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The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.
Sperm Stories examines the ethical dimensions of Danish donor sperm as it is marketed globally, often framed through the playful narrative of "little Vikings" conquering the world. Drawing from media coverage, regulatory shifts, sperm banks, fertility clinics, and the personal accounts of fertility travellers, the book highlights how ethics shape the experiences of donor families. By interweaving these stories, Adrian invites readers to envision a more response-able ethics of third-party reproduction.
A landmark study, this book draws on twenty years of dedicated sociological research on donor sperm reproduction to combine extraordinary empirical depth, theoretical innovation, and a remarkably comprehensive analysis of the ethical dimensions surrounding donor conception. Adrian’s practice-based ethical thinking is exactly what the world urgently needs amid the global expansion of third-party reproduction.
— Chia-Ling Wu,Professor, Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University
Few medical technologies are as ethically charged as those that facilitate and surround third party reproduction. Based on decades-long and careful ethnographic engagement with some of the largest sperm banks in the world in Denmark, Sperm Stories approaches ethics not as a set of adjudicative principles, rather as socio-materially woven into the everyday practices of sperm banking. In doing so, Stine Adrian has provided us with a compelling and much-needed analytic for understanding how medical technologies can be more response-able. Sperm Stories is essential reading for medical students, practitioners and social scholars alike.
— Ayo Wahlberg, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (author of Good Quality: the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China)
In this compelling account, world leading scholar of assisted reproduction Stine Adrian demonstrates that sperm is generative not simply of children, but also of heated debates about rights to assisted reproduction, the politics and ethics of global markets in gametes, and the commodification of life itself. This book is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand the complex dynamics of a now newly normalized global trade in human reproduction.
— Bronwyn Parry, Professor, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University
Stine Willum Adrian is a professor of sociology specializing in health, welfare, and qualitative methods at the Department of Social Sciences, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a PhD in feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) and has spent over 20 years conducting interdisciplinary ethnographic research on the use of reproductive technologies of life and death. Throughout her career, Adrian has cultivated a deep interest in the emergence and impact of ethics—exploring what ethics does and how it might be reimagined to foster greater responsibility and responsiveness – a response-able ethics.
Chapter 1. Emerging Ethics: Subversive Practices on the Border and Boundaries
Chapter 2. Donor Sperm as Genes
Chapter 3. Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
Chapter 4. Traveling for Treatment
Chapter 5. Selecting Sperm
Chapter 6. Modes of Care: Ethics at the Clinics
Chapter 7. Who’s Your Daddy? Reconceiving Family with DNA Testing and Online Groups
Chapter 8. Reconceiving the Ethics of Donor Sperm in Response-able Ways