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Double donation challenges our deepest assumptions about family and genetics.

Couples face questions, double binds, and uncertainty that few people understand.

Belonging grows through lived experience, not shared DNA.

A double donation of sperm and eggs; a baby carried by the intended mother and raised by the intended parents, but genetically not related to either of them.

You've probably met a family built through double donation, but would you know?

More of these families exist now than at any point in history.

We don't even know how many double-donor families there are. But we do know this: in the UK, one of the few countries that keeps track, double-donor cycles have increased dramatically since 1991 (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority [HFEA], 2021). The US doesn't track these families at all (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024). And in lots of countries, creating embryos this way is not even legal (International Federation of Fertility Societies [IFFS], 2021).

Double donation challenges one of our deepest assumptions about what makes a family a family: genetics. It stretches us enough to come to terms with egg or sperm donation alone, so the loss of both is harder. More confronting, as they don't fit into the stories we traditionally tell ourselves about families.

Our society only counts what it has a conceptual category for. You've seen it in the school family tree project. In the term 'real' as in real mother, or real father. Our culture treats genes as the gold standard of belonging. Everything else? A workaround.

"I tried to explain it to my great aunt, who told me it's very unnatural. Well, I suppose... I mean, yes, I feel so embarrassed." —Rachaeli and Simon*

Double-donor families disrupt the genetic model of family so completely that culturally, we have still to develop a space for them. Society places an asterisk beside these families as if they are somehow so completely different from the rest of us that they don't fit in. The asterisk version is true or real, but with an exception. Surely we can do better.

We........

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