Abstract
Donor conception is an area where increased emphasis on “openness” has produced major changes to legal, medical, and kinship practices. Anonymous gamete donations are becoming prohibited, and donor registers with identity-release systems are becoming common. These reforms assume that it is in a child's best interest to know the “truth” about their genetic origin, and that this overrides intended parents’ right to privacy. Drawing on ethnographic material from commercial fertility clinics in Finland, this article discusses how the assisted reproductive donor identity-release register as a governmental sociotechnical device acts as an instrument of (un)relatedness in treatment practices at the level of both individuals and nations. The register intervenes in these practices in such a way that the principle of openness is maintained but transformed from site to site. It is devised to naturalize parenthood based on intent, with no perceived threat to child welfare or family privacy. In the context of the transnational egg donation market, the register works as a guarantee of the white Nordic kin-ness of Finnish donors. Consequently, it has become a technology that assists strategic familial, national, ethnic and racial belonging.
Keywords
Introduction
Recent decades have seen a cultural shift toward “openness” as a virtue in family and intimate relationships (e.g., Klotz 2014; Gilman and Nordqvist 2018). Honesty and transparency are considered essential to healthy relationships, and there is a strong social discourse that mutual disclosure should prevail in families (Strathern 1999; Faircloth and Gürtin 2017).
Legal and policy systems have sought to translate this openness into practice, including in DNA paternity confirmation, adoption, and gamete/embryo donation (e.g., Frankfurth 2020; Gilman and Nordqvist 2018). For donor conception, this has meant changes to legal, medical, and kinship practices. Anonymous gamete donations are being prohibited, and identity-release systems are becoming common, for example in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (Blyth and Frith 2015).
Such reforms assume it is in the child's best interest to know the “truth” about their (genetic) origin (Gilman and Nordqvist 2018; Herbrand and Hudson 2015). This assumption aligns with the broader Euro-American idea that information about reproduction is a constitutive component of kinship and identity (Strathern 1999; Klotz 2014). Policy and legal frameworks that favor open donation suggest that genetic information is essential for the well-being of children and child–parent relationships (Herbrand and Hudson 2015).
Previous research has investigated intended parents’ family practices regarding the disclosure of gamete donation and kinship connections (e.g., Frankfurth 2020; Readings et al. 2011; Nordqvist 2014). This article sheds light on sociotechnical practices of disclosure in the case of gamete donation in Finland, which has become the main destination for donor eggs in the Nordic region. I explore ethnographically how state-organized openness in Finland—which operates an identity register with a release system—enacts not only kinship but also unrelatedness between all participants in donor arrangements in everyday clinical practices.
Scholars of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have shown that kin and family relations can be enacted in unexpected ways in fertility treatments. Western practices and notions of kinship and family, which prioritize biological connections and genetic relatedness through heterosexual sex and pregnancy, have been contested, reformulated, and reinforced by ARTs, marketization, and reproductive tourism (Franklin 2001; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Thompson 2005). Transgressive third-party reproductive technologies produce new ways of perceiving family and kinship, but also of becoming related—juridically, socially, affectively, and biologically (Franklin 2013)—(re)producing familial, national, and racial belongings (Benjamin 2016; Bergmann 2011; Vertommen, Pavone and Nahman 2022; Vora and Iyengar 2017).
I conceptualize the donor identity-release register as an assisted reproductive sociotechnical device. The register is a database device that mutates and multiplies across practices and sites (Ruppert 2011, 2012). This conceptualization allows me to explore the register as part of datafication of ARTs and everyday clinical practices as part of the sociotechnological context where data management practices emerge. The register device also enacts kinship in a shared fashion involving multiple actors. Actors in practices include both technologies and humans, as pioneering studies on sociotechnical systems have shown (e.g., Muniesa, Millo and Callon 2007; Latour 1992; Akrich 1992).
This article is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted at four private fertility clinics in Finland between 2015 and 2024. First, I show how the register is ultimately devised to naturalize intended parenthood by altering the third-party reproductive arrangement into a contractual arrangement. I then describe how donors are sometimes enacted as personal and even kin relatives of donor offspring, without jeopardizing the intended parents’ parental status. In both cases, the policy principle of openness about (biological) heredity and the value of the child's best interest are maintained, but they mutate depending on how the register device threatens to disrupt (or not) family life and belonging. Beyond the family level, I consider the level of nation, ethnicity, and race, and examine how the donor register has intervened in the practice of matching donors with recipients. The policy purpose and design of the register-as-device, which is to force open donations, has in practice resulted in a situation where the device reproduces (white) Nordicness and enacts national kin-ness by allowing traceability.
