If this is really a commercial sperm bank I don’t see why they didn’t immediately notify their insurance company and legal counsel, then do everything in their power to make this woman happy (shut her up).
I’m a white, dark eyed, dark haired fair skinned person with one Asian child - adopted - and one white bio child who was blonde and blue eyed (her hair has gotten darker, her face has become more of what it will be as an adult and now she looks just like me with blue eyes - and I still got the “where was she adopted from” question last week.). We live in the interracial adoption capital of the world in a city where interracial marriage is common and in a neighborhood where there are lots of interracial families and lots of Asians. I have a son who really doesn’t care too much about his racial heritage. And we get tons of stupid questions and the little bit my son does care - its damn hard. He doesn’t really fit in with the Asian kids - who have Asian parents and are Hmong primarily - not Korean.
But you don’t explain “she looks like her Dad” if you can help it. That rewards impertinent questions and makes it harder for others - especially those whose family histories are more complicated. You look at them - if you can arch an eyebrow you do so - and you say “I beg your pardon” in your best Dowager Duchess of Grantham voice. And when they repeat the question you say “oh, I heard you, I was wondering why anyone would think that was appropriate to ask.”
Moving away from your family, your community, your friends and your jobs is expensive - and hard on the grown ups. Living in a community where your kid is the only dark skinned kid in school - where she’ll get comments every time her hair is cut - where you can’t make the sorts of connections you’ll want to support her as she deals with being different - i.e. people who are similar to her - makes raising a kid hard. They should move for the emotional health and racial identity issues of their daughter - and that’s expensive.
Frankly, that behavior is 1) very supportive of their daughter and the situation and 2) the opposite of racist - its acknowledging that your life will need to be broader - and taking the steps to make it so.
And as long as I’m ranting…
There is a difference between being an adult lesbian in a town and being a black child. For a kid, there sexuality really isn’t a deal until they have to deal with it - and lesbians generally fit in to a straight community pretty easily - as opposed to a flamboyantly gay man. Though even there - people are often willing to overlook the “eccentricity” for one of their own. Adults can usually handle snubs and gossip - and what is the reality - mostly just ill considered remarks.
With kids, those ill considered remarks can be the ones that fester. In a community of white people - the stereotypical assumptions that go with race (will her daughter be pegged as lazy by the teachers - without the teachers ever really realizing they are making that jump - because of some unconscious racist attitude) - can be hard to shake. They aren’t easy to shake in a diverse community either (black kids are far more likely to be disciplined for the same behavior), but in a diverse community, people tend to have been made more aware.
Well then it’s a good thing no one’s said that.
But look…they screwed up. I’m taking a course in Root Cause Analysis, Systems Management, Safety in Healthcare, Kill Me Now… and this would be a great case study, if only I could get more info.
The problem isn’t the biracial baby. The problem isn’t that the person wrote down the wrong number, or that someone misred the number. The problem is much more fundamental and complicated than that. The problem (from a Systems perspective, which is all the rage in health care these days) is that the practice was set up to fail eventually. So many simple and cheap fixes could have prevented this, and will prevent this same error from producing a worse outcome. (If I could do my project on this one, I’d suggest eliminating hand written forms and instituting verbal report with repeat-back when information is passed from one person to another. These are pretty standard in health care settings now, so there’s little excuse for not having done that already; hence I think a slap-on-the-wrist lawsuit is appropriate.)
Consider a Ashkenazi Jewish woman with the Tay-Sachs gene who very much needs to get sperm without Tay-Sachs. Great, Donor 183 has no Tay-Sachs risks, so let’s send her sperm from donor 183. Same exact errors happen, and sperm is sent from Donor 188, a Cajun man with one copy of the same mutation that causes Tay-Sachs. Now you’ve got a baby who is going to have a brutal and short life and die in infancy or early childhood - and not from a random luck of the draw of life, but because of a series of errors which could easily have been prevented. Indeed, the fact that sperm can be selected on the basis of the father’s traits is an advertised benefit to artificial insemination from sperm banks.
In Textbook Perfection Land, this is one of those events which a good company will use to perform a Root Cause Analysis and address the issue so that it has a far less likelihood of happening again when it might actually cause even more harm. (And it’s probable that that is indeed happening, but they’re not telling the press that.)
Bingo.
Again, bingo.
That’s my understanding too. The company messed up.
