The Real Problem With Sperm Banks
By Keli Goff,
The Daily Beast
| 10. 07. 2014
Untitled Document
Many are outraged by the story of a woman suing a sperm bank for mistakenly providing her with sperm from a black donor, instead of a white donor as she requested. Jennifer Cramblett, who is white, later gave birth to a biracial daughter whom she and her partner are raising—a daughter who will one day grow up to read that her mother felt being impregnated with her was such a hardship that it warranted a lawsuit.
The crux of Cramblett’s complaint is essentially that they didn’t request black sperm and weren’t prepared to welcome a black child into their family—a family that, according to the lawsuit, has some extended relatives who are a little bit racist, and who live in a community that’s a little bit racist.
My heart breaks for this little girl in the same way it breaks for every kid who appears to have been dealt a bad hand in the parental lottery. But I’m not outraged by Jennifer Cramblett’s lawsuit, at least no more than I would be outraged by the Ku Klux...
Related Articles
By Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, and Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal | 12.13.2025
Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right.
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental...
By Sarah A. Topol, The New York Times Magazine | 12.14.2025
The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge...
By Grace Won, KQED [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025
In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first...
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...
