Today there is a sperm market and a growing industrial sector in trade. The sperm banks date back to the 1930s and only involved cattle breeding. It will be about twenty years before the idea of creating human sperm banks emerges and another twenty years for the first commercial establishments to appear in the United States (Daniels and Golden, 2004). Currently, in Europe, the market is dominated by Danish companies whose clientele, consisting of couples (heterosexual or same-sex) and single women, is international. The technique of cryopreservation separates in time and in the donor and recipient space. Does this separation coupled with the possibility of selecting the donor from a very wide range of choices result in new ways of representing birth and kinship? To what extent do these representations, which refer to the notion of gene, mark an accentuation of the biological prism whose Euramerican conceptions of kinship are already strongly impregnated (Schneider, 1968)? Should we see in the genetic discourse only an avatar of the “biologisation” of kinship or, conversely, a significant inflection linked to the emergence of an elective kinship and an individual making reproductive choices?
The analysis of the service offer of two Danish banks makes it possible to propose elements of answer (Déchaux, 2017). They collected data from January to June 2016 on the websites of Cryos International (CI) and European Sperm Bank (ESB). CI presents itself as “the largest sperm bank in the world” with a catalog of 500 donors (in 2016). Sperm purchased by an individual may be delivered to a clinic for medical insemination or at home for insemination performed by the individual. ESB has a catalog of 400 donors (in 2016). She works with clinics or individuals and offers home delivery. The analysis consisted in thematically analyzing the editorial content of the web pages and advertising brochures downloadable on the site from the central part that is the catalog of donors. Knowing which requests respond to these services, how they are used by those who obtain them, refers to another problem, that of uses (Mamo, 2005), which is not dealt with here. The study, therefore, focuses exclusively on the supply of services and secondarily on the conflicts between providers and customers, which confirms that new ways of conceiving both the “project” of birth and that of transmission are emerging. .
Sperm banks and the trade of phenotypes
The service offering of sperm banks is accompanied by marketing discourse, sometimes explicit, often suggested. Explicit speech is expressed through commercial slogans and comments posted on the institutions’ website, intended to explain to consumers what type of need or situation corresponds to what is offered for sale. The suggested speech proceeds with the staging and image of the sections of the site, including the catalog of donors.
What kind of good do the sperm banks sell? Is it a simple biogenetic material, in this case, male gametes in the form of flakes of frozen sperm? Viewing the home page of the CI website (Figure 1) shows no. There are infants of different appearances. The variety of phenotypes is linked to the international character of the clientele that covers more than 80 countries. This iconographic choice reflects the desire to respond to the diversity of requests by starting from the hypothesis, suggested rather than explicitly mentioned, that the couple is looking for a baby that looks like it on a phenotypic level. By clicking on the link “search donor”, the user accesses the catalog. Appears at the top of an infant’s face while the donor’s selection criteria (by default) appear below: size, eye, and hair color, blood type, “race” (actually a category heterogeneous which mixes physical phenotype and cultural traits), etc. A link is thus established between the child and the donor by selecting the desired physical traits. The image of the catalog implies that the characteristics of the donor will be found in the traits of the child. The user is invited to choose his donor according to the profile sought for his child.
According to the selected criteria, appears a list of donors with for each of them a profile summarized in a form. The basic profile corresponds to the morphological and physiological criteria selected by the user. The price of the gametes is specified, it is a function of the mobility and the concentration of the spermatozoa, the available stock and if it is raw or purified sperm (in order to obtain a greater number of functional spermatozoa and of eliminating toxic or damaging substances) for intrauterine insemination or IVF. Added to this is the donor’s medical record, the result of a genetic screening to exclude those carriers of mutations associated with risks of communicable diseases (the list is on the bank’s website) and a background questionnaire. medical relatives. It is also possible to access when it exists, the extended profile of the donor that contains psychosocial information: a voice recording, photos of his child, a handwritten letter and a self-portrait presenting his family and social identity. Thus, on his Adrian sheet (Figure 2) tells that being an “open” donor he undertakes to reveal his identity (his real name, his address, etc.) to the majority of the child. Thanks to this expanded profile, the Internet user can have the impression of getting to know him: to hear his voice, to read his writing, to know who Adrian is, to know his level of education, his job, what he likes in life and the reason he is a sperm donor.
In the broadened profile of the donor most often appear the results of a personality test to identify his temperament is empathic? does he trust him? Is he booked or extroverted? rational or intuitive? Presented in the form of scores, curves, star graphs, the results facilitate the comparison between the donors. The use of a numerical language locating the person in relation to the “average” as well as the identification and the commentary of strengths and weaknesses express an evaluative intention which is based on a reference norm, that of a balanced masculinity, never explicitly defined. With this psychological information, the banks encourage their clients to see the donor as a person in their own right whose competition goes beyond the sale of biological material: because it embodies a human profile associated with its gametes, choose the “right partner” is crucial. According to the banks’ marketing discourse, the client/donor relationship must be thought of as a matching link whose issue goes beyond the sale of reproduction cells alone [1].