I argue that the register as a database device in the context of Nordic transnational reproductive tissue donation works as a technology of belonging (M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014a, M’charek, Schramm and Skinner2014b; Lee and Voigt 2020; Widmer 2014; cf. Rose and Novas 2005): that is, a technology deployed to classify people and make connections of “natural” belonging to family/race/nation. This analysis of everyday clinical processes contributes new understandings of how a data-based technology alters practices of family/race/nation (through assisted reproduction in transnational market setting).
Digital Registers as Sociotechnical Governmental Devices
I conceptualize the gamete donor register with an identity-release system to be a (data-based) assisted reproductive sociotechnological device of kinship, drawing on STS insights into (governmental) databases (e.g., Ruppert 2011, 2012; M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014b; Amoore 2006) and/as sociotechnological devices (e.g., Muniesa, Millo and Callon 2007; Latour 1992; Akrich 1992).
Finland's donor identity register is a digital database. The digital form allows the storage, maintenance, sharing, and searching of volumes of data. Databases are maintained by all sorts of public and private agencies; with donor databases, these may be (commercial) medical or governmental agencies. Finland's donor database is maintained by the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health, a government agency.
Ruppert (2012, 120) conceptualizes governmental databases as sociotechnical devices because “they are government schemes devised to…intervene in the performance of individuals and populations, and consist of an ensemble or system of relations.” Database devices comprise not only inscriptions but also “strategic orderings” between governing actors and elements, ranging from laws and regulations to administrative discourses and measures. Devices are not static, however, but unstable, mutable, and multiple (Mol and Law 1994). This means that while devices might “hold” in some relational or functional manner between different sites, they also mess with strategies, orders, purposes, and relations (cf. Law and Singleton 2005). In the case of the donor identity database device, the strategy of openness about biological origins holds but is transformed across different practices. This in turn affects the (power) relations at play in clinical practices and how relatedness and belonging are enacted.
In addition to intervening, sociotechnical devices may also work as instruments to an end—helping, forcing, making others do things, and so on. In short, they act (Latour 1992; Akrich 1992). Furthermore, the agency of devices is distributed in the sense that what is done results from a compound of acts by a multitude of actors—local and transnational, human and nonhuman, across different sites and practices. In in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, these actors include technologies, donors, clinical staff, intended parents, market players, and national and supranational laws, regulations, and recommendations regarding donors’ registration and information-sharing.
An Ethnography of Everyday Clinical Practice and Relations
This article is part of a larger research project on the constitution of social relations in the fertility sector. To examine care practices in fertility clinics, I used ethnographic methods such as observation and video recording. After obtaining formal permission from the Tampere Region Ethics Committee, and consent from personnel in the clinics, I conducted fieldwork between 2015 and 2017, and again starting from late 2019, in four commercial clinics (A, B, C, and D). Consent was obtained from all intended parents and donors.
The material comprises video recordings of appointments (63) and procedures (42). These include 21 video recordings of donors, and 23 of fertility travelers who were not Finnish residents. I also made observations in meeting rooms, common areas, and the IVF laboratory.
I collected interviews with 50 professionals in both fieldwork and non-fieldwork clinics, including doctors, nurses, embryologists, coordinators, and people in corporate positions, to cover their experience-based knowledge of treatments and the market. Intended parents (32) and donors (23) were also interviewed. Additionally, I collected handouts distributed to intended parents, and care guideline materials.
Gamete Donation in Finland: Openness and the Market
Openness in gamete donation covers a wide range of practices for sharing identifying and nonidentifying information about the donor. Depending on the national context, a variety of information may be shared even when the overall donation arrangement is anonymous, ranging from family history and susceptibility to certain illnesses to education, profession, personal letters, and phenotypic characteristics (Nordqvist and Gilman 2022).
In Finland, donors remained anonymous until the 2006 Act on Assisted Fertility Treatments (1237/2006). i This Act legalized gamete donation. In the interest of donor-conceived persons’ emotional well-being and identity, it banned anonymous donation and the remuneration of donors beyond expenses (e.g., Parliament Plenary Session Memoranda 15/2006, 13/2006; Grand Committee Report 1/2006). It also established a state-maintained donor identity register with an identity-release system, allowing children born as a result of donor IVF to request and receive donor identity information after turning 18. Intended parents are not entitled to this information.
