en sociologisk analys av privata spermadonatorers berättelser om reproduktion och faderskap
Av Sjöberg, Liselotte
Private sperm donation has become an increasingly visible yet understudied form of reproduction in Sweden. While assisted reproduction is largely formalized and regulated through public healthcare, digital platforms have enabled a parallel and more informal reproductive arena where donors and recipients negotiate arrangements outside institutional frameworks. This dissertation explores how men who donate sperm privately understand, negotiate, and give meaning to their role as donors. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twelve men and an analysis of seventy-one online donor profiles collected between 2014 and 2020, the study examines private sperm donation as a relational and emotionally complex practice. The analysis focuses on how donors navigate negotiations with recipients regarding anonymity, openness, responsibility, and expectations of contact. It also investigates donors’ internal negotiations, including their motivations, moral reasoning, emotional ambivalence, and the ways they reflect on fertility, genetics, and resemblance. The findings show that private donation cannot be understood as a purely instrumental exchange of genetic material. Instead, it constitutes a moral and imaginative terrain shaped by broader cultural ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, kinship, and reproductive responsibility. Donors occupy ambiguous positions—neither fathers nor strangers—while simultaneously distancing themselves from parenthood and imagining future relational possibilities. By foregrounding men’s perspectives, the dissertation contributes new empirical and theoretical knowledge about reproduction outside formal institutions and highlights how contemporary meanings of fatherhood and masculinity are both reproduced and renegotiated in emerging reproductive practices