Sebastian Mohr

Beyond motivation: on what it means to be a sperm donor in Denmark

This paper, analyzing interviews with men that donate their semen in Denmark, explores what it means to be a sperm donor. Breaking with the assumption that men have a specific and clearly identifiable motivation to become sperm donors, this paper leaves the confinement of such an accountable actor model implied in asking for mens motivations to donate semen. Instead, the author describes the experiences of sperm donors to show how the moral, organizational, and biomedical-technological context of sperm donation in Denmark makes for enactments of moral selves as well as specific embodiments of masculinity. Instead of looking for motivations that can be accounted for, the author engages with the question of how donating semen affords men the experience of moral and gendered selves.

Containing Sperm—Managing Legitimacy Lust, Disgust, and Hybridity at Danish Sperm Banks

The governance of assisted reproduction in Denmark through legislation regards semen as a reproductive substance and thus restricts donor semen’s reproductive potential by setting terms for its use. What is not addressed in legislation is semen’s status as an ambiguous male bodily fluid that also carries other meanings. Making semen into a governable and exchangeable substance happens instead on the practice level. Based on qualitative interviews with Danish sperm donors and ethnographic fieldwork at Danish sperm banks, this article explores how material-semiotic practices at Danish sperm banks contribute to the legitimacy of sperm donation by making donor semen into a governable reproductive substance. Inspired by the containers that are used at sperm banks, in order to handle donor semen, these practices are understood as containment practices. By managing donor semen’s lust and disgust potential, containment practices help to secure donor semen’s conversion into an exchangeable means of donor-assisted reproduction.

Transforming social contracts: the social and cultural history of IVF in Denmark

The introduction of IVF in Denmark was accompanied by social transformations: contestations of medical authority, negotiations of who might access reproductive biomedicine and changes in individual and social identity due to reproductive technologies. Looking at the making of Danish IVF, this article sketches its social and cultural history by revisiting the legal, medical, technological and social developments that characterized the introduction of IVF in Denmark as well as by contextualizing the social research on the uses and impacts of IVF carried out in the 1980s and 1990s within these developments. The making of Danish IVF is presented as a transformative event in so far as it changed Denmark from being a society concerned about the social consequences of reproductive technologies to a moral collective characterized by a joined sense of responsibility for Denmark’s procreative future.

Regulating the ‘good’ donor: the expectations and experiences of sperm donors in Denmark and Victoria, Australia

Regulating the good donor : The expectations and experiences of sperm donors in Denmark and Victoria, Australia