From ‘Virgin Births’ to ‘Octomom’: Representations of Single Motherhood via Sperm Donation in the UK News

Abstract

The use of sperm donation by single women has provoked public, professional and political debate. Newspapers serve as a critical means of both broadcasting this debate and effecting a representation of this user group within the public sphere. This study uses the theory of social representations to examine how single motherhood by sperm donation has been represented in the UK news over time. The study sampled news coverage on this topic in eight British newspapers during three 4‐year periods between the years 1988 and 2012. The dataset of news reports (n = 406) was analysed using a qualitative approach. Findings indicated that UK media reports of single women using donor sperm are underpinned by conventional categories of the ‘personal’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘natural’ that when paired with their corollaries produce a representation of this user group as the social ‘other’. The amount of coverage on this topic over time was found to vary according to the political orientation of different media sources. Using key concepts from social representations theory, this article discusses the relationship between themata and anchoring in the maintenance of representations of the social ‘other’ in mass mediated communication. Findings are explained in relation to theoretical conceptions of the mass media and its position within the public sphere. It is argued that the use of personal narratives in news reports of single mothers by sperm donation may have significant implications for public understandings of this social group. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Single mothers by choice: Parenting and child adjustment in middle childhood.

“…Criticism of single mothers by choice reached its peak in the United States in 2009, when a single woman gave birth to octuplets following donor insemination (Garrison, Yoshino, & Ho, 2009; Pennings, Klitzman, & Zegers-Hochschild, 2016). In the United Kingdom, a change in the law in 2008 that no longer required fertility clinics to take account of the child’s need for a father, but instead to consider the child’s need for supportive parenting, sparked controversy in the British Parliament (McCandless & Sheldon, 2010) and media (Zadeh & Foster, 2016). The original law meant that most fertility clinics only offered treatment to couples who would create traditional families; the new legislation opened the door to single women.…”

With or Without You – Starting Single-parent Families: A Qualitative Study on How Single Parents by Choice Reorganise Their Lives to Facilitate Single Parenthood from a Life Course Perspective

“…The question of whether it is possible to start a family alone has already been extensively discussed by others (Golombok, 2013; Hertz, 2011; Hertz & Nelson, 2017; Zadeh & Foster, 2016). The findings reveal that some people are able to make such a parental transition on their own.…”

Hardworking women: representations of lone mothers in the Swedish daily press

“…However, our study also demonstrates that although she is "ordinary" in some respects, she is also continuously represented as a "social other" (cf. Zadeh and Foster 2016). The common use of "lone mothers" as an example of people in financial hardship who need (further) societal support, risks stigmatising and/or victimising the single mother, although this may be counterbalanced by the agency and resourcefulness emphasised in descriptions of lone mothers as hardworking, resilient and admirable.…”