Are you new to the US? That’s how we do things here. See the quote below:
Yup. Like it or not, that’s how we do things here in the US. If the carelessness of a company causes my child’s death, I sue, so it doesn’t keep doing that. Does the money I get compensate in any way for the loss of my child? Hell no – I hope I’d donate it, because I sure wouldn’t enjoy spending it. That’s beside the point of how the US torte system works.
In the US, there are pretty much three ways you can deal with bad service or a bad product: 1) go somewhere else next time 2) tell your friends to avoid Brand X 3) sue for punitive damages.
Nobody ever said there’s a guarantee nothing bad will ever happen to you. But we do have a torte system, and people use it. And abuse it, like the guys who (successfully, IIRC) sued the lawnmower manufacturer after they tried to use it as a hedge trimmer and got their fingers nicked off. But I wouldn’t consider this case abuse: the company fouled up completely by not delivering the selected product, in a situation where there aren’t any do-overs.
Those would be actual damages, and are easily quantified as the expense of relocating. There are also punitive damages to consider, which are measured differently.
No kidding! Talk about a PR nightmare!
Great post. Thanks for sharing!
This is why, when my mother had routine surgery for “trigger thumb”, they had HER mark the thumb to be operated on with a magic marker. Simple solution to an unfortunately pervasive problem! I’m sure we’ve all seen stories where a wrong limb was amputated; think of the suffering caused by that, with such a simple solution for such a “simple” mistake (in many but not all cases, of course.)
Even if the sperm bank “deserves” to be sued, I still think it’s a pretty terrible thing for the mother to do, because of the harm it could to to her daughter.
Its possible it happens all the damn time undetected. If you are white parents getting sperm from a white man - and you ask for donor 183 because he is athletic and has a high IQ and is 6’2" and you get donor 188 and its a white man with a high IQ who is 5’10" but who isn’t at all athletic and your kid turns out to be a klutz who when he grows up is only 5’10", you probably really aren’t going to put it together and come to the conclusion that the sperm bank made an error. He’s just a klutz and your grandfather was short - he probably got it from there. There are really only a few things that genetically are going to stand out - congenital defects (which tend to be screened out of sperm donors to start with) and race. (And even race is tricky, since a family can have an entire range of shades in it)
Yes, thank you. I’d never lie to my child and tell her she was not adopted. That way lies madness when it eventually, inevitably comes out. I was just trying to say I wouldn’t use the color of her skin to not tell her she was adopted, but I’d want either an indian baby or a chinese baby so it at least looks like one of us.
My son is adopted. My daughter came along a year later. Do you think my son doesn’t know that we didn’t set out to adopt children - that we spent years battling infertility? That adoption was a “second choice.”
And do you think we are so stupid that we don’t tell him that we are so happy it worked out as it did - that we got him? That we were lucky to have been infertile and that his sister was not conceived before he became part of our family?
Do you think adopted kids should be of the same race so we can pass them off as bio and make them believe that they weren’t a second choice? That we should keep secrets about the choices we made in their conception?
Why wouldn’t this family tell their daughter as she grew up “you were conceived via a sperm bank - we didn’t choose for you to be bi-racial - that was a lucky mistake because it got us you - but that lucky mistake did cause us to make some changes in our lives - like moving away from Grandma into a community where you could have role models that looked like you.”
Do you really think that a bi-racial teenager conceived via sperm bank might not figure out that her parents didn’t choose a bi-racial child? That a friend when she is a teenager might not say “its really strange they picked a black bio-dad for you - you would think they’d pick someone who looked like your other mom?” That’s a silly as believing my Asian son won’t figure out he’s adopted and that adoption wasn’t our first choice.
This is the sort of “secret” that is best never being a secret. Just a fact of life.
duplicate post
This is being blown a little out of proportion. First, the complaint is written by her attorney. She may have said everything in it word-for-word but that’s generally not how it works. Second, it is not abnormal for a parent to want a child that looks like her. This is why sperm and egg donors’ physical characteristics (not just color, but hair color, height, eye color, weight, etc.) are provided by banks.
As for all the people saying “how is she damaged?”, she didn’t get what she paid for. The sperm bank breached its contract with her by providing goods that did not conform to the contract. Yes, that’s a pretty cold way to look at it, but sperm donation is not a “grab bag” arrangement.
But the thing is, if you insist on selecting a sperm donor with blue eyes so your baby can have blue eyes that match your own, and the baby end up with brown eyes that’s just how traits work. Yes you ordered the blue-eyed blond-haired baby, but babies aren’t machine-made consumer goods (yet).
