‘A lifelong decision’: a qualitative study of retrospective perceptions held by egg and sperm donors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RESEARCH QUESTION: What is the retrospective perception of past gamete donors, given the paradigm shift in donor anonymity practices? DESIGN: This study draws on an exploratory qualitative study involving semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 sperm donors and 12 egg donors, conducted an average of 31 years after their first donation. All participants had been contacted by donor offspring. RESULTS: This study examines how personal life courses and socio-historical contexts shape past gamete donors' perceptions of their donations as they change over time. Findings show that, at the time of donation, the donors' personal histories and the anonymous donation paradigm fostered a view of donation as a time-limited action. However, as time has passed, the donors have gained new experiences, achieved new statuses and witnessed shifts in the social context, leading them to re-evaluate the implications of their donations - namely, the birth of human beings with needs and rights. This realization has prompted the donors to consider the long-term impact of their donations, which has transformed those donations into enduring commitments. CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to common assumptions, past donors are receptive to social and personal changes. The study demonstrates donors' evolving perception of their donation as an act with long-term effects and highlights the importance of recognizing donors as essential actors within third-party reproduction, deserving of specific consideration and care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".