TNC basically made the point that these parents were effectively asking for reparations. And that they (and others) ought to get them.
Making a list, checking it twice.
Get the right swimmers, then de-ice.
Some guy is coming in a cup.
I can't get past the idea that these parents decided to do this knowing that their daughter would have to live for the rest of her life with the entire world knowing that her parents sued about the circumstances of her birth.
That fact alone seems so contrary to my conception of loving parenting that I can hardly even get to step two.
Conception, not birth. Unless you want to consider malpractice suits against OBs where something happened to the baby as the same kind of deal.
Of course, people sue about how babies were conceived all the time. It's just usually not two parents suing a third party.
This is the TNC piece both heebie and oudemia mention.
I have... thoughts. Including that of lesbians suing over their babies' parentage, these are among the least offensive, I guess. I continue to hate the biological mother in our community who went on tv with the sperm donor and his partner to say that all kids need a mom and a dad and the donor's partner is not the baby's dad and neither is the woman she called Mama for her first two years a mom and therefore she shouldn't have parental rights. That woman has lovely twins with her new partner and they adopted in another state to be able to both be the children's legal parents, but grrrrrr.
There's an odd feature of the situation in that a racial mixup is the only thing a donor-sperm parent would be likely to sue over, because what else would be apparent at or near birth? If you were inseminated with an axe murderer's sperm rather than that of the Nobel Prize winning decathlon champion advertised in the catalog, how would you ever know?
(I also kind of want to rant about the black lesbian couple I know who chose a non-black donor so their child would have looser curls and lighter skin because they thought that would make her life easier, which gives me the creeps. Apparently I have a longer List of Lesbian Scorn than I might have previously guessed!)
7: I don't see any sign that he got sued over it, but this guy went to prison for using the wrong sperm (among other things).
He cut out the middle man and passed the savings on to his customers.
Anyway, yes the family should move to a new and more diverse community, and supposedly they're going to use some of the funds they hope to win for that. It's bogus that they feel they "have" to take her to a black beauty shop, though that can be a good thing culturally too and I'm probably a baddish person for not bothering. etc.
looser curls and lighter skin because they thought that would make her life easier
This seems depressingly astute on their part.
I recently read a brief comic online of a Hispanic woman's recounting of her mother warning her as a teenager not to marry a black man, in the interests of her children and "improving the race" - in particular, avoiding the kinky hair the mother has and is thankful she didn't pass on.
7: didn't they find out in utero?
I should caveat that I have tons of privilege and really shouldn't be judgmental about how other people who don't choose to navigate a bigoted world, but I guess I should also caveat that I am judgmental anyway.
Here is a probably bogus but relevant Dear Prudence about finding out that wrong sperm may have been involved in a surrogacy situation where her advice is to do nothing.
I can never remember whether the Internet Internet-hates or Internet-loves Dear Prudence.
Wait, I thought TNC had stopped blogging for a while, and I unsubscribed from his feed. Crap.
Anyway, couldn't they sue for breach of contract without alleging injury (at least from the race of the donor)? Injury would affect the remedy, of course. But even there, you could assert injury from being made to bear the "wrong" foetus without addressing race.
Race aside, I used a sperm bank and would be really angry to find I'd been sent the wrong sperm. Picking sperm was strange and fraught enough without the thought of error. Though for the reasons Witt gives I doubt I'd sue.
Is there a malpractice claim, a la "You amputated the wrong arm, Dr. Jackass," instead of the less politic "You gave us a black baby and society is racist"?
Since I'm just saying random stuff, I'll keep going. I've started being one of the experienced parents they bring in to talk to prospective foster parents and one of the things I always say is that you're not a bad person if you choose not to parent transracially, that children of color deserve parents who take that responsibility seriously and are able to meet their needs. We are not failures as parents because our bedrooms are on the second floor and so we don't take calls for children in wheelchairs, nor are families where Grandma is racist and also the backup babysitter who don't move in non-white children for that reason. So I do think their complaint that this is not fair to the child is a fair one.
