University of Humanistic Studies

In 2020, the Dutch government issued a call to investigate age limits for donor-conceived people to access donor information because there was insufficient justification for such limits in the Dutch law. This question is equally important in a changing landscape of donor conception due to searching using direct-to-consumer genetic tests and social media. This paper describes recommendations for policy and practice based on an interdisciplinary (ethical, legal, psychosocial and empirical) research. Findings show that no age limits can be adequately justified, including the current ones. Consequently, we recommended modification of the law by dropping age limits and by making donor information accessible upon the birth of a donor-conceived person. Moreover, we set forth recommendations for due diligence in providing donor information. Integrating donor information into one's life's story is a gradual process that should be tailored to a child's development and individual needs. Because this process is more than a single moment of accessing donor information, we see parents as being best suited to align accessing donor information with their child's needs. We recommend that donor-conceived people, parents and donors are given support in this process, provided by professionals with experience and knowledge about donor conception.

Older people often face drastic life events, such as spousal loss, that profoundly affect their daily lives. Consequently, resilience-how one navigates life's changes to avoid further adverse outcomes-is increasingly relevant in ageing studies. Although understanding older adults' resilience is key to preventing adverse outcomes, the complexity of loss-related events and everyday resilience in later life is underexplored from a process-based perspective. This study employs an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) case study of one individual to investigate resilience in response to spousal loss from a process-based perspective. Four interviews were conducted with this one participant and data was analysed following IPA guidelines. Findings indicate how resilience, in this case, resembles a process of continuous adaptation and renewal or "bouncing forward", in the face of diverse adversities, as written by Bourbeau. This study enriches our understanding of the process-based perspective on resilience, which is essential for concretely defining resilience and its practical application.

Caring well for people with profound intellectual disabilities is challenging. This challenge is often framed in terms of their complex needs and the ambiguity of interpreting these needs. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that behind these challenges lies a more fundamental challenge of doubt: doubt stemming from uncertainties about the mind of the other, and thus about the purpose of care itself. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s notion of skepticism, the article explores how this challenge arises and how caregivers grapple with it. The study finds that skeptical doubt always threatens care for people with profound intellectual disabilities, but often remains unseen. This is because caregivers deftly manage to ward off their skeptical doubt, by ‘placing people into life’: imagining the people in their care as participants in a shared human everyday life. The article tracks such exercises of ‘placing people into life’ to document how caregivers manage to retain faith in the purpose of their care. In this way, the article gives ethnographic texture to the challenge of caring well for people with profound intellectual disabilities and gathers clues for improving this care—which can also aid in improving care in other contexts of cognitive difference.