Likewise, if you ordered sperm from a man who was 1/8 “non-white” (whatever that eventually can mean) and self-identifies as white, and the baby you get ends up with strongly “non-white” hair or enough other “non-white” traits, should you be able to sue because you didn’t get what you ordered? Just how white must the baby be?
I creeps me out a bit because it comes back to whiteness as the ideal that is “polluted”.
But that’s not what happened. They made an error. They apparently admitted as much.
Analogies aren’t really perfect here, because of the non-returnable nature of babies, but imagine it was any other consumer good. If I order a Kia and you deliver a BMW, I have the right to sue if that BMW cannot be returned, if it adversely affects my life. It doesn’t matter that a BMW is a better vehicle, what matters is that I didn’t order it and you screwed up. You have to make me whole for your screw up, maybe by paying the difference in my insurance cost.
I have nothing contructive to add, except that I got (sort of) the opposite “problem.”
When my wife and I arranged to adopt our son, we met the birth mother but not the biological father. The mother was white, but we were told the father was Mexican. So, we expected a dark-skinned, black-haired child. And in our families, that would have worked out perfectly! My immediate family is 100% Irish, but my brothers and I all married Hispanic women, so a brown skinned kid would have fit in perfectly; he’d have grandparents, aunts, cousins, etc., who looked just like him.
But, by sheer dumb luck, our son was fair-skinned and dirty blond like his mother.
Ya never know.
I doubt anyone would bother her because she’s a white parent with a darker-skinned child. If she were a dark-skinned women with a light-skinned child, she could expect people to ask once in a while if she was a nanny or babysitter. These things do happen. Anyway
A lot of this depends on how the company ‘advertises’ its sperm donors. I’m guessing they don’t only mention race because that’s not much to go on. The woman probably chose Mr. 380 based on a number of factors and not just his race. We don’t know how similar or different Mr. 330 is. You’re correct that a lot of variance could be based on the mother’s genes and not the differences between 330 and 380, but you can also say that she wouldn’t have expected her baby to be exactly like 380 anyway. On the other hand, when these people screwed up, they handed her a bunch of potential problems she never thought she’d have to deal with - racist friends and family are the obvious one, but then there are broader problems like structural racism in the school system and law enforcement, where black kids (granted, it’s worse for boys) just get treated worse than white kids.
Right, but they didn’t send her blue-eyed sperm that happened to make a brown-eyed baby. They sent her the sperm (metaphorically) of a brown-eyed guy because they had packed up the wrong sample for shipment.
I don’t think this is contrary to what I said in any way. The “lucky mistake” stuff sounds fine, but “lucky mistake” doesn’t jive with “mom was so pissed off that you were not white that she sued the sperm bank and made national news”.
So I think it’s wrong to sue the sperm bank and make a big public issue of how difficult it is to raise a bi-racial kid, because I believe the potential harm to the child far outweighs any “justice” from suing the sperm bank.
I also live in NYC, and would have agreed with this … until I had a baby and now I have more consistent, ongoing mom friends who have mixed race families, and I am shocked and appalled by some of the stuff they encounter fairly frequently. In New York City! The land of heathen liberals (and proud of it)!
And to continue the things I am shocked about, I am amazed that this sperm bank does orders like this over the phone. This is probably how sperm banks operated in medieval times, but in the 21st century, it is unbelievable to me that this process would involve phones and handwriting. Did the mom pay them by check as well?
We’re currently in the process of having a baby by sperm donor and part of it is handled over the phone - the payment for shipping. The choosing and initial order is done online, but I think the reason they require you to also speak to them over the phone is as an additional security check. It’s not really necessary for us since it’s being sent to a clinic and everything else will happen there, but I can see some situations where just having that one extra little barrier could make sense.
We did include race in our selection so that the baby has more of a chance of looking like my partner, me and my daughter, which will make it easier for people to accept us as a family. It really does make a difference.
More importantly, we also included features like height and weight (which could affect health) and sperm motility. This woman did conceive, so the sperm motility must have been OK, but if this sperm bank were allowed to send out just any old sperm then it could just send us low motility stuff, which would greatly impact on our chances of conceiving.
That’s the reason the sperm bank should pay - because if they don’t they have no reason to get it right any other time. This is not exactly a competetive market.
I don’t think the parents wanted this to become a big public issue. It looks like somebody at NBC News picked up on the story while trawling through complaints filed in Cook County and decided to report on it.