In progress

Conducted in collaboration with the LGBT+ Family Coalition, the Adoption project aims to describe, understand and compare the attitudes and representations of various groups of professionals (from the fields of social work, psychology and law) regarding the adoption of a child by a person or couple from the LGBTQ communities. We wish to identify the best predictors of a favorable attitude towards adoption by a person or couple from the LGBTQ community. The results of this research will allow us to better target the training needs of social and legal professionals who work with LGBTQ families. ** In French Only **

The Contact project aims to examine situations in which a gamete donor is directly contacted by a donor offspring, whom they did not previously know. The study will help better understand the consequences of the progressive expansion of donor conceived people’s access to information about their origins. It will provide pathways for people working in the field of assisted reproduction with regard to supporting users and could be mobilized by lawmakers interested in the issue.

This project aims to document, from an intersectional perspective, the experiences of LBP women and QTNB people in accessing PMA services or seeking sperm donation through socio-numerical networks. It will enable the development of tools (videos, summary sheets, practice guides) to improve services for these populations and better support the people concerned.

This study aims to develop a better understanding of how adolescents integrate the narrative frameworks surrounding their conception. Thanks to a triangulation of these data with data from their parents, this study will help identify courses of action for social workers who work in fertility clinics and with couples who need gamete donation in order to become parents.

Donor conception has become democratized in recent years, with a growing number of sperm banks. Certain abuses related to this assisted reproduction procedure continue to be the subject of debate, such as the overuse of specific sperm donors for the conception of numerous children within different families and the problem of doctors’ deliberate substitution of donors at the time of conception. This project aims to document the experiences of people born from instances of such abuses, among other things in order to inform decision-makers on the repercussions of such cases and the need to better regulate donor conception.

While the media describe a vast range of positive and negative experiences on the part of women who act as surrogates in Canada, we know very little about the way the surrogacies they are involved in actually function. Surrogates’ Voices is the first large-scale Canadian study to examine the ways surrogacy agreements are experienced, as well as the difficulties that surrogates face. The results will support the development of social practices, public policy and legislative frameworks that are more in tune with their needs.

The My Mother’s Surrogacy project is a Canadian study that looks at the subjective experiences of surrogates’ children when it comes to the surrogacy processes in which their mothers are engaged. More than sixty children and teens have been interviewed for this project.

When a child asks, “Where do babies come from?,” parents who have conceived via sperm donation are faced with the choice of whether or not to disclose the circumstances of the child’s conception. Various supports can be used to facilitate family dialogue and to help tell the child the story of their conception. In a participatory process that brings together and benefits from professional, experiential, scholarly and artistic knowledge, the team members for this project will develop a children’s book to help facilitate conversations on the subject.