Heated debates preceded the Finnish legislation. The debates included (feminist, liberal, and patient organization) voices in support of liberal practice; voices in support of “traditional family values;” and conservative religious views. The most contested debate framed childlessness as a medical problem, excluding social aspects, making queer and other alternative families’ use of ARTs dubious, and problematizing equality in terms of both eligibility and access. The debate on anonymity for donors, in turn, revolved around gendered perceptions of difference between social and biological parenthood: the (in)significance of knowing one's genetic mother/father (Eriksson 2017).
The Finnish identity database consists of all gamete donors’ personal identifying information: name, identity number for Finnish nationals, passport number for foreign nationals, and the donor identifier code assigned in the clinic. The register also includes data on the type of donation (sperm, ovum, embryo), consent/withdrawal of consent to donate, and (sperm donors’) voluntary acknowledgment of paternity. The register's primary policy function is to provide donor-conceived children with identifying information about the donor.
Under the 2006 Act, some nonidentifiable information can be shared with intended parents. This information concerns the donor's appearance, which medical staff are required to match as closely as possible to the recipients. Appearance is broken down into five characteristics on which information can legally be collected for matching only: “Skin tone, eye and hair color…height, and ethnic origin.” These five characteristics can be revealed to recipients but are not recorded in the identity register. No ethnic or racial information can be registered in Finland, in the belief that this will protect against racism. This is a peculiarity of Nordic registers, which are regularly used for administrative decisions about social rights and compilation of statistics, which in turn are used to craft future state policy (Homanen and Alastalo 2024). Curiously, it seems that according to regulators, using racial data “only” for matching is less problematic.
Overall, the Finnish system of state-organized openness with an identity-release system is similar to identity-release systems in other Nordic and European countries. What varies slightly is the age when donor-conceived children can access identifying information and the type of non-identifying characteristics shared and used for matching (Blyth and Frith 2015; Nordqvist and Gilman 2022).
Gamete donation in Finland, especially egg donation, is largely a private enterprise centered on a few chains of clinics, some of which have international investors. 2 As the use of donor gametes for heterosexual couples usually follows rounds of IVF in state-funded public clinics using their own gametes, donor gamete recipients tend to be older than people treated with their own gametes, unless the latter have been diagnosed with prohibitive conditions. Cross-border travelers coming to Finland also go to commercial establishments.
Within the Nordic region, Finland is the destination for donor eggs, especially for travelers from Sweden and Norway (Homanen 2018; 2021). Indeed, a large proportion of Finnish donor eggs go to these fertility travelers. In 2020, 560 treatment cycles were performed on non-Finnish residents. Of these, 545 used donor gametes (National Institute of Health and Welfare 2021). According to my interviews with staff, travelers come for donor eggs or preimplantation genetic testing almost without exception.
In addition to its permissive legislation and availability of care, Finland's pull factors include imaginaries of inheritable phenotypic resemblance. Similar pull factors are found in other destinations (Speier 2016; Thompson 2011). In the Nordic context, Finns are seen as white kin, and clinics reinforce the inheritability of “Nordicness” by translating Finnish ethnic origins into Nordic kinship, nationality, and race, perceived in terms of genetic difference and similarity (Homanen 2018).
Devising a Threat to Intended Parenthood?
During my fieldwork, I found that the role of the egg donor in donation is frequently steered toward a distant third-party, with no place in the family relations created through donor-conception. This accords with prior research on donor motivations and clinical practices (Tammi and Homanen 2024; Nordqvist and Gilman 2022). I observed how this donor role is addressed as early as the first appointment. The following snapshot is from a first-time appointment with a coordinator and a donor: The coordinator explains to a donor about the legislation that has come into effect since she last donated: “Then we did not have the Act, so you were an anonymous donor, but now all are registered. This means that the recipients will of course not be told anything else about you than those five characteristics. But if a child is conceived, after they turn 18, they will know that they originate from this treatment, and they can get your identity information. But that does not make you a mother. The mother is the one who gives birth to the child.” (Clinic B, appointment with a coordinator, videotape B_1N)
Prior research on ARTs, kinship and family formation has noted the legitimization of the “natural” basis for kinship and family through a process Thompson (2005) labels the strategic naturalization of assisted reproduction. This process refers to practices of discretion regarding donor use allowing intended parents to pass as “natural” genetic parents in public.
Recently, it has been suggested that naturalization in assisted reproductive sociotechnical practices is unraveling in the movement toward a more child-centered approach where children's moral rights (to know) are weighed against intended parents’ right to privacy (e.g., Herbrand and Hudson 2015; Nordqvist and Gilman 2022; Thompson 2005). Identity database devices can be viewed as born from this policy and cultural movement, and their agenda of openness can be seen as threatening strategic naturalization where donor-conceived children belong to intended parents despite the “lack” of genetic resemblance. Donor registers do not only make the choice of nondisclosure harder and more morally questionable. They also open up a new space for relationship and kin formation and enactment of family belonging between donors, donor offspring, and intended parents, as identity-release makes it possible for donor offspring to contact donors.
