When Jennifer Cramblett and her partner, Amanda Zinkon, decided to start a family in late 2011, Jennifer chose to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization. To begin the process, the couple went to a sperm bank in their native state of Ohio, USA, to find a suitable donor for their baby.
Since they were using a sperm bank, the couple could “shop around” for exactly the kind of man they wanted to be the biological father of their child. The couple had very specific traits in mind that they wanted so that the baby would also look like Amanda and ended up going with donor 380 who had blue eyes, blonde hair and – most importantly – white skin.
After making their choice, Jennifer was inseminated by a doctor using the sperm sample from the sperm bank. Everything went fine and the couple’s dream of starting a family came a step closer to reality.
Nine months later, Jennifer was rushed to the hospital where she got the shock of a lifetime when she gave birth: Her baby girl looked nothing like what she expected. In fact, the baby was black! The couple was absolutely horrified.
How could this happen? As it turns out, the sperm bank accidentally mixed up the white donor the couple requested after an employee misread the handwritten number of the donor 380 as 330, who was an African-American.
On the one hand, Jennifer was heartbroken and had to deal with feelings of anger, disappointment and fear over the prospect of raising a black child. She grew up in a predominantly white town in Ohio and only had her first interaction with a black person when she was in college.
She knew next to nothing about African American culture and wasn’t the least bit prepared for transracial parenting. Furthermore, she feared her conservative family would be unwilling to accept her black daughter. She simply could not imagine raising a black child in that environment.
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