Mixed Race Studies

Suit filed over mix-up at Downers Grove sperm bank is dismissed

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-03

Clifford Ward

A judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against a west suburban sperm bank whose clerical error resulted in the birth of her mixed-race daughter.

DuPage County Judge Ronald Sutter tossed the suit after lawyers for Midwest Sperm Bank argued that the woman’s claims lacked legal merit. But the judge said Jennifer Cramblett of Uniontown, Ohio, could refile her lawsuit under a negligence claim.

Cramblett, who did not attend Thursday’s hearing, filed suit last year against the Downers Grove-based sperm bank alleging wrongful birth and breach of warranty following the birth of her daughter, who is of African-American ancestry.

Cramblett and her same-sex partner purchased sperm with the understanding that it was from a Caucasian donor, but later discovered that the sperm bank had sent material from an African-American donor. The mistake was caused by a clerical error, and the bank later issued an apology and a partial refund…

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Cramblett vs. Midwest Sperm Bank

Marley-Vincent Lindsey
2014-10-07

Marley-Vincent Lindsey

I. Narratives and Political Order

On September 29, Jennifer L. Cramblett filed a suit against the Midwest Sperm Bank for “Wrongful Birth and Breach of Warranty against Defendant.” Where the expecting couple had picked a “blond hair blue-eyed individual” to resemble the non-biological partner, the mix-up had led to the conception of a bi-racial child. The basic grounds for the lawsuit are described in sections eight through sixteen. To summarize, the Sperm Bank had confused two sets of donors: Donor 380 and Donor 330. The confusion is explained in Section 21: “[The Records] are kept in pen and ink. To the person who sent Jennifer vials of sperm in September, 2011, the number “380” looked like “330,” and there are no redundancies to catch errors.”

Simply put, wrongful birth cases are a form of tort in which the claim for damages is based on the cost to parents of raising an “unexpectedly defective child.” Indeed, the term “defective child” is all over the relevant cases. “Wrongful Birth” on a whole has a long history of being associated with the parent’s right to information about their child before carrying it to term. In the words of BGD [Black Girl Dangerous]: “90 percent of fetuses testing positive for Down Syndrome will be aborted in the US. Eugenics cannot be our answer to ableism; advancing disability rights and justice should be.”

I don’t think this perspective ties us to the elimination of wrongful birth entirely. As one of the cases I’ll discuss later demonstrates, there are extreme cases in which a child may never live to see their fifth birthday. On a whole, however, wrongful birth is reflective of a structural consistency within systems to normalize their subjects. One of the many objectives of colonial ontologies is creating environments in which normalcy, through a number of repetitive subjects is preserved, at the cost not only of the value of diversity, but also the ability of subjects to make educated decisions about their own value. This is why I have a very difficult time assessing the development of colonial mentality in colonized subjects, despite the fact that most activists are ready to write such subjects off…

…I further have a specific interest in this regard: as a multi-racial child living with a white mother, I no doubt have a very close experience to what Peyton may know throughout her childhood. It is too easy to dismiss this narrative as simply one in which blackness is imposed on an otherwise white family. I think this is a mistake largely stemming from the structural intent on erasing multi-racial experiences. One only need recall the vitriol a certain Cheerios advertisement met to gain sense of mainstream conception of the mixed family. Calling again, Hardt and Negri, their chapter entitled “Symptoms of Passage” focuses on the irony in the relationship between postmodernism and Empire. Namely, that the former fails by only addressing the symptoms of the problem—the lack of pluralism in contemporary discourse, as an example—and completely misses the cause, which is the passage of power. In light of this chapter, I would suggest that the transition in contemporary race issues has been one in which the liberation movements of the late twentieth century sought to replicate the same power structures without regard to how those power structures would impact others…

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Lawsuit: Wrong sperm delivered to lesbian couple

The Chicago Tribune
2014-10-01

Meredith Rodriguez, Tribune reporter

A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

Jennifer Cramblett, of Uniontown, Ohio, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank sent her the vials of an African-American donor’s sperm in September 2011 instead of those of a white donor that she and her white partner had ordered.

After searching through pages of comprehensive histories for their top three donors, the lawsuit claims, Cramblett and her domestic partner, Amanda Zinkon, chose donor No. 380, who was also white. Their doctor in Ohio received vials from donor No. 330, who is African-American, the lawsuit said.

Cramblett, 36, learned of the mistake in April 2012, when she was pregnant and ordering more vials so that the couple could have another child with sperm from the same donor, according to the lawsuit. The sperm bank delivered vials from the correct donor in August 2011, but Cramblett later requested more vials, according to the suit…

…”On August 21, 2012, Jennifer gave birth to Payton, a beautiful, obviously mixed-race baby girl,” the lawsuit states. “Jennifer bonded with Payton easily and she and Amanda love her very much. Even so, Jennifer lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future.”

Raising a mixed-race daughter has been stressful in Cramblett and Zinkon’s small, all-white community, according to the suit. Cramblett was raised around people with stereotypical attitudes about nonwhites, the lawsuit states, and did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron…

Read the entire article here.