Like devices are (in)tend(ed) to do according to theory (Muniesa, Millo and Callon 2007, 2; Ruppert 2012, 120), I observed the donor identity register device intervening in clinical practice. The register is treated as a threat to the distant role assigned to donors in relation to future offspring—a distance previously guaranteed by donor anonymity. That is not the end of the story, however. Professionals spent time during appointments explaining to donors what the register does and does not do. In general, they presented contractual relations as a new clinical strategic ordering scheme of the register device (cf. Ruppert 2012, 125) in addition to the original administrative one of openness.
Relations between donor and recipient, and hence family (non)belonging, are managed through the donor contract, where donors are assigned the role of a special third-party reproductive citizen with responsibilities (to be on the register) and rights (to privacy from the intended parents), and parenthood is assigned to the intended parents, like in this snapshot from an appointment with a donor candidate. The doctor is explaining: The donor does not have any rights to this child. Her responsibility is to be on the register, there is no way out of that. But the donor can say no to using the eggs as long as she has them [in her body] or we have them or we have made embryos of them. (Clinic B, appointment with an IVF doctor, videotape B_9N)
This doctor makes a similar shift to that made in the previous extract: from informal, intimate, even familial relations, to contractual relations involving responsibilities and property rights over eggs—not children—which in the case of eggs are conferred on the intended parents only at the moment of embryo transfer. The donors’ personal relation to the donor-child is enacted as irrelevant in this framework of (re)devicing the register.
In these practices of explaining the register, the offspring's access to identifying data appears to produce a fear that donors might think they can claim a relationship with, or rights to, the child. Hence the explanations regarding how and when one can make a claim to the tissue but not the child-to-be. These clinical practices, then, maintain the register device's original principle of openness.
Yet, the register device does not become a kin-making or family-making device for donors and offspring in these practices. This is achieved by rendering a reproductive arrangement with a register device into a contractual arrangement with specific roles, relations, rights, and responsibilities for all the actors involved, including the information-release technology itself. The nonpayment of donors further allows donation to be imagined within the framework of a civic gift relation, rather than as reproductive employment or paid labor, which would be arguably possible in more commercial settings such as the United States (cf. Cooper and Waldby 2014; Gilman 2020; Almeling 2011).
The donor register as a database device of assisted reproduction works as an instrument of belonging, in a situated and biotechnologically enacted manner. Informed by scholarship on technologies of belonging (M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014a; M’charek, Schramm and Skinner2014b; Lee and Voigt 2020; Widmer 2014), we can conceptualize how technologies—understood as enacted in sociotechnological practices—make desirable particular forms of belonging to family, community and nation etc. likely or inconceivable in contemporary technoscientific societies. Accordingly, the register device mutates through the practices described above into a device for donor-children belonging to intended parents’ nuclear family. Donors, instead, are assigned a role of non-family belonging; a role as third-party reproductive citizen of sorts. The policy principle of openness does not in itself reveal how family belonging appears in the clinical practices that implement “openness.”
Altering “the Child's Best Interest” and Making Meaningful Connections
Some medical professionals were dubious that the register is in the child's best interest. According to my findings, they, like other medical staff, think it is important to inform children about their donor IVF origins, and are sometimes even in favor of sharing further nonidentifying information, for example through personal letters. As one head IVF doctor put it to me: “This kind of description of one's character [provided by donors for children] that has been used [elsewhere], with one's profession, talents, likes and dislikes, and such, might be more fruitful for [children's] identity formation [than identifying information]” (clinic D, IVF doctor 1, interview). Later in the same interview, he drew a comparison between Estonia's anonymous donation system and Finland's identity-release system: In Finland the basis for the identity registration is the children's ethical rights. In Estonia it is exactly the same, but there children's ethical rights mean that one should not bother the children with the fact that they have both social and genetic parents. The child has only one pair of parents or a single parent. And genetics can have a different meaning. In the social sense, parenthood is what is here in everyday life and not some biological background somewhere else. I think it is very important for us to reflect on this, as we live after all in the very same type of ethically civilized and conscious culture in Europe, and despite that we have opposite views when it comes to anonymity and registration. (Clinic D, IVF doctor 1, interview)
This head IVF doctor makes a point about medical ethical institutions and logics in two very similar European countries. Instead of the rights-based discourse of parents’ reproductive privacy, he praises Estonia's anonymous donation system in terms of children's moral right to privacy in family life, free from any potential disturbance caused by contact with an additional parent figure. Genetic parental information is significant in other terms—as information about ancestry and perhaps health.
