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One of the first publicly-recorded actions of the HFEA's apparently ironically-named 'Opening the Register' (OTR) Working Group has in fact been to recommend reversal of the HFEA's current policy of disclosing gamete donor codes to patients and to 'strongly advise' centres to follow its lead (1).

The report of the British Fertility Society's (BFS) Working Party on Sperm Donation Services in the UK (1) recently hit the headlines, following an associated editorial in the British Medical Journal (2). However, the report's proposals for a fundamental overhaul of the current arrangements for organising donor recruitment were considered less 'newsworthy' than suggestions that the maximum number of families containing a child conceived from the gametes of a single donor should be increased (3).

This article considers the disclosure, sharing and exchange of information on being donor conceived within families, drawing on data from a study undertaken with donor‐conceived adults registered with UK Donor Link (a voluntary DNA‐linking register). This paper considers the narratives of how respondents found out they were donor‐conceived and what events triggered disclosure of this information. This paper then goes on to examine the role secrecy played in their family life and uses the concept of ‘display’ to explore how secrecy affected their relationships with their immediate and extended family. Secrets are notoriously ‘leaky’ and we found complex patterns of knowing and uncertainty about whom in the family knew that the person was donor‐conceived. We argue that what is kept secret and from whom provides insights into the multifaceted web of social relationships that can be created by donor‐conception, and how knowledge can be managed and controlled in attempts to display and maintain family narratives of biogenetic connection.

This paper considers how sperm donor-conceived adults registered with a voluntary DNA linking register, UK DonorLink, constructed identity and relatedness by examining two areas: how their identity was affected by becoming aware that they were donor-conceived; and the process of searching for their donor and donor-conceived siblings. The views and experiences of donor-conceived adults has, until recently, been a neglected area. This study is the first to consider the experiences of those searching through a DNA-based register, and contributes to the growing literature on searching. This paper presents qualitative data from a questionnaire-based study with 65 adults conceived following sperm donation. It examines emerging linkages by investigating how ideas of relatedness, kinship and identity were enacted and how narrative certainties were moved and removed by opening up new conceptions of what it means to be ‘related’. Their knowledge of being donor-conceived was both a powerful disrupter and a consolidator of family relationships. No single story of being donor-conceived emerged – with competing narratives about the effects and implications for respondents’ kinship relationships and sense of identity. This study sheds light on how kinship relationships are negotiated and managed in adulthood by those conceived following sperm donation and how this can change over the life-course.