The great fictitious philosopher Forrest Gump once likened life to an unopened box of chocolates, because “You never know what you’re gonna get.” It turns out that Gump’s musings apply to a case involving a White woman in Ohio suing a Chicago-sperm bank for accidentally impregnating her with a Black man’s sperm.
The woman and her partner clearly wanted the man juice of a White donor.
Reports AP:
The woman is seeking damages and wants to ensure the sperm bank doesn’t make a similar mistake again.
Within days of their wedding in New York, Jennifer Cramblett and Amanda Zinkon had become pregnant with the donor sperm. In April 2012, five months into her pregnancy, Cramblett, 36, called Midwest Sperm Bank LLC outside Chicago to reserve sperm from the same donor in the hope that Zinkon, 29, would someday also have a child.
That’s when Cramblett received some disturbing news, says a lawsuit filed Monday against Midwest Sperm Bank in Cook County, Illinois: She learned from a sperm bank employee that she had been inseminated with sperm from the wrong donor.
Cramblett said they had chosen sperm from a man known as No. 380, a white donor. The sperm used for insemination came from No. 330, a black donor, she said.
“How could they make a mistake that was so personal?” Cramblett said during a telephone interview on Wednesday.
According to the lawsuit, her excitement about the pending birth was replaced with “anger, disappointment and fear.”
“They took a personal choice, a personal decision and took it on themselves to make that choice for us out of pure negligence,” Cramblett said.
It’s not that Cramblett and Zinkon don’t love their bi-racial toddler, they most certainly do –they’re just worried about raising her in their predominantly White neighborhood, which is apparently open enough to accept lesbian couples but not Black people.
There’s also the fact that Cramblett doesn’t know much about Black culture to pass on to the child, and she has to drive to a “Black neighborhood” to get the now 2-year-old’s hair done. Her family is a factor too. They hadn’t been completely on board with her sexuality, therefore bringing a Black baby into the picture is probably a lot on them.
“I’m not gonna’ sit back and let this happen to anyone ever again,” she told NBC News of the mishap. “Because you can’t just say ‘well you got a baby so you should be happy.'”
Cramblett says the little girl has made she and Zinkon the “people” that they are and that she’d “never trade it for the world,” but that doesn’t mean the sperm donor doesn’t have to pay for what happened. “I’m not gonna let them get away with not being held accountable.”
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Photo: Screenshot