I'm also interested in the way this is laid out in the complaint, that the mothers' reason for using donated sperm rather than intercourse has to do with both of them having a history of molestation that makes the idea of sex with men even more off-putting than just their orientation might. That suggests that the violation of having been inseminated by the sperm of someone other than the donor they'd consented to use may be additionally traumatizing, or else it just seems weirdly exploitative of them to put that detail in there.
I also have pretty strong feelings about the importance and meaning of biological sibling bonds, and intending to be able to give your child a genetic sibling and finding out you can't because you got the wrong sperm seems like a legitimate loss of sorts, even though obviously there are no guarantees in intended pregnancies and so on.
"You gave us a black baby and society is racist"?
I'd be sympathetic to a black couple that got a white baby under similar circumstances, and wouldn't consider the problem at all mitigated by the fact that society is racist.
Anyway, couldn't they sue for breach of contract without alleging injury (at least from the race of the donor)? Injury would affect the remedy, of course. But even there, you could assert injury from being made to bear the "wrong" foetus without addressing race.
There's a real problem, because the remedy is almost the whole case. The basic remedy for breach of contract is the difference in value between what you contracted for and what you got, and if what you contracted for was substantially the same value as what you got, there's nothing really to sue over.
This is obviously a problem when you're talking about a child, given that for the emotional/parenting reasons Witt brought up immediately you're not going to want to make a case that your child has diminished economic value, or diminished value of any kind. The only non-horrifying damages you can talk about are concrete increased expenses, and those are still going to be hard to quantify.
Sperm banks are also generally set up to make it easy to match physical characteristics-- the assumption seems to be that you want to search for someone who looks like your partner, and it was noticeably harder to search for other sorts of things.
I'm not a lawyer, but I still don't see why they are limited by damages based on the diminished value of the child. Insemination under false pretenses (or because of negligence) strike me as something that should trigger punitive damages by itself.
if what you contracted for was substantially the same value as what you got, there's nothing really to sue over.
Is there no way of suing for getting something you didn't want, even if it is of equal value? If you order a swivel chair online and get a bobcat instead, for example. A bobcat might actually be worth more than a swivel chair, but you didn't want a bobcat!
Or to be less xkcd about it, getting a car of a different colour to the one you ordered?
29: Actually no, you usually couldn't get specific performance. With the bobcat, literally, you'd be able to charge off the expenses of dealing with a bobcat, and the damage it did, but mostly your remedy is sell the bobcat and go buy yourself a chair.
A bobcat costs about the same as an Aeron chair. So that works out.
Offer of judgment for double the fee.
I'm no great fan of arbitration, but the sperm bank should definitely have an A clause in their standard contract.
30: Cost isn't value. There, you'd have a good argument that what you got was literally valueless to you, and you could very likely get your money back, and plausibly also any expenses you incurred in getting it removed or covered up.
26: Damage awards not related to quantifiable proof of damage incurred are usually going to require a statute imposing them. I think a statute imposing high statutory damages for any sperm-donor identity error is probably a very reasonable idea, but if there isn't such a law yet, it doesn't apply in this case.
24, 31 -- Nominal damages, though. One presumes the plaintiffs aren't looking for $1. I might give them that as a juror, though.
I am rusty on the UCC, which governs contracts for the sale of goods and so I think would govern the bobcat case (I do some contracts cases, but invariably involving services); that said, wouldn't the better approach be to refuse tender of the bobcat and either refuse to pay or (if one had already paid) seek return of the purchase price? Having to sell the bobcat seems like an unreasonable burden to impose on the buyer.
Since I'm just saying random stuff, I'll keep going.
Honestly, I sent in that link hoping that you would have thoughts, so I'm glad you've been inclined to say random stuff.
