Genetic Ties and Affinity: Longitudinal Interviews on Two Mothers’ Experiences of Egg Donation in Japan

Abstract

As of July 2017 twenty-four women who became mothers after receiving donated eggs have participated in an interview study entitled “The Experiences and Attitudes of Mothers Who Have Received Donated Eggs.” Two of these women have been participating in the survey for more than five years. Focusing then on these two women, analysis revealed that their attitudes toward egg donation and genetic relationships changed over the course of their pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing. Each woman chose eggs from donors who were similar to herself, as closeness and resemblance would bring affinity and certainty of the child’s roots; the donor’s egg is a substitute for her own and produces a pseudo-kinship between mother and child. Carrying and delivering the child made each woman feel biological ties with her child. However, by the time they entered the child-rearing stage, the women had to face the absence of any genetic ties. They felt compelled to tell the truth to their children, and to raise the children to be sufficiently strong enough to endure being told, yet at the same time the women began to attach less importance to genes. Thus, the ideas of genetic ties held by women who became mothers through egg donation changed.

Abstract

卵子提供を受けて母親になった女性 24 名へのインタビューのうち 5 年以上インタビューを継続した 2 名の分析結果を報告する。卵子提供、遺伝的つながりに対する考えは妊娠、出産、子育てを通して変化していた。自分に似ているドナーを選ぶことは自身の卵子の代わりになる、いわば擬似的親子関係を築こうとするもので、妊娠・出産は子どもとの生物学的つながりを感じさせた。しかし子どもが生まれると自身と子の遺伝的つながりの欠如に直面し、子どもに出生の経緯を伝えるプレッシャーも感じる。しかし子どもの成長に伴って、遺伝的つながりの位置づけが低下してくる。縦断的インタビューではこのような変化を捉えることができた。

• egg donation
• third-party reproduction
• nonblood parent-child relationships
• genetic tie
• life story

• 卵子提供
• 第三者が関わる生殖技術
• 非血縁的親子
• 遺伝的つながり
• ライフストーリー

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant numbers 10J40128, 26380726.

Notes

¹ In Japan, seven institutions carry out donor egg procedures, either according to their own guidelines or in compliance with those of an affiliated organization. In some cases the clients seek out a donor themselves, but anonymous egg banks have also been established and are now in operation. According to data (Yoshimura 2013), the majority of cases involve a client arranging personally or via an agent to undergo implantation abroad; to this end, a Japanese-language egg-donation agency has been operating in the United States since 1995. In Japan, 99 percent of hospitals and clinics carrying out IVF are not involved in the egg donation. The number of pregnancies in Japan involving donor eggs has increased considerably in recent years. In 2012, there were more than three hundred births using donated eggs, a near three-fold increase in three years. The majority of the donations (56 percent) were in the United States (Yoshimura 2013). Further, according to reports ( Asahi Shimbun 2011), annually more than one hundred Japanese women become donors, traveling to countries such as South Korea or Thailand to donate to Japanese clients overseas. Egg donation is just one aspect of third-party assisted reproductive technology, which also includes sperm donation and surrogate birth. At present, Japan has no laws to regulate this kind of reproductive technology; it is neither lawful nor unlawful. It was anticipated that sperm and egg donation would be granted legal recognition under certain conditions and that the 2013 report of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Review Committee, which recommended the criminalization of surrogate pregnancy, would be incorporated into a bill. However, no such legislation has come about, nor has any bill been proposed for presentation to the Diet (Japan’s legislative chamber). Specialist organizations, such as the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology (JSOG), the Japan Society for Reproductive Medicine (JSRM), and the Japan Society of Fertilization and Implantation (JSFI), have released their recommendations based on surveys of members’ views but there are a number of inconsistencies among the suggested guidelines. Furthermore, there are currently no systems for managing the records of users, donors, or resulting children, or of the medical institutions and physicians that carried out the procedures. Any formal means whereby children can trace their genetic origins is also lacking.

² One of the women said, “I don’t like myself much anyway, so I had no resistance to not using my own eggs.”

³ For distant participants, I used telephone interviews or mail correspondence. However, all of the interviews with the two participants discussed in this article were face-to-face.

⁴ Special adoption is a welfare-based adoption, instituted in 1987. It is restricted to married couples and to children under six years old and is decided by a family court. Adoption of a child is quite unusual, with only about five hundred adoptions each year; such children are commonly perceived negatively, with suspicion regarding circumstances surrounding their birth, such as rape, incest, or being from an unknown father, or with connections to poor maternal health, sexually transmitted disease, or mental health issues. To put Emi’s words “family genes” or family genetic line into context, it is important to outline certain Japanese notions of tradition, although “tradition” does not necessarily imply long-standing custom but rather what Hobsbawm and Ranger refer to as “invented tradition” (1983). In the traditional patrilineal family line (the ie), family succession rather than consanguinity is emphasized, and adoption between relations, particularly of adults, might occur to maintain the integrity of the ie. According to one source, 1 percent of the population of any given village might have been adopted (Ueno 1998).

⁵ In the case of adoption, the importance lies in neither the genetic relationship nor the biological relationship; it lies in the emotional relationship or the time spent together, consistent with the norms of the modern family.

⁶ The story of Mr. Kato had appeared in the media in Japan. He had insisted on the right to know his own genetic roots, and Japanese people who have received gametes will probably know his story. In Japan, people born by sperm donation contacted the media from 2003 on, in response to discussion of the legalization of gamete donation, and in 2005 a group of interested parties was formed. Mr. Kato’s case received extensive coverage, but it was not until 2010 that he showed himself and revealed his real name on television. The parties went on to publish a book in 2014 that presented their stories.

⁷ From Emi’s account, “the donor was a lovely person,” suggesting that she sees the donor as part of her related group, of her “extended family.” It has been suggested that donors and their relatives do not consider themselves as “other” to the recipient family: donors might blame themselves when their clients fail to get pregnant (Yee et al. 2011), and parents of donors might consider the clients’ children as their grandchildren, citing the genetic relationship (Beeson, Jennings, and Kramer 2013). It is apparent that the donor and her client form a special relationship through the exchange of a body part (as a gift or in exchange), that is also present in organ donations (Lock 2002), through the trade and transfer of the gamete.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chiaki Shirai

Chiaki Shirai is a professor in the Department of Social and Human Studies, Shizuoka University. She is the author of Funin wo Kataru 不妊を語る (Information on Infertility) and Umisodate to Josan’no Rekishi 産み育てと助産の歴史 (History of Childbirth, Child Rearing, and Midwifery in Japan). She has worked on nonblood parent-child relationships, such as third-party reproduction, foster parenting, and adoption. She is now working on a project entitled “Gender and Reproduction in Modern Asia: An International Comparison,” which is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.