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 Frankie Fattorini, Pharmaceutical Technology | 12.02.2025
Próspera, a charter city on Roatán island in Honduras, hosts two biotechs working to combat ageing through gene therapy, as the organisation behind the city advertises its “flexible” regulatory jurisdiction to attract more developers.
In 2021, Minicircle set up a...
By Vardit Ravitsky, The Hastings Center | 12.04.2025
Embryo testing is advancing fast—but how far is too far? How and where do we draw the line between preventing disease and selecting for “desirable” traits? What are the ethical implications for parents, children, clinicians, and society at large? These...