35: there are IIRC laws making consensual intercourse illegal if consent is obtained by deceit. Could this be applied in the case of someone who is consensually but deceitfully impregnated?
40: Fine! Then I'll add that part of the Ohio definition of "special needs/hard to place" that makes a child being adopted from foster care eligible for a post-adoption subsidy is "The child is at least one year old and is a member of a minority racial or ethnic group that makes it difficult to place the child for adoption." (Something like that is true in many states, though one is the youngest age I've ever seen, lower than it is even here.) That doesn't particularly connect to anything, but as well as the race-based price differences in domestic infant adoption, this is a thing.
It was mentioned by the evil-motorcycle-baby-thief in Raising Arizona..
(Selah's siblings were adopted into an otherwise all-white family in a town with very similar demographics and that concerns me, even though it's none of my business. I need to push harder on seeing if they'll do visits, but the answer seems to be that they won't allow them unless we cut off Selah's mombecause they don't want the kids having family contact until they're adults.)
I guess citing movies to prove points isn't very authoritative even when Nicolas Cage isn't involved.
45: The only way I can convince my stepdaughter anything is to cite to one of her favorite cartoon movies. But sometimes, I get some detail wrong, and she laughs at me.
41: Wouldn't that require showing willfulness? It probably wasn't like "donor #330's stuff isn't moving, let's clear out some old stock."
Clearly the remedy for an unwanted bobcat is for the vendor to finance a screwball comedy with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
48: Ah, bobcat like the animal. I was imagining the little scoop loader thing. Amazing how that changes the chair for bobcat calculus.
47: it is an interesting exercise to try to conceive (sorry) of a scenario in which someone consents to sex because she has been unintentionally deceived by the other party.
("I would never have gone to bed with him if I had known he wasn't a firefighter."
"Your honour, in my defence I had just been to a fancy dress party, I was quite drunk, and I had honestly forgotten I was still wearing the outfit.")
49: a Bobcat scoop loader is, in fact, a swivel chair (it has a seat, it has a back, it swivels) and so there would be no grounds for action at all.
Actually, scrub 50: what we're wanting is a scenario in which A consents to sex with B only because she has been deceived about B by C. The legal profession will no doubt remember it as the Wingman Case.
50. "I am unmarried." "I tested negative." "I had a vasectomy." "I am on the pill."
54: exactly, but those are all examples of intentional deceit. And the donor in this case wasn't intentionally deceitful.
I don't think the issue of intention is that big of a hurdle to overcome. At least for somethings, 'willful negligence' counts as close enough to intent. It looks here like their system was sufficiently stupid (a misreading of a '3' as an '8' gets you the wrong vial) that I'd consider it willful.
I didn't willfully omit the space between 'some' and 'things'.
56: Is there perhaps a non-banned analogy of some sort to whatever ended up happening with the Texas Ebola patient who was asked if he'd traveled from West Africa and then his affirmative answer wasn't relayed to the medical team?
I think our analogy ought to involve a violinist.
It's coerced if it involves violins or even just the threat of violins.
That makes me thing. I wonder if she couldn't sue for damages on the grounds that her only remedy to bearing a child she didn't consent to was a late-term abortion (because she didn't find out until after 5 months).
I meant, "That makes me think."
39: Sure, if refusing tender were a practical option, I couldn't see any court imposing an obligation to accept a bobcat as satisfaction of a contract for a chair. Refusing tender and rescinding the contract would be the way to go. I was sort of assuming we were restricting the discussion to situations where there were practical problems with refusing tender.
Not because it's vital to the point, or anything, just... just in case.
Can you get me a good price? Now that we don't have a dog anymore, the apartment seems kind of empty.
You can't sell pets on Craigslist, so I suppose just take out an ad in the classified section of the paper.
In a run-of-the-mill surprise bobcat delivery case I suppose it would come down to whether "open box, run screaming" counts as an objective manifestation of intent to refuse tender. I think I like the plaintiff's chances on that one.
