How intended parents negotiate sperm donor selection in Canada
Constrained choices: Navigating agency and social structures in sperm donor selection. (Zeghiche, 2026)
Zeghiche, S., Côté, I., & Lavoie, K. (2026). Constrained choices: Navigating agency and social structures in sperm donor selection. Sociology of Health & Illness, 48, e70135. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70135
Geographic Region: Canada (primarily Québec)
Research Question: How do intended parents in Canada navigate the process of sperm donor selection under institutional, interpersonal, and material constraints?
Design: Qualitative study drawing on semi-structured interviews with parents of adolescents conceived through donor insemination in Canada. Data were collected in the winter of 2019 and spring of 2020 as part of the STORIES project, which examined how families integrate narratives of donor conception and how parents and their donor-conceived adolescents perceive kinship and parentage. Each parent participated in an individual interview lasting between 1.5 and 2 hours. In two-parent families, partners were interviewed separately to allow candid discussion of potentially divergent perspectives. Interviews covered four themes: infertility experiences, the use of donor insemination, narratives of conception and disclosure, and representations of the donor. This article draws only on findings from the donor insemination theme. The theoretical framework is Strauss’s negotiated order theory, which treats institutional order as provisional, contested, and produced through ongoing interaction among actors with unequal power. Fertility clinics, sperm banks, and policy frameworks are understood as distinct ‘worlds’ converging in the broader ‘arena’ of assisted reproduction. This lens allows the authors to conceptualize donor selection as a negotiated, iterative practice rather than a one-time autonomous choice.
Editor’s Note: Negotiated order theory can only account for actors who are present in the negotiating arena. The donor-conceived person has no ability to negotiate the terms being set. The theory also tends to treat negotiation as something all actors engage in from different positions, rather than acknowledging that some actors set the terms of what is even negotiable. A parent who abandons open-identity donation because they cannot afford it or one who selects a White donor because there are none of the preferred ethnicity is not negotiating in any meaningful sense.
Sample: 40 parents ages from 28 to 61 years (mean age = 46 years) whose donor-conceived children were born between approximately 2001 and 2008. Marital status varied: 18 were married, 7 were single, 9 were separated, 5 were in common-law relationships, and 1 did not specify. Only 2 of the 40 participants identified as racialized individuals. Thirty participants held a university degree. The sample was predominantly middle- to upper-middle-class. Recruitment was conducted primarily through social media communities focused on infertility, sperm donation, single parenting, and lesbian parenting.
Key Findings
Editor’s Note: Keep in mind that parents are reflecting on their donor selection experiences related to children born between 2001 and 2008. Norms and standards around pre-conception counseling and disclosure have shifted. Donor availability in Canada was severely limited when these parents were selecting donors. While the study discusses racialized parents’ experiences (donor pool shortages, racial matching pressures), only two racialized participants are in the sample. This means the analysis of how race operates in donor selection is built almost entirely on how white parents perceive and respond to racial dynamics, not on the lived experience of racialized intended parents themselves. The authors note that the initial selection preferences were embedded in bionormative frameworks that privilege genetic kinship, heteronormative family forms, and the management of stigma.
Health was a near-universal selection priority across all family types. Parents examined donors’ extended medical histories seeking to minimize hereditary risk.
Physical resemblance was a dominant preference, but for different reasons depending on family type. Heterosexual fathers sought resemblance to affirm paternal legitimacy. Lesbian couples often sought resemblance to the non-biological mother to affirm her parental bond. Single mothers sought racial congruence to shield their children from social scrutiny.
Some parents viewed open-identity donors as essential for their children’s future access to information, framing it as a right rather than a threat. Among parents who chose closed-identity donors for their children, some described their reasoning in terms of family boundaries and the perceived intrusion of a 'third party.' Some parents felt they were not adequately informed about the long-term implications of closed-identity donation before they conceived.
Parents reported that clinics narrowed and structured the selection process through curated lists, trait limits, and bank restrictions. Some parents experienced this as a denial of agency; others found it a relief from an emotionally overwhelming process.
Some clinics offered only closed-identity donors, removing open-identity donation as an option entirely. Parents who wanted open-identity donors either had to switch clinics or accept a closed-identity donor. One participant reported that her provincial public program covered only closed-identity donors, and several participants described the additional costs of open-identity donation as prohibitive, making financial constraints a real factor in identity-status decisions for at least some families.
The donor information provided to parents before conception varied. Canadian clinics tended to provide basic physical descriptors only. One family discovered only after their children were born that the donor’s extended profile included information that conflicted with what the clinic shared with them.
Extended treatment timelines eroded donor availability. When conception did not occur on the first attempt, the initially chosen donor was often no longer available. Some families used sperm from different donors for subsequent children because their first donor’s supply was exhausted.
As treatment extended, pressure to conceive intensified and willingness to wait for a preferred donor diminished. Preferences once considered non-negotiable (e.g., open-identity status, physical traits, or ethnic background) were often abandoned under time pressure.
In two-parent families, donor selection was often shaped by intracouple conflict or unequal participation. One father left all decisions to his partner; she found his disengagement distressing. Other couples disagreed on identity status, ethnicity, or religion and had to negotiate a compromise.
Some parents who chose anonymous donors expressed some form of regret or retrospective reconsideration. The nature of the regret varied. The authors note a recurring tension: decisions made by prospective parents to solve a fertility problem may feel very different when viewed later through the lens of their child’s needs.
Limitations: The study is limited to the Canadian context and may not generalize to other regulatory and cultural environments. Social-media recruitment substantially limits representativeness. All data are retrospective. Parents were recalling donor-selection decisions made 10–18 years earlier. The socioeconomic profile of the sample is unusually affluent. The bionormativity analysis is primarily descriptive rather than critical.
Applications: The negotiated order framework introduced in the study could be genuinely useful because it allows researchers to examine how institutional power, not just individual preferences, shapes reproductive decisions over time. This study also suggests that tracking how preferences change over time, and why, would be more illuminating than snapshot studies of what parents say they wanted.
Funding Source: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as part of the Self, Transmission, Origins, Representations, and Identity (STORIES) project (Grant #435-2018-0707)
Lead Author: Sabrina Zeghiche is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Work at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, where she studies family ties in the context of sperm donation and leads the DRIFTS project on overuse and substitution of sperm donations. The lead author did not disclose a personal connection to donor conception.
Regulatory context
The Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2004) governs gamete donation nationally and mandates altruism and anonymity in all gamete donations. Health Canada sets safety standards including quarantine requirements for donor sperm.
Provincial health systems determine access and reimbursement. Québec provides limited public reimbursement for insemination and IVF. Ontario covers one IVF cycle and intrauterine insemination but excludes medication, genetic testing, and storage.
Most clinics import sperm from the United States, but this increases cost and is often not covered by provincial plans.
Donor diversity is limited: white donors dominate both Canadian and international databases, creating particular hardship for racialized intended parents.
There is no national registry to track donor births or protect donor-conceived people’s right to identity information at the federal level.
Industry guidelines suggest a limit of 25 births per donor per 800,000 population, but this is not legally mandated.
In 2024, Quebec became the first province to pass legislation to establish a provincial donor registry allowing donor-conceived people over 14 to access certain donor information.
Commercial payment to donors is prohibited; altruistic donation is required. Single people, same-sex couples, and heterosexual couples have legal access to assisted reproduction.
In 2024, Canada removed restrictions on gay and bisexual sperm donors.
Related Posts