This doctor went on to tell a story about a donor-conceived child who imagines their donor as a wonderful, kind fairy godmother and wants to preserve that image rather than find out about the real person who actually donated their gametes. The doctor thus enforced the idea that knowledge about one's biological ancestry is important, but meeting or personally knowing the donor is not.
While this framework maintains the principle of openness about biological ancestry in the child's best interest, it transforms that principle to exclude the donor-identifying information recorded in the register. Furthermore, contrary to appointment practices described in the previous section, here the register device is molded to work against the value-object of the child's interest because it disrupts family life and belonging (based on parental intent) by (potentially) involving more parental actors than the intended parents.
The fairy godmother in the doctor's story is a well-used trope for egg donors as figures of unconditional giving, personalized here through letters and nonidentifiable information. As such, the trope traces indirect but nonetheless valuable connections between donors and children that do not disrupt the intended parents’ status as the only parents, and thus the child's belonging in their nuclear family.
My interviewees, who were all registered in the donor register, also construct scripts for relationships that are exclusively nonparental (see also Gilman 2020). Some posited no connection except a gift relationship with the intended parents. They were ready and curious to meet donor offspring when the latter became eligible to receive identifying information, but they denied any truly meaningful relationship with them. These donors, then, were attuned to the register device's policy function of traceability to assure openness. For them, any meeting between donors and offspring is significant only in terms of the offspring receiving more information about their ancestry.
A few donors constructed other meaningful and positive connections with their (future) donor offspring. These alternative relationship narratives include “godmother,” “fun additional person in the family tree,” and “friend.” Such narratives may be a sign that clinical staff's labor to manage (non)parenthood and mold the register device is working. By making sense of their connection with donor-conceived children in these ways, donors used alternative personal and kin relations as narrative resources. Culturally, the figure of godmothers, family friends, and odd members of the family tree do not have the exclusive or noncontingent status that parents have in relation to their children.
However, by providing identity data that enables encounters, the identity database device is an incentive to form relations and relatedness, if not of the parental kind. Prior studies on donor motives and experiences show donors are (also) active participants in donor treatment clinical practices (e.g., Almeling 2011; Gilman 2020), and they make biological connections in socially (in)significant ways that do not straightforwardly accord with preexisting kinship categories (Klotz 2014). In these connections, procreation is a complex process, involving a combination of (genetic) actors and actions (Tammi and Homanen 2024). For example, the expression one of the donors used, an oddity in the family tree, is not like a mother or aunt of any kind, but a family member contributing to procreation all the same.
Guaranteeing Kin Nationality
As part of strategic naturalizing of assisted reproduction, the practice of matching/donor choice has been viewed in prior research as the basis for keeping ARTs as “natural” as possible by helping intended parents to appear as genetic parents. Intended parents typically seek gamete donation that will assure phenotypic resemblance with the infertile recipient, and clinics support this. People particularly wish to be matched with donors who share their ethnoracial origins, which they believe will be, passed on to donor children genetically (Speier 2016; Thompson 2011; Homanen 2018; 2021).
Notions of belonging to a family and kin but also race and nation—and the ways such belongings are bound together—have a long history in relation to reproduction and (strategic) naturalization (e.g., Haraway 1997; Valdez and Deomampo 2019; Weinbaum 2004). Race involves reference to natural heredity insofar as it is expressed in appearance and behavior and mediated through kinship in family (making) practices. In Euro-American contexts, this mediation has entailed establishing kin connections via substances passed on through (sexual) reproduction, such as blood or genes (Haraway 1997). Reproduction and reproductive technologies have been instrumentalized to reproduce the notion of race and naturalize racial exclusion, oppression, and colonialism in every realm of life, including the family/nation (TallBear 2018; Wade 2014).
Generally, racialization is part of the (transnational) gamete markets (e.g., Bergmann 2011; Thompson 2006). Racialized notions of the world are at work when people choose destinations for reproductive journeys (e.g., Bergmann 2011; Kroløkke 2017; Vertommen, Pavone and Nahman 2022; Homanen 2018). For example, many Westerners don’t consider East Europeans to be their national kin, true Europeans, or white in terms of culture and class, yet countries such as the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Estonia have been destinations for many white travelers from Western regions seeking donor gametes to ensure their family's racial stability (Gunnarsson Payne 2015; Speier 2016; Vlasenko 2021). In the case of Finland, it is mostly other Nordics coming to Finland for (perceived) white “Nordic” eggs.
