'You have a biracial kid: Accept her'

Lonnae O'Neal has some advice for a mom who sued over a sperm bank mistake: get over it!

|||

Washington - I had a number of choice words when I heard the tale of Jennifer Cramblett.

The 37-year-old Ohio woman filed a “wrongful birth” lawsuit against Midwest Sperm Bank last year after a mix-up with an African-American donor resulted in her giving birth to a biracial child.

The little girl, now three, is named Payton. The sperm bank apologised, issued Cramblett and her partner, Amanda Zinkon, a partial refund, and, last week, a judge dismissed the suit, which had sought at least $50 000 (about R500 000) in damages.

After all the “thought, care and planning,” a paperwork mistake resulted in “Jennifer's excitement and anticipation of her pregnancy” being “replaced with anger, disappointment and fear,” court documents said.

Cramblett grew up in an all-white environment around “unconsciously insensitive” people, and she worries about her own limited cultural competency, her steep learning curve and the lurking prejudices in the small town in which she lives. They are prejudices she had been subject to by family members who have “not been capable of truly embracing Jennifer for who she is” and who “encourage her 'not to look different' signaling their disapproval of her lesbianism,” the suit said.

It's a hardship that doesn't seem to have left her wanting to fight intolerance. She even added her difficulties with her daughter's black hair in the lawsuit - how stressful it was having to find people outside her neighbourhood to get it done.

First, a word of compassion.

A mistake was made, and the couple did not get the child they dreamed of. They got a child they were not prepared for. A daughter who will require special care and sacrifice. A little girl who may force them to see the world anew and to tremble at its perils - and to see their own limitations.

There is a word for that.

It's called motherhood.

I'm not sure whether it's a role Cramblett has embraced fully. It often involves children who challenge the things you want for them and your ideas about who they should be. Right out of the gate, she is teaching this child that she is “less than.”

I turned to Shannon Cate, who is a white lesbian married to a white lesbian and who has two adopted daughters - one African-American, one biracial - for her take.

First, she had a few words of anger: “I was horrified” by the lawsuit, said Cate, an adjunct professor of media studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “She sued using the same legal mechanism that parents use when their child is born with birth defects.” What happens when this child gets older, she wonders, and searches for herself online?

Cate also has some words of advice for Cramblett: “Find this girl some black people in her life,” she suggests. “Take your experience with discomfort to empathise with how she's going to feel, instead of making it about you.”

 

Cate's two daughters “have different hair: one is African-American with tighter curls, and one is biracial with looser curls. I had to learn what to do,” she says.

Cramblett is “making a big deal about not even doing the hair, but being in a black neighbourhood,” Cate says.

The irony is that Cramblett is making a big deal about her daughter one day going to school in an environment of intolerance that she apparently would have been content to raise a white child in.

“Jennifer is well aware of the child psychology research and literature correlating intolerance and racism with reduced academic and psychological well-being of biracial children,” the suit contended.

Cate had final words for this: This woman is suing over “losing some of her white privilege. What she's losing is the ability to live in a bubble with people just like her and to never have to learn what life is like for anyone else. And to never have to go anywhere where she's not in the majority. I want to say whatever heterosexual privilege she lacked doesn't have anything to do with white privilege... Homophobia and racism are different, and she's learning that.”

Myself, I can offer only these words to Cramblett: Buck up, mama!

I get that you got something you didn't pay for. And perhaps you deserve money for that. But you'll eventually have to come to terms with the harsh realities that mothers of black children have always known. You'll need to give your daughter tools to navigate a country twisted by racial sickness and hardened by denial, a country that often does not love children of colour or those who are different. You can allow yourself to get paralysed with the hurt of it. You can shake a fist at the wind.

Or you can mother the best you can, and inch by inch, in your own way, you can work for change.

Perhaps you could start with the mom in the mirror.

Washington Post