Week 1 - Initial Thoughts — Emma Caroline Thompson

Family can be formed and defined in so many different ways, but biology has always been the most common family bond. - Wendy Kramer

Initial Research Questions & Thoughts

Who am I? Where did I come from?

What does the new modern family look like?

What is it like growing up not knowing half of your genetic makeup?

What is the process in searching for your donor half siblings?

How important is knowing your genetic background for identity creation?

Random Thoughts

The new kind of extended family
The new opportunities created through sperm donation
Story of the new American family
Displaying a different type of family that is appearing in america
The desire to know where we come from
Everyone wants to know where they come from
The “not knowing" comes in different stages but it is still all there
The idea to create a new community

How my project answers my capstone question?

I think that by using my own experience of being a dibling* and also using the experiences of other people discovering their own diblings*, I hope to show others what the new American family unit looks like in the 21st century. We didn’t grow up with each other, but feel an underlying connection with each other. I hope that by using my own personal experience I can inform the public about this new type of family unit.

*a dibling is a word used to describe a donor half sibling

My Audience

I believe that my audience is anyone/everyone who wants to find where they belong and want to learn where they come from. The topic resonates with everyone because everyone wants to discover who they are in order to help them determine who they will become. For families with two biological parents they don’t necessarily understand the need to find where they come from because they already know their lineage. But this is not the case for children conceived with donor egg or sperm. They are missing half of their background and actively want to find about their background in order to help in their identity creation. Especially in my formative years I have become more and more interested in my missing half. I believe in order for identity creation to happen one must know where they came from.

My Initial Content

For my initial content outline, I planned on using a wide array of articles from accredited news sources. I hoped that these would be the main source of content and from there I could intertwine my own story throughout my book.

Initial Article Links

Sperm Donor Siblings: Find Family Ties

What It's Like to Find Your 17 Sperm Donor Siblings on the Internet

Sperm Donor Connects with 19 Children He Fathered

Half Siblings from Sperm and Egg Donation

Finding, and Connecting with, Our Son's Sperm Donor Siblings

As I kept working I realized that having a more linear narrative to my capstone would generate a better understanding of my story. In my first week of feedback I received a lot of questions about the donor sibling registry. The DSR is a website created by Wendy Kramer, a mother of a sperm donor conceived child. The website is a place where diblings can connect to other diblings and sometimes even the donor.

With this new realization of the type of content I needed, I arrived upon using Wendy Kramer's book Finding Our Families: A First-of-Its-Kind Book for Donor-Conceived People and Their Families. This book is a comprehensive guide for the growing number of families with donor-conceived children. It discusses some topics such as how and when to tell your child, how to search for half siblings and much more. I believe that using the text from this book I can intertwine my own process of discovering I was a donor-conceived child and meeting my diblings.

If you want order or learn more about the book click here.

My Questionnaire

I wanted my book to include more than just my own thoughts about being a donor-conceived child, but include my diblings as well. In order to do that I created a survey for them to complete with a wide array of questions pertaining to their own family life, connections with diblings, and their thoughts surrounding our donor.

Here are some sample ones:

How would you describe your family?
Did you grow up wondering about the second half of your genetic material?
When did you find out that you were a sperm donor child?
If you have met a half sibling do you see any similarities between you two?
Has meeting your half sibling made you feel different about yourself and your family?
Do you wish that you could have a relationship with the donor
What kind of relationship would you want?
If you had the opportunity what is one question you wish to ask the donor?