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. 

Privat spermadonation är en växande men fortfarande relativt osynlig väg till familjebildning i Sverige. Utanför vårdens reglerade ramar skapas kontakter mellan donatorer och mottagare genom digitala plattformar och informella nätverk, där frågor om ansvar, relationer och gränser måste hanteras i dialog – och ibland i tystnad. 

I denna avhandling undersöks mäns erfarenheter av att donera sperma privat. Genom intervjuer analyseras hur donatorerna förhandlar sin roll i relation till mottagare, barn och föreställningar om faderskap och maskulinitet. Avhandlingen visar hur donationen rymmer spänningar mellan anonymitet och närvaro, mellan det personliga och det opersonliga, och mellan genetiskt släktskap och socialt ansvar. 

Med utgångspunkt i reproduktiv maskulinitet och centrala föreställningar om faderskap visar studien hur män som donerar sperma privat navigerar ansvar, närvaro och gränsdragningar i delvis oreglerade reproduktiva sammanhang.