At ESB, the test allows the user to build with the donor the pair corresponding to his preferences. It includes an analysis of the combinations of pairs made from the generic psychological types to which the donor and the user belong (the results of his own test can be obtained through a link provided by the bank). This service, which proposes to optimize the choice of the parent based on an analysis of the combinations of temperaments, likens the donor to a partner, not conjugal, sexual or in love, but biogenetic to generate a child with a specific psycho-cognitive profile that would result from the combined influence of the “couple” formed by the female genitor (the client of the bank) and the donor.
In view of the offer of services and the marketing discourse that accompanies it, it appears that sperm banks sell not just biogenetic materials but phenotypic, corporal and psychological profiles. They base the highlighting of the phenotype on a correlation, or even an equivalence, between the biogenetic component of the gamete (its genotype) and the desired phenotype. Although this is not the subject of any explicit statement in the institutions’ marketing communication, there is every reason to believe that the phenotype is transmitted genetically as if the gamete were a kind of miniature human being, a preformed phenotypic image. The banks thus take up a deterministic and essentialist conception of genetics making the genome the infrastructure of the person, his physical and cognitive plan, a belief certainly widespread in the cultural representations of the gene but belied by advances in research. genomics.
“Genetized” kinship
This “genocentrism” sometimes gives rise to an explicit marketing discourse that defines kinship in genetic terms and makes DNA the surest foundation for parentage and germanity. Banks offer their clients options to reserve gametes from the selected donor. The reservation, which can be up to ten years for a cost ranging from € 50 (three months) to € 1000 (ten years), guarantees that it will not be necessary to change the donor during treatment (which can be spread out over a long period of time) and, in the case of successive births, that the children will come from the same parent. The reservation of gametes is included in the offer of services of the two establishments studied and is the object of an explicit promotional argument aimed at convincing the customers to use them. On his website, CI says, “Do not wait: reserve your donor sperm online now. […] Do not take the risk that the sperm of your donor is no longer available; do not take the risk of having to change sperm donors during treatment; keep the possibility of having other children from the same donor. […] Children will be genetically 100% related and will be more likely to resemble each other; if you have successfully conceived a child with the donor you have selected, you have every chance of succeeding again; you know what to expect your children will be a reference for each other in their personal identities “. These recommendations emphasize the biogenetic dimension of the link of germanity. Not only is the genetic link shared with the donor supposed to provide the assurance of a bodily and psychological similarity between siblings, but it would provide, through the sharing of the same heredity, a solid foundation for relationships in the siblings.
Banks even offer an exclusive booking formula for an unlimited period, the customer reserving the exclusive gametes of a specific donor. It costs between € 12,000 and € 17,000 depending on the establishment. The couple can therefore be certain that the straws will not be used for others and that children born to this donor will not have half-brothers or half-sisters in another family. This offer of service plays on the fear of random incest through the possible contact, in the future sexual life of children, gametes deemed too close, that is to say from the same donor. This fear, which is at the heart of the ordinary representations of kinship (Porqueres i Gené, 2017), is here put forward for commercial purposes — to sell more glitter and for a longer duration — in the context of a speech that promotes to the rank of “true Germanness” a strictly genetic link. Its foundation is not ethical or ontological, that is to say relating to what is or should be the kinship link, but pragmatic and prudential: customers are invited to minimize the risks and, to do so, to enhance the genetic dimension of kinship.
A final illustration of this propensity to “genetize” kinship is found in the advice given to future parents. Addressing the user who would discover the services offered by the bank, a section of the ESB site describes the process leading to a “successful treatment of infertility”: among the nine steps listed, the last, entitled “Plan for siblings “, recommends to future parents to think carefully about the advantages for children of having a same parent and encourages them to choose one of the booking formulas. Thus, it is kinship that is “genetized” (through germanity, ancestry and partnership between the donor and the donor) and not simply the reproductive link.
Referring to the idea of a consubstantiality supposed to establish the ultimate foundation of kinship, it is the blood that traditionally in the West was the most used metaphor. What does this transition from blood to gene mean, manifested in the marketing discourse of sperm banks but also identifiable in society with the ever wider diffusion of a genetic reading chart of life and the growing practice of tests and examinations? genetic? The answer is not evident. For Imaz (2018), the blood metaphor refers to an inherited and transmitted entity that is neither generated nor changed. Diasio (2008) emphasizes the difference and the complementarity between blood and gene in representations of heredity: blood is a stable entity associated with a linear temporality that produces collective identity; the gene has a more random, capricious, volatile and mobile character, it certainly invests the person but in a discontinuous and inconstant way, thus skipping a generation. The gene would express a more contingent and individualizing representation of heredity. This raises the question of “genomic uniqueness” (Duboule, 2018): what is the genome the expression? Does it belong to the individual or kinship group? Is it the DNA of the ancestors who owns us or is it not the opposite (“my genome is me first”)? The study of the conflicts between sperm banks and clients makes it possible to better define this symbolic universe of the notion of gene applied to kinship.
