Recent events in Baltimore and other U.S. cities serve as a painful reminder that racial tensions have far from disappeared. But what form could racism take in our emerging high-tech world? It might involve embryos and genetics.
Last year, a lesbian couple–a white lesbian couple–sued a sperm bank for inadvertently getting the mother pregnant with sperm from an African American donor. The Ohio couple, Jennifer Cramblett and Amanda Zinkon, have a healthy toddler, but the mothers are worried about how the child will be treated by the extended family in their very un-diverse, rural community
Are Cramblett and Zinkon ‘racist’ for being upset about having a black child? They claim the suit is not about race, but about fairness.
“I am happy that I have a healthy child,” Cramblett said in an NBC interview last year. “But I’m not going to let them get away with not being held accountable,” she added, speaking about Midwest Sperm Bank, which recognized the mistake a few months before the child’s birth. Tocompensate “personal injuries, medical expense, pain, suffering, emotional distress, and other economic and non-economic losses,” the couple has demanded $50,000.
High-tech racism
Is it wrong that a parent is concerned whether her child is of another race? That’s a hard argument to make. We would have to assume were are somewhat biologically programmed to want to raise biological children who look like us. Racial thinking looks as though it will continue to be a factor in the business of donated sperm, eggs and genes. With traditional adoption, although many parents are happy with any child, like Cramblett and Zinkon, white people tend to want sperm or eggs from white donors, and the phenomenon is not limited to whites. In response, in recent years, a new wave of businesses has emerged based on a a demand for ethnic matching between parents-to-be and donated fertility materials.
“Everyone I’ve ever worked with, Irish, Italian and Africans from Africa, people always ask for a donor who comes from their background,” says Judy Weiss, a California-based nurse whose company, A Jewish Blessing, specializes in finding Jewish donors for Jewish couples in need of fertility assistance.
Share this article
An age of eugenics?
Not only are women and couples choosing the genetic parents of their children based on ethnicity, many also select donors based on characteristics that many would say are superficial. A story in Slate Magazine found that many couples are requesting donors that are athletic and good looking.
“Couples have become much more particular about what they are looking for in their perfect egg donor,” said Richard Sherbahn, founder of the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago. “A ‘white girl with dark hair’ will rarely be enough to satisfy recipient couples today,” he added, and went on to recount the story of a couple that asked him for a white egg donor of Swedish ancestry with wavy blond hair, green eyes, height ranging from 5’7″ to 5’8”, an IQ of at least 120, a master’s or doctoral degree, and a background of competitive sports at the college level.
From the Slate article, it’s not clear whether the ambitious parents ever got the green-eyed, Swedish, Ivy League athlete they wanted, but apparently, at Yale University, a non-smoking female student can expect to earn up to $25,000 for her eggs, if donating them leads to a successful pregnancy–provided she scored at least 1500 on her SATs, which is pretty common at Yale.
Obviously, the more desirable attributes that are to be included in a designer baby, the higher the cost. This, in turn, suggests that a money-driven eugenics trend could be on the horizon, with people who can afford it rearing a higher number of valedictorian NCAA champions than people who produce such children with no fertility aid. That may worry a lot of people, though others may see it merely as a new and entirely understandable trend.
David Warmflash is an astrobiologist, physician, and science writer. Follow @CosmicEvolution to read what he is saying on Twitter.
