Sibling Registry, and Naomi Cahn, family and reproductive law professor, have compiled a comprehensive and thorough guide for the growing community of families with donor-conceived children. Kramer and Cahn believe that all donor-conceived children’s desire to know their genetic family must be honored, and in Finding Our Families, they offer advice on how to foster healthy relationships within immediate families and their larger donor family networks based on openness and acceptance. With honesty and compassion, the authors offer thoughtful strategies and inspirational stories to help parents answer their own, and their children’s, questions and concerns that will surely arise, including: How to support your children’s curiosity and desire to know about their ancestry and genetic and medical background. How to help children integrate their birth story into a healthy self-image. How to help your children search for their donor or half siblings if and when they express interest in doing so. Finding Our Families opens up the lives of donor-conceived people who may be coping with uncertainty, thriving despite it, and finding novel ways to connect in this uncharted territory as they navigate the challenges and rewards of the world of donor conception.

Finding Our Families

Finding Our Families PDF Author: Wendy Kramer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1583335269
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The first comprehensive book that offers invaluable step-by-step advice for families with donor-conceived children. Wendy Kramer, founder and director of the Donor Sibling Registry, and Naomi Cahn, family and reproductive law professor, have compiled a comprehensive and thorough guide for the growing community of families with donor-conceived children. Kramer and Cahn believe that all donor-conceived children’s desire to know their genetic family must be honored, and in Finding Our Families, they offer advice on how to foster healthy relationships within immediate families and their larger donor family networks based on openness and acceptance. With honesty and compassion, the authors offer thoughtful strategies and inspirational stories to help parents answer their own, and their children’s, questions and concerns that will surely arise, including: How to support your children’s curiosity and desire to know about their ancestry and genetic and medical background. How to help children integrate their birth story into a healthy self-image. How to help your children search for their donor or half siblings if and when they express interest in doing so. Finding Our Families opens up the lives of donor-conceived people who may be coping with uncertainty, thriving despite it, and finding novel ways to connect in this uncharted territory as they navigate the challenges and rewards of the world of donor conception.

Random Families

Random Families PDF Author: Rosanna Hertz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019088827X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"The ready availability of donated sperm and eggs has made possible an entirely new form of family. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Sometimes this network of families form meaningful connections that blossom into longstanding groups, and close friendships. This book is about unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media and the human desire for belonging. Random Families asks: Do shared genes make you a family? What do couples do when they discover that their children shares half their DNA with a dozen or more other offspring from the same sperm donor? What do kids find in common with their donor siblings? What becomes of these chance networks once parents and donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28) and their parents from all over the U.S., Random Families chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make from what donor to use to how to participate (or not) in donor sibling networks. Children reveal their understanding of a donor, the donor's spot on the family tree and the meaning of their donor siblings. Through rich first-person accounts of network membership, the book illustrates how these extraordinary relationships -- woven from bits of online information and shared genetic ties -- are transformed into new possibilities for kinship. Random Families offers down-to-earth stories from real families to highlight just how truly distinctive these contemporary new forms of family are." -- Publisher's description

Your Family

Your Family PDF Author: Wendy Kramer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692106938
Category : Birthparents
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
A sweet and light-hearted picture book for donor-conceived children that answers the question "where did I come from?" and then gently introduces the concepts of half siblings and donors in an open and honest way. For ages 2-8.

We Are Family

We Are Family PDF Author: Susan Golombok
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541758633
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From one of the world's leading experts, this absorbing narrative history of the changing structure of modern families shows how children can flourish in any kind of loving home. The past few decades have seen extraordinary change in the idea of a family. The unit once understood to include two straight parents and their biological children has expanded vastly—same-sex marriage, adoption, IVF, sperm donation, and other forces have enabled new forms to take shape. This has resulted in enormous upheaval and controversy, but as Susan Golombok shows in this compelling and important book, it has also meant the health and happiness of parents and children alike. Golombok's stories, drawn from decades of research, are compelling and dramatic: family secrets kept for years and then inadvertently revealed; children reunited with their biological parents or half siblings they never knew existed; and painful legal battles to determine who is worthy of parenting their own children. Golombok explores the novel moral questions that changing families create, and ultimately makes a powerful argument that the bond between family members, rather than any biological or cultural factor, is what ensures a safe and happy future. We Are Family is unique, authoritative, and deeply humane. It makes an important case for all families—old, new, and yet unimagined.