The identity-release register database device also alters kinship practices at Finnish clinics by altering the matching of donors with intended parents as a practice of belonging in terms of race/ethnicity/nationality (see also Homanen 2018). Generally, the norm of matching at the clinics is such that children born from donor IVF should not diverge too much from the family “environment” into which they are born. “Environment” refers to the intended parents’ physical characteristics, as the legislation directs matching on the basis of appearance.
In practice, it is the matching of ethnic and racial characteristics that seems to matter the most, as is apparent in the following interview extract: We…hope that the donor will not diverge a lot from the environment into which the child is born.…Like of course, we always recommend that [one choose a donor who shares] one's ethnic origin. (Clinic A, doctor 1, interview) Only when we have had a quite dark-skinned lady and of course a few darker [white] donors too. But we aim not to make a mess of races. (Clinic B, coordinator, interview)
By contrast, height, eye color, and hair color are treated as relatively unimportant in matching; with those characteristics, the complexity of inheritability is acknowledged. But this does not apply to skin tone, which instead seems to invoke the notion that “one drop” of nonwhite blood makes a person “of color.” The one-drop rule—very much alive in the transnational fertility sector of today (Thompson 2006; Homanen 2018)—has its origins in the twentieth-century United States, where it served as a prominent legal principle of racial classification. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of African ancestry should be considered black (colored in historical terms) (Thompson 2006.).
A matching resemblance is what most recipients desired, and again ethnic origin and skin tone appeared to be paramount. For example, recipients said they would “be happy just with a white Finnish-looking donor” or refer to wanting the “Nordic look.”
When asked why ethnic or racial resemblance is so important, staff and recipients alike often indicated it is in the child's best interest. Concerns were raised about potential problems for families and family relations: So if on top there are these differences in physical appearance…like a child with really dark skin tone, then there might be even more pressure on the child. That's what I think.…In cases where it is like this, it might be best if the starting point is that the child resembles the family it is born into. (Clinic B, doctor 1, interview)
Reproductive technologies that allow intended parents to select (socially) desirable donors can be thought of as a way race, racialization and racism appear in today's society. As Ruha Benjamin (2016) argues, race and racism are mobilized not so much by top-down eugenic policies or explicit references to race anymore, but by allowing, encouraging, or even obliging consumer-citizens to make (normative) racial(ized) genetic family “choices.”
One (white) intended parent explained that she would prefer to have a white egg donor in the best interest of the child, so the child could belong to the family more “easily.” For her, the choice of a white donor seemed to be authorized wherever possible: I think [about the interest of] the child as well, maybe we’re not the [best] parents for that child [of a different ethnic background]. I also have friend families that have children from other ethnic backgrounds, and the children, they see two parents who have nothing in common with them [in appearance]. And then you have to raise your child very, very well, and I think it's not impossible, definitely not, because I also see success stories. But I think if you have the ability [to choose the same ethnic group], I think it's good. But for the rest, I don’t think it matters. If it was a child with blue eyes and brown hair, it would be OK. (Recipient from the Netherlands, interview)
The recipients are not saying they would never have a donor/child from a different ethnic background (implying skin color and race) but, if possible, through the (transnational) donor markets and enabled by these technologies, they should.
The idea that race, racialization, and racism appear in less discernible ways than in top-down policies—for example, in technological practices that allow intended parents to select socially desirable traits in donors—resonates with scholarship on technologies of belonging. M’charek, Schramm and Skinner (2014a; 2014b) suggest that race and nation can have an absent presence in cases where it is impossible to identify them in policies and protocols.
How does the register intervene in practices and logics of racial matching within sociotechnical clinical practices? Recipients generally seemed satisfied with the state-maintained database of donors. Professionals pointed out that cross-border travelers specially like Finland's state register. However, the reason was not (only) openness about donor identity. Consider the following account: After a Norwegian couple's embryo transfer, I talk with them for a bit. I ask why they picked Finland as their destination to access donor eggs. The woman answers that it was because “Finns do look like Norwegians” and “there is open donation here.” I ask her to elaborate. She says she means there is a state register. Then she continues by saying “the donor is truly known.” I ask: “So that there are no unpleasant surprises?” I had health conditions in mind. The woman nods and repeats: “Us Norwegians and Finns look alike.” (Clinic C, fieldnotes)
Thus, a state register device that was built to ensure children's moral right to know the donor's identity and the principle of openness acts in practice as a guarantor of the Nordic ethnoracial origin of donors, and hence of future offspring. The way race and nation appear in the clinical practices that implement the policy of openness is not disclosed in the policy itself. When I discussed this with clinic staff, I was told that before the register, cross-border travelers had been particularly concerned that donors might be Russian.
