María Begoña Leyra

Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Departamento de Trabajo Social y Servicios Sociales

The project focuses on children conceived using assisted reproduction techniques with donor / s (ART-D) or third parties involved, either gamete donors and / or surrogate pregnant women. Using an ecological model of explanation of their experiences, practices and representations to locate the environment and the social agents that contribute (or not) to generate them. We are interested in the intermingling of voices around this group: fathers, mothers and members of the extended family; professionals and other service providers in different fields: education, health, social communication and "culture", as well as associations and self-help groups. The institutional framework in which these families are registered is also considered relevant, while the legislative arrangements and the processes of implementation of public policies or the absence of these could be making a difference in this environment, affecting the representations and self-representations about/of these subjects. It is from this angle that the proposed research integrates the governance perspective, examining the different actors and factors (political, social, economic, technological, ideological) that converge in legislative and public policy designs that, in turn, impact in the ways in which the experiences, the practices of the subjects and the creation of representations are articulated. The concept of reproductive governance focuses on the mechanisms through which different actors, both institutional and private, use legislative and economic instruments, as well as moral or ethical principles and even direct coercion, to guide and control reproductive practices and related behavior. This approach provides a way of projection for the research, as the identification of problems from within society is essential to generate spaces for public discussion, fostering the social inclusion of these individuals and families. The specificity of this group is marked by its integration into families that emerged from a voluntaristic family project, in which the idea of "origins" of the offspring marks a certain exceptionality. The construction that the children make of their "origins" is therefore one of the main thematic pathways that we will investigate, with others such as parenting and filiation, as well as the debates that take place in our society over reproductive matters, among which is the one originated around the maintenance or lifting of the anonymity of the donors, or the one that relates "the origins" of this group with physical and / or mental health problems, which may be giving rise to a hypervigilance on these people and thus contribute to a form of biomedicalization of these lives, and so of a certain social exclusion. The proposal is a conceptual and methodological challenge, as social research on these groups tends to substitute the voices of children or adolescents for those of their reference adults. The project is committed to considering children as competent social agents, who demand adequate research instruments and practices that respect their condition. It starts from privileged conditions of access to these subjects, thanks to the relationship established with their families in previous studies. MAIN RESEARCHERS: María Isabel Jociles and Raquel Medina FINANCING ENTITY: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de Investigación. Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento 2021.

Proyecto I+D 2016-2019 / Investigadoras Principales: Ana María Rivas y Consuelo Álvarez, Universidad Complutense. Otros miembros del equipo de investigación/grupo de trabajo: María Isabel Jociles Fernando Villaamil Begoña Leyra Santiago Agustín José Ignacio Pichardo Raquel Medina Fernando Lores Carla Cubillos Rosa Frasquet Ariadna Ayala

(I+D 2010-2012 / IP: MI Jociles) Social researchers who work in the field of assisted reproduction frequently state that, in contrast to families who adopt, these families resist revealing the origins of their children, either to the people around them or to the children born thanks to gamete donation. Nor do they have narratives about these origins. However, in the research we have carried out previously on Single Mothers by Choice (SMC) we have noted that, when a woman turns to gamete donation because she is “involuntarily without children” because she has no partner, she usually reveals these origins. The same can be said about families composed of lesbian couples, as can be seen in the international literature on the subject. It is different, however, when sterility/infertility is the reason for the decision to turn to gamete donation, this being the case with most of the heterosexual couples who opt for this way of having children. Based on these ideas (which must, nevertheless, be compared and contrasted for the Spanish case with a broad sample of families corresponding to different family models), our research proposal is both quantitative and ethnographic. This proposal leads us to an in-depth inquiry into these families’ tendencies regarding the secret about their children’s origins and, above all, into the strategies that they deploy in this regard, as well as the practices that the professionals who work with them develop with respect to this issue.