How Australian egg donors interact with recipient families
From clicks to creating kin: how Australian online egg donors craft relationships with recipients and donor-conceived children. (Volks, 2025)
Volks, C., Goedeke, S., Griffin, L., & Kelly, F. (2025). From clicks to creating kin: how Australian online egg donors craft relationships with recipients and donor-conceived children. *Human Fertility, 28*(1), 2585670. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647273.2025.2585670
Geographic Region: Australia
Research Question: How do Australian egg donors who meet recipients through online platforms understand their motivations for donating, select recipients, negotiate contact, and experience early post-birth contact with recipients and donor-conceived children?
Design: Semi-structured interviews to explore donors’ motivations to donate on online platforms, their expectations of contact, and their lived experiences of early contact. Interviews ranged from 40 to 90 minutes. Data were collected from participants who primarily donated between 2013 and 2018.
Sample: 24 egg donors who met recipients through online platforms and had early post-birth contact with the resulting children. Most participants donated to multiple families (23 of 24 participants). Five participants also donated through clinic recruitment or to friends in addition to online platform matches. All participants were cisgender women who identified as she/her and most described themselves as Caucasian. In terms of sexual orientation, 23 identified as heterosexual, one as lesbian, and one as bisexual. Participants were recruited through online platform group moderators who posted study advertisements on Facebook pages, and through the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA) Facebook page.
Key Findings
Donors described a strong sense of empathy for, and personal identification with, the families they donated to. This empathy most often arose from their own reproductive difficulties, from watching close contacts struggle to conceive, or from reflecting on the value of motherhood and the pain of not achieving it. Donors’ personal reproductive journeys created a sense of common ground with potential recipients and motivated them to donate.
Unlike clinic-based donation, online platforms gave donors a mechanism to select recipients directly. Donors read recipients’ advertisements and communicated through instant messaging, which allowed rapid relationship development. Donors chose recipients with whom they felt shared values and a sense of compatibility, with many explicitly selecting recipients they believed would be open to ongoing contact.
Discourse on online platforms, which emphasizes the importance of early disclosure, access to identifying information, and the value of early contact for donor-conceived children, significantly influenced donors’ decisions. Exposure to stories from adult DCPs who had not known they were donor-conceived, and who expressed regret about missing early connections with their donors, shaped donors’ beliefs that early contact was in the best interests of children. Donors negotiated explicitly for early contact during the pre-donation stage with recipients, with some making donation conditional on agreed post-birth contact.
Early contact between donors and donor-conceived children typically involved family gatherings organized by donors, with donors inviting recipients and sometimes their own extended families. Donors used extended family terminology, describing themselves as “aunts” and positioning their own children as “cousins” to the donor-conceived children. This framing allowed donors to establish meaningful relationships without threatening recipient parents’ parental roles.
Donors reported that early contact led to strong kinship bonds and meaningful relationships. Many described feeling proud of genetic traits they observed in donor-conceived children and experiencing satisfaction at knowing the families their donations had helped create.
Some donors experienced relationship breakdowns when recipient parents disengaged after the child’s birth, despite prior agreements about ongoing contact. These donors felt unable to enforce informal agreements and experienced emotional distress about losing contact. They expressed concerns about the donor-conceived child’s future ability to access information about their genetic background and family history.
Limitations: The study captures only donors’ perspectives. Understanding how parents and donor-conceived people themselves experience early contact relationships, and how they understand their relationships with donors and donors’ children, will be important for future research. The sample is likely biased toward donors more comfortable with contact and relationship-building. Most participants were Caucasian and identified as cisgender women, which limits understanding of whether experiences differ across racial, ethnic, gender identity, or other diversity dimensions. The research is specific to Australian context where all states mandate identity-release donation (not anonymous), which differs substantially from jurisdictions permitting anonymous donation.
Applications: The fertility system (pre-treatment counseling, clinic infrastructure, and regulation) was designed for donation at arm’s length. The shift toward relational, early-contact donation is happening largely outside those systems, without professional support. People aren't bypassing the system because they're reckless. They're bypassing it because it wasn't designed for the kind of experience they want. Professionals should keep in mind that people are often making decisions based on experiential wisdom, not research evidence. Evolving and often complex psychosocial needs can emerge post-donation, particularly when contact relationships are established.
Funding Source: Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant, DP180100188.
Lead Author: Cal Volks is a researcher, policy commentator, educator, and donor-conception linking counselor based in Melbourne, Australia. Volks has formal training in infertility counseling (BICA-certified) and currently works as a research fellow at Monash University. No personal connection to donor conception was disclosed.
Regulatory Context
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) provides ethical guidelines for assisted reproductive technology (ART), including donor conception.
Each state and territory has its own laws governing donor conception, which can lead to some variation across the country.
Since the early 2000s, most states have moved away from anonymous donation. Donor-conceived individuals generally have the right to access identifying information about their donors once they reach a certain age (usually 18).
Many states limit the number of families a single donor can contribute to, to reduce the risk of inadvertent consanguineous relationships.
Most jurisdictions require counseling for donors and recipients before proceeding with donor conception.
Several states maintain central registries with information about donors and donor-conceived individuals.
It’s illegal to pay donors for their gametes (eggs or sperm) beyond reasonable expenses.
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