Counseling Donor Family Members

Counseling Donor Family Members PDF Author: Hilary Bertisch
Publisher: Ethics International Press
ISBN: 1804410195
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Donor families are unique, yet are also becoming substantially more common with the exponential advancements being made in the field of reproductive medicine, and with the wider acceptance of LGBTQ+ and single-parent families utilizing donor gametes in recent decades. The accessibility of commercial DNA testing is also helping to expand these families, as many people are finding out by surprise that they are part of a sometimes quite large donor family. Individuals connected to donor families are therefore much more likely to be seen across a variety of mental health and medical settings for a range of presenting problems, either related to or separate from this part of their background. Regardless of the presenting issue, for these individuals the challenges of forming and redefining family as they explore their own or their child’s new biological connections can seem overwhelming and are therefore very likely to surface as a topic of discussion in treatment. Given the greatly increased probability of encountering a client connected to a donor family in their practices across settings, and the specific challenges this presents, clinicians must be well-informed about all perspectives in order to address such issues in a knowledgeable and sensitive manner. Counseling Donor Family Members provides clinicians and mental health professionals with guidance on the unique issues that can present for egg and sperm donors, parents of donor-conceived children, and donor-conceived people. They will be better prepared for many of the issues that donor family members might present in regards to their family of origin and with their new donor family relationships. Counseling Donor Family Members is both a resource for mental health and medical professionals in any setting, and a useful reference book for researchers, and donor family members themselves. It presents evolving ideas, recommendations, and talking points, that can be used in counseling everyone in the donor family. Because each stakeholder is deeply connected to the others, understanding all viewpoints is important for a successful counseling experience with any parent, egg and sperm donor, or donor-conceived person.

The New Kinship

The New Kinship PDF Author: Naomi R. Cahn
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814790321
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
No federal law in the United States requires that egg or sperm donors or recipients exchange any information with the offspring that result from the donation. Donors typically enter into contracts with fertility clinics or sperm banks which promise them anonymity. The parents may know the donor’s hair color, height, IQ, college, and profession; they may even have heard the donor’s voice. But they don’t know the donor’s name, medical history, or other information that might play a key role in a child’s development. And, until recently, donor-conceived offspring typically didn’t know that one of their biological parents was a donor. But the secrecy surrounding the use of donor eggs and sperm is changing. And as it does, increasing numbers of parents and donor-conceived offspring are searching for others who share the same biological heritage. When donors, recipients, and “donor kids” find each other, they create new forms of families that exist outside of the law. The New Kinship details how families are made and how bonds are created between families in the brave new world of reproductive technology. Naomi Cahn, a nationally-recognized expert on reproductive technology and the law, shows how these new kinship bonds dramatically exemplify the ongoing cultural change in how we think about family. The issues Cahn explores in this book will resonate with anyone—and everyone—who has struggled with questions of how to define themselves in connection with their own biological, legal, or social families.

Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age

Donor-Linked Families in the Digital Age PDF Author: Fiona Kelly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316518515
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Situates donor conception debates in a global context, exploring the interaction between law, technology, and relationships.

The Organ Donor Experience

The Organ Donor Experience PDF Author: Katrina A. Bramstedt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442211172
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
With a current US need of over 115,000 organs one would think that Good Samaritan donors would be welcomed with open arms by transplant centers and society in general; however, this is often not the case. Tell someone that you have donated an organ to a stranger and the reaction is likely to be one of astonishment and disbelief. Some doctors even consider people who offer their organs to strangers crazy. Why would anyone do that? Who are these people so committed to helping others-strangers-that they would undergo surgery, discomfort, and disruption of their lives? This book profiles donors who have offered their organs to strangers and helps readers understand the meanings behind their donations. For the donor, altruism should always be the primary motivation, though other motivations often come into play. Often, there are also subconscious reasons for performing this great act of kindness. The Organ Donor Experience gives living anonymous organ donors of kidneys, liver lobes, and lung lobes the opportunity to tell their stories as they understand them, and for others to understand the motivations and the meaning of true altruism.