While the recipients I talked to were uncomfortable elaborating on the issue of looking like/relating to other Nordics rather than Russians, other researchers report that Nordic recipients who travel to East Europe for donor eggs refuse Russian donors on the basis of ethnic stereotypes (Gunnarsson Payne 2015; Bergmann 2011). In countries along the Russian border, this concern may have historical roots. Finland belonged to Russia for the period 1809–1917, and it still takes special political and economic interest in Russia as a neighboring superpower. Anti-Russian sentiment may also stem from a more general devaluing of East Europeans linked to the Soviet era: socialist history and culture are considered undesirable and “less white” (e.g., Vlasenko 2021).
In the context of Nordic transnational (egg) gamete donation, the policy purpose of the register-as-device, which is to force open donations, has led to clinical practices where the device reproduces white Nordicness and enacts Nordic kin-ness through traceability, in the (supposed) best interest of enabling the (donor-conceived) child to belong more easily and “naturally” in the family. Furthermore, the register is devised to reproduce non-Russian kin-ness, since Russia is excluded from the family and kin nations.
When the register device acts as a device for belonging to race/nation like this, it is rendered a device for the transnational market of which Finland is part of (and to the extent that it is part of it). As Muniesa, Millo and Callon (2007) argue, there are many kinds of sociotechnical actors and actions that need not be economic in themselves, but become economic actors and devices through some aspect. The authors use the example of a nuclear reactor which can be considered as a molecular device (providing an encounter between atomic particles), but which can also be “economized” in the realm of nuclear power econometrics. In my case study, the government register device becomes a market device by virtue of its contribution to the construction of Nordic transnational and racializing egg donation markets and mobilities.
Conclusions: A Device for Family, Nation, and Post-Socialism
I have focused on the identity-release register as an assisted reproduction sociotechnical database device that intervenes in the kinship practices of donor IVF clinics, within the Nordic context of transnational egg donation and its markets. Analyzing the register as a device helps grasp how its governmental scheme of openness is instrumentalized to (strategically) order relations and relatedness across different sites. In these practices and processes, the administrative function of openness and/in the best interest of the child holds, but mutates at the site(s) of everyday clinical practice. The register database can be viewed as a specific technology of belonging in family/race/nation. Key here is how the register is devised to naturalize intended parenthood at this nexus of sociotechnical practices. Practices of kinship and family that emphasize heredity also mediate racial belonging, but they do so only implicitly, as is common with today's institutional technological race-making (M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014a; 2014b; Benjamin 2016; 2019). Race and racism are mobilized here not by top-down eugenic policies, but by allowing, encouraging, or even obliging consumer-citizens to make (normative) racial(ized) genetic family “choices” (in the best interest of the child) (Benjamin 2016; 2019; see also Rose and Novas 2005). In this respect, this analysis contributes to critical scholarship that has illuminated how racially stratified neo-eugenics are at play in contemporary ARTs (e.g., Valdez and Deomampo 2019; Vertommen, Pavone and Nahman 2022).
The establishment of the donor register ART device follows the larger cultural shift toward openness in family relations in the best interest of the child. This contrasts with the results of previous studies on assisted third-party reproduction that show how fertility clinics routinize, normalize, and naturalize assisted reproduction in favor of the intended parents and their privacy, often aided by discourses of anonymous, unconditional gift relations (Thompson 2005; 2011; Almeling 2011). Given that biological connections and genetic relatedness are culturally prioritized and associated with permanence, it is perhaps unsurprising that the identity-release register might be perceived as a threat to the exclusive parental status and rights of intended parents. This was the case in the clinics where I conducted fieldwork.
Overall, however, this analysis confirms the ongoing legitimization of the “natural” basis for kinship and family through the strategic naturalization of assisted reproduction (Thompson 2005). In practice, the register is devised to turn a third-party reproductive arrangement into a contractual arrangement that entails civic responsibilities and rights. As donors in Finland are unpaid, these contractual relations and roles are conceptualized as civic gift relations more easily than as reproductive employment (cf. Cooper and Waldby 2014). Within the contractual framework, the threat to recipient parents’ family boundaries and intent is managed by differentiating between claims to one's own tissue and subsequent claims to a relationship with the children. The register is formulated to support parenthood and family belonging based on intent, with no perceived threat to child welfare or family privacy.
