I might be a little bit upset if I asked for an Indian or an Asian baby and it came back white. That has nothing to do with racism! I definitely wouldn’t want a black baby either. Why is this a problem? I’d tell the kid she was adopted, but if she at least looked like me a little she wouldn’t have to answer every stranger.
If my wife and I had used a sperm bank and requested it be caucasian but ended up with a black child would we keep it? Yes. Raise it as our own? Yes. Love it? Yes.
Sue the sperm bank? Hell yes.
Just because you still ended up with a child doesn’t mean they get to be incompetent. They don’t get to give you the option of “race” when selecting sperm, screw it up, and then say “oops, sorry. No harm no foul.”
A similar example with race removed would be if they allowed couples to choose the sex of their child. Say a couple with 2 boys would like a girl. They choose “girl”, the sperm bank screws up, they end up with another boy.
More than likely they’re keeping the kid (raise it, love it, etc.) but they have every right to sue the sperm bank and should.
A few years ago there was a similar case where a husband and wife sued a pregnancy testing company for failing to discover that the child they were carrying had Down Syndrome. If they had known, they would have aborted the pregnancy. They wanted the company to help pay for the large medical costs associated with their child’s condition. That’s a more extreme situation for obvious reasons but we had a similar GD thread about it. The point wasn’t that they didn’t love their child. It’s that they wound up with a lot of extra costs and trouble because of someone else’s mistake - they said the company made actual mistakes, it wasn’t just that their test wasn’t perfect - and they wanted that remedied.
You highlighted the wrong part. If their town is all white and they make fun of them for having a nonwhite child, they are surrounded by assholes. The bit about the hair actually rings true. I know some biracial people who have horror stories about the things white barbers and/or parents did to their hair when they were kids. These days it’s easy to get hair products designed for people with interracial backgrounds, but that didn’t used to be the case.
I think you can wish for a baby that matches your race without being a racist, though I haven’t read the article and so have no basis to judge how shitty these particular people are. There are support groups all over the place for families that have adopted babies of other races (on purpose), because that kind of mixed family raises all sorts of issues. I don’t think it’s necessarily entirely evil to wish to avoid those kinds of issues if you have the option.
Personally, I’m not moved by the complaints about how hard it is to raise a black child in an all-white world. Yes, it is hard. But it’s also hard to raise a child who is different in any way. The kid could have been born with hard-to-manage hair and still have fully white parentage. The kid may go on to have a learning disability or another handicap. When you have children, you do so knowing that life may be a lot harder than you originally thought. So I have no sympathy for her on this point.
But still. Unless the clinic told her up front that it had no responsility to grant her sperm request, they clearly screwed up. They should compensate her somehow.
Just how “white” does the father have to be to not make the clinic “negligent”? Is there a skin chart they should have consulted?
I assume some of this stuff is written in a way to maximize the difficulties she’s supposedly experiencing. So the reality may not be all that bad. But this really doesn’t make the mother look very good:
So part of the problem is that the mom has a racist family and racist friends, which isn’t all her fault, and another is that she doesn’t like being around black people… and it’s hard to be too sympathetic to that. The company is responsible for its error if they made one and didn’t give her the proper warnings, but wow.
I think the point is when you select sperm, you are selecting a specific man’s sperm. It’s a decision I would imagine is not made lightly. It isn’t just a checklist of physical characteristics. They picked their daddy, and got someone completely different. If a woman had invitro done and they implanted the wrong fetus, it would be the same thing.
You work it out with a pencil.
I should clarify, in this case the negligence was that the wrong number was written down. But what if the donor self-identified as white, is it the responsibility of the bank to override that? Just how much non-whiteness are you allowed to be labeled a white donor?
Here’s where I don’t see where your recreational outrage is going: you say she is racist and the courts shouldn’t rule in her favor since she got a child; yet you also say that she loves the child. What tune would you be singing if she were an actual hard core white power racist who didn’t love the child, was suing and putting the child up for adoption? She should have to keep the child since she order “a child” by phone and that’s what she received so it would be a travesty of justice to allow her to essentially return the child by placing it up for adoption?
But how exactly was this woman damaged, and how could she be made whole? Just because someone screws up and doesn’t deliver exactly what you asked for DOESN’T mean you should get paid a bunch of money. Why should a clerical error mean someone gets money when they don’t seem to have quantifiable damages? If anything, the child should get the money put in a trust until her 18th birthday.
Courts have ruled against trans-racial adoptions on racial grounds. From 1972 to 1994 the National Association of Black Social Workers considered whites adoption of black children to be “cultural genocide” as a part of the group’s policy statement. New York Times article cite
It was enough of a problem that a federal law was passed to help address the issue. The Multi-Ethnic Placement Act bars consideration of race in placement if the agency receives federal funds.
Punitive damages, make it cost enough so a Corporation changes it’s ways for financial reasons cause no one expects them to for ethical ones.
The question of racism is irrelevant. Yes, the mother may well be racist, but being racist isn’t illegal. The clinic sold her a service, and didn’t provide the service they were promising. At the very least, they need to refund her some or all of the fee they charged.
Or at least, they need to do that if it was due to their error. It’s possible that they did nothing wrong, and that the child’s skin color is the result of a quirk of genetics. This could of course be the clinic’s defense in court.
She says that the sperm bank confirmed the error and cut off contact with her shortly thereafter and then gave her a partial refund (ha!). If true, that’s pretty incriminating. And reading the story again I saw this:
Which is to say she wants to move away from all these racists. I don’t blame her much for that even though I wouldn’t want to live around people who I knew were racist anyway.
No, no for over a century, the brown paper bag has been the accepted measuring tool.
If a sperm bank offers race selection (and I’m open to debates if they should) then yeah, they should make good on that. Just because something is a weird thing to promise doesn’t mean you can just do whatever instead.
Raising a kid in an environment where they are likely to face intolerance is hard, and I’m sympathetic toward people who want to at least know they are taking on.
This has not really developed into an actual debate. I think it will work better in IMHO.
But the principle is the same. She paid for the company to provide a service and a product. They defaulted and deserve to be sued.