Rosanna Hertz

Extremely strong study of kinship in America, investigating how people integrate "donor siblings" into their conceptions of family and self through a series of case studies and a series of chapters drawing conclusions.

The book contains a lot of insights from people who have done a lot of thinking about what family means. Among the many themes: how families decide to draw their lines of kinship (whose family, if anyone's, is the sperm donor? the donor siblings? how do you know?), why individuals or families decide to reach out to donor siblings, how kids make sense of their conception narratives when they are confronted with sex education that is focused on accidental pregnancy avoidance rather than paths to family creation, how extending familial relations to others based only on genetics connects to the queer idea of "family of choice", how a child's donor siblings in some sense equalize birth and non-birth parents, and much more. The authors benefit from very thoughtful study participants, and develop a book that is more than the sum of its parts in its clarity of presentation and juxtaposition of ideas.

Quite a wonderful book that I expect will be widely read by lay and professional folks interested in academic sociology and reproduction. It delves deep on topics that many people connect viscerally with (kinship, nature/nurture, identity), through a useful lens that couldn't have been used even a decade ago, and engages its topic very respectfully to uncover a multitude of useful insights in short order.… (altro)

Very outdated; this book was originally published in 2006 but reads like it was written in the 1980s. Things like lamenting that child support is only based on current income, not imputed income, and that deadbeat dads will refuse to make their court-ordered payments and the court takes no action, both of which are no longer true. I personally found her casual, offhand mention of single middle-class women in America choosing to adopt from abroad as way of further erecting barriers between adopted children and birthmothers to be in particularly poor taste. It's written from a strongly second wave feminist point of view, and has some interesting insights from that perspective, but how much you enjoy this book will depend on how much you personally agree with that perspective.

This is far less of a 'how-to' for women considering single motherhood, and more of a women's studies retrospective on the phenomena.… (altro)