Boomerang effect and myth of the perfect genome
Focusing on the genetic dimension of ancestry leads to the emergence of a dispute between sperm banks and some client couples who consider that they have been harmed by the profile of the donor they have chosen. In the summer of 2016, a Canadian couple sued a US institution and JC Aggeles, the donor chosen by the couple, whose identity was unfortunately revealed during an exchange of emails with the bank. The couple whose child was conceived with the gametes of Aggeles thinks they have been deceived about the donor’s profile after discovering that he suffers from schizophrenia and mental disorders, that his level of education and his IQ do not correspond. what is in his file, that his photos have been retouched and that he was sentenced in the past to eight months in prison for delinquent acts. Since 2016, nine other complaints from three countries have been filed, gametes of Aggeles having been the source of 36 births between 2000 and 2014
At the heart of this case lies the accusation of fraud or, at least, negligence in writing the file of the donor Aggeles, his catalog profile does not match the biological, psychological and social phenotype of the person. But couples are especially afraid that their children will inherit the mental disorders from which Aggeles suffers or even his criminal predispositions. In this regard, the Canadian couple’s lawyer states: “At least 36 children are at risk of psychosis”. Other similar cases exist. In May 2016, a client sued another US bank that she accused of not supplying the requested gametes: the sire is “African American” while she had selected a “Caucasian” profile.
A North American association, the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), created in 2000, has set itself the goal of allowing people born as a result of a donation of gametes to have access to the knowledge of the donor, designated “parent genetic “by the association. The DSR carries out an intelligence watch identifying the complaints addressed worldwide to the sperm banks. Most relate to genetic diseases that could be transmitted to the child by the donor. The genetic screening practices of the banks are denounced as insufficient: the tests would only cover a limited number of pathologies; they would be too irregular in case of repeated donations. The number of children born from the same donor would also be too high. Taking advantage of advances in genomics, DSR requires banks to sequencing the donor genome in order to optimize their biogenetic selection and to minimize or even eliminate the risk of genetic transmission of pathologies. A large registry is also required to consolidate genetic and medical information about donors, providing families with a genetic “traceability” that is considered essential for medical care in case of a declared illness in children.
The dispute over donor profiles and the claim of access to origins for the purposes of genetic traceability is a sign that the genocentrism characterizing the marketing discourse of banks does indeed produce effects in the representations and social practices of a number of parental couples. At least part of the clientele takes over the genetic determinism promoted by the commercial communication of the establishments. In the Aggeles case, the Canadian couple feared that the donor’s mental disorders could be found in his child, as if schizophrenia was determined by a few “faulty” genes. However, according to the current state of knowledge, the reality is more complex: if schizophrenia does have a genetic component, more than a hundred genetic variations are associated with the risk of developing this disease, each of them having only a minor effect. The image of the “perfect” genome — or “faulty” what, on an epistemological level, returns to the same — at the origin of the lawsuits and the demand of a traceability of the gift is a myth which denies the role “epigenetic Acting on gene expression, environmental and behavioral factors in the phenotype configuration. The vast majority of pathologies are actually multifactorial, only a tiny fraction (so-called monogenic diseases) resulting from the mutation of a single gene.
The genetic marketing of banks is caught in its own trap after an effect that could be described as a boomerang. It has helped to reinforce the idea that the person’s profile is germinating in his DNA and, above all, that it would be enough to proceed to a trait selection by the trait of the donor to obtain a child with this or that property. Now, it is in the name of this same genetic reductionism that banks are accused of not having done what is necessary to remove donors carrying genes supposedly “faulty”. This boomerang effect could lead to a higher bid for genetic testing, further reinforcing the belief that DNA determines the person’s traits and the “true” outlines of his or her relationship.
The beliefs about kinship are really at stake. To be designated by the ambiguous syntagma “biological parent” rather than parent, as in DSR’s argumentation, is the sign of a process of “genetization”, that is to say of a greater indistinctness between the kinship as an institution and social representation on the one hand and the biological reality of genetic connections arising from the reproduction of the other. To this confusion between kinship and reproduction, already highlighted by Sarah Franklin (2001) who shows how, in the context of new reproductive technologies, genetic information is appropriate and re-imagined by individuals to produce relationships and to include them in body, is added the idea of a conditionality of birth which, beyond the couple who feels ready or not, this time concerns the unborn child himself. The insistence on the genetic component of the person and heredity gradually transforms the status of birth: giving birth no longer means the unconditional acceptance of a new life but its conditioning by the antenatal selection of a profile determined phenotypic of the child. On this point, the “genetisation” of kinship tends to differ from its naturalization by biology to the extent that it depicts an individual who has become an “entrepreneur of kinship” who is called upon to produce the best of himself and who, by his choices, configure the genetic complexion of his offspring. An individualistic, entrepreneurial and consumerist conception of birth and transmission associated with an elective kinship, which is more of a construct than of a given (Strathern 1992, Viveiros de Castro 2004), would replace the conservative and organic one that characterized until then the reference to nature in terms of consanguinity.