In the third-party reproductive arrangement with identity-release, donors’ roles—as curious information sources, (fairy) godmothers, friends, and oddities in the family tree—are also ways to trace meaningful yet nonthreatening relations (cf. Almeling 2011; Gilman 2020). These roles and kin connections are established by the register device, which by releasing identifying information requires donors to prepare to form relationships with donor offspring.
The identity-release register database also intervenes in the naturalization of kinship through practices of matching donors with recipients. Resemblance matching is the norm, with an emphasis on (perceived) ethnoracial resemblance. It is built into Finnish legislation on ARTs and clinical practice that racialized resemblance determines family belonging, and that is how families should be built in the children's best interest. Finnish practice determines that racial belonging should “naturally” inform or implicate family belonging (and vice versa). The notion that this “makes things easier in life” is often a vague reference to racism and its effects on interracial families. For white people, the choice of a white (Nordic) donor wherever possible seems authorized and even irresistible. Finland has become the destination for donor eggs in the Nordic region, and Nordic intended parents are pulled to Finland by imaginaries of Nordic whiteness, kin, and ethnicity that help them “naturalize” their family via donor matching.
The state's donor identity register device has mutated into a state guarantee of Nordicness and Nordic and European kin-ness, especially non-Russian kin-ness. It may be interpreted as a reproducer of national and ethnic stereotypes. This can be seen as part of the broader history of ARTs’ appropriation by economic and government policy, as technologies to strategically assist colonialism and nation-building through reproduction and the family (e.g., Bergmann 2011; Vora and Iyengar 2017; Weinbaum 2004; see also Homanen 2018). In Europe, this requires us to recognize the similarities between the Othering processes of postcolonialism and post-socialism (e.g., Mulinari et al. 2009; Vlasenko 2021). There is a long history of discourse about Russians and other post-socialist populations that resembles characterizations of the colonial South—for instance, as non-European and primitive (Vuorela 2009). East European levels of whiteness and desirability are linked not just to donors’ phenotypes but also to socialist history, culture, and class (Vlasenko 2021).
The donor identity register device has become an (assisted reproductive) technology of racial, ethnic and national belonging (M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014a) where sociotechnical systems and practices, including economic systems and practices, enact biologized identity (e.g., Lee and Voigt 2020; M’charek, Schramm and Skinner 2014b; Widmer 2014). By producing particular population categories, this governmental database has become part of a shift whereby life sciences and technologies alter practices of family/race/nation. Clinical practices show how technology, race, and contemporary enactments of Europeanness are entangled. The register database and the data it contains are not isolated from the prevailing cultural, family, and kin value system, and biological differences come to perform ethnoracial difference.
The donor ID register does not contain any information on donor ethnicity or racial or any other characteristics as there is a ban on recording ethnicity in Finnish registers because that is believed to protect against racism. Hence, race (and racism) emerges through spatiotemporal orderings of disparate components that are strategically drawn together in this transnational fertility market. The absent presence of race in Europe continues, as M’charek, Schramm and Skinner (2014a) note.
On a sociopolitical level, this analysis sheds light on the (unintended) consequences of the prevailing identity-release policy, also present in other Euro-American contexts, which maintains that it is in the best interest of the children (to have the option) to know the identity of their genetic parents, and that the donors’ responsibility is to share background information. In clinical practice involving many participants, there are diverse manifestations of openness and secrecy, proposing a reconfiguration of policies and practices to acknowledge the multifaceted, evolving, and distinct ways in which the register assumes significance in peoples’ everyday (family) lives and organizations’ work practices. In the context of Nordic state registers’ data compilation practices, the Finnish gamete donor register is in practice used as guarantee of racial and ethnic origin, which is precisely what the legislation against recording ethnic/racial background purported to avoid in efforts to fight racism.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by two projects. Two Academy of Finland projects have been involved: Academy Research Fellow Project number 321711 “Everyday Ethics of Reproductive Outsourcing: Making Good Life in the Era of Biocapitalism (EEROS)” and Academy Project number 362800 “Gendered Ethics of Reproductive Time: Science, Technology and the Market (ReproTime).” I would like to thank the Valda research team and gender studies research seminar participants from Tampere University for excellent comments on different versions of this article. A special thanks goes to Professors Mianna Meskus and Venla Oikkonen. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for revisions. Finally, thank you to my generous research participants without whom this research would not be possible.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland, (grant number 321711, 362800).