ABSTRACT

This chapter begins by considering the cultural context in which a diagnosis of infertility and the achievement of parenthood by donor conception takes place. Infertility and donor conception workshops, support groups, and on-line chat forums, usually accessed through charities such as the Donor Conception Network, also provided the opportunity to hear other men's voices and experiences. The "professionalism" of fertility clinics sometimes helped to dampen the powerful negative feelings stirred up by the donor insemination procedure. Men's feelings about being told they are infertile or about choosing to engage in assisted reproductive technologies such as the donor insemination of their partners, are less well understood or publicly discussed. Donor insemination transforms the moment of conception from something that is private and intimate between a couple to something "artificial" and public, no longer under personal control. The clinical, medical, and impersonal atmosphere of fertility clinics helped some men to distance the procedure from fantasies of sexual impregnation by another man.