Calling all parents via egg donation
If you are a parent via egg donation and have a child age 13 and older we need your help.
Dear PVED Families,
My name is Jordan Parker and I am a recent graduate of Wellesley College and am assisting my professor, Rosanna Hertz, and her co-researcher with finding participants for a new study on donor families. We are seeking parents who have conceived children through egg, embryo, or sperm donation to be interviewed in-depth. We are also seeking offspring over the age of 13 and egg, sperm, and embryo donors. We are studying the making of new kinds of families and the way social and genetic connections are understood, sought out, and experienced by members of these families.
This study is being conducted by academic researchers, specifically Sociologists. All participants will be anonymous in anything written from our findings. Interviews are completely confidential. This is guaranteed by the IRB boards of Wellesley College and Middlebury College. We are not seeking interviews for media, blog, or journalistic pieces. Our study will be used for presentation at the major medical meetings, including the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A policy paper, several academic journal articles and an academic book are also planned.
We are especially hoping to find families who have contact with their donor conceived child’s genetic relatives (the donor, donor’s family, biological half-siblings, etc)–whether that means sending letters and pictures, meeting online or in person, or spending time together on a regular basis. We really need your help. Each individual story is important to our work.
Interviews can be conducted over Skype or in person. We will be traveling to several cities to interview people. Our hope is to interview pairs in order to show multiple perspectives from each donor family. For example, we may interview two parents via donation (a heterosexual or same-sex couple), a donor conceived teen and her parent, parents via donation and their donor, a donor conceived person and his donor, etc. These interview pairs do not have to be conducted in the same place or at the same time. We would like to schedule something convenient for you. I promise to send you feedback once the study is complete. We will also share published work with our participants. I hope you will consider becoming involved!
Below you will find the description of the study and answers to some questions we’ve been asked regarding our work. If you are interested in being interviewed, please contact one of the lead researchers whose contact information is below. If you have further questions, please contact me directly via email: jparker2@wellesley.edu. Thank you very much for considering our study! We look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Jordan Parker
https://sites.google.com/site/donorfamilystudy/