Also, then you have a bobcat which, by assumption, isn't yours but is loose on your property, so you could probably not only rescind the contract but also seek damages in tort.
I would have thought owning a bobcat was illegal without a special permit, which means they're not freely transferable. And keeping a wild animal has subjected the owner/keeper to strict liability for centuries.
69: Rylands v. Fletcher. I just referred to that in an article!
So the contract is void for illegality before we even get to the tender issue? I guess that's probably right. And, yes, presumably the tort claim would be strict liability.
50: Actually, if I remember back far enough, I think Dr. Oops had a story kind of like that. I'm not getting the details, but she and a friend were at a bar, and a couple of guys struck up a conversation by asking what they did for a living. On hearing "We're surgeons", the guys assumed they were kidding and came back with something impressive-sounding.
I don't think anyone ended up sleeping with anyone else, but there was a moment when it became clear that Dr. Oops and co. were, in fact, surgeons and the guys they were talking to were not, in fact, professional athletes or whatever, and everyone felt awkward for a bit.
My gut reaction is that I'd be a lot more sympathetic to a heterosexual couple with this problem. In that case, having a sperm donor the same race as the parents would lead everyone to think that the kid was the parents' child biologically. They should be honest with doctors and the child when genetics is relevant, of course, but that would avoid lots of problems, race-related and otherwise. But a same-sex couple? Anyone aware of the orientation of at least one of the parents will also be aware that the kid has an unusual story. They're going to get strange looks and deal with rude questions and have an outsider's view of society no matter what. Adding blackness into the mix would be harder, but it's a difference of degree, not kind. So acting like a black sperm donor changes things completely seems... maybe not racist, but petty? Or something?
Like I said, just a gut reaction, I wouldn't be suprised if I'm really being unfair to the parents or black people or gay people, but that's what I thought.
As for bobcats, it depends on how plausible it would be to mistake it for a domestic cat, so wacky hijinx are more likely to ensue. Are there any fat, poorly groomed, Manx/tabby hybrids in the neighborhood?
And keeping a wild animal has subjected the owner/keeper to strict liability for centuries.
"Let us not forget, Dude, that uh, keeping an aquatic...mammal...in the city limits...that ain't legal either."
Bobcat ads are the only thing keeping newspapers in business, these days.
Regarding 74: The presumption that a non-bio child needs to more look like they are a biological child if you are a hetero couple, but not a homo couple, does strike me as a bit unfair. I'm not clear on the distinction that one is more important that the other.
The same issue would hold for adoption (and fostering, as Thorn alluded to earlier in the thread) too. In this case, is it more important that the adopotee resemble the adoptive parents, and would that matter differently for a hetero versus homo couple?
I do think 74 gets at the question of what gets described as "conspicuous families" like the one I'm in. I mean, the first time I had to give a sex talk in response to questions from the girls was "When a daddy and a daddy love each other very much, they find a nice woman called a surrogate..." and that's because they could see how our family worked, could see how mom/dad families did, but when their default assumption of adoption wasn't met they were deeply confused.
It does seem pretty common to look for matchiness in situations when you're looking for a sperm donor, and I don't think it's surprising that people would assume that's what a couple of any sort would want. (It's why I was being snarky about my friends and their non-black donor, in fact.) Before this case, the big one in the news was a white woman who'd been barred from using a non-white donor by her sperm bank. Whether this kind of "passing" puts too much pressure on the child is something that gets talked about a fair amount in adult adoptee circles, which are now expanding to include some donor-conceived adults.
Anyway, I wasn't offended by anything in 74. I do think people have assumptions about how families generally do and should work and it's good to see those challenged sometimes, but they also do exist.
80: The presumption that a non-bio child needs to more look like they are a biological child if you are a hetero couple, but not a homo couple, does strike me as a bit unfair. I'm not clear on the distinction that one is more important that the other.
To defend? not exactly, but kind of, 74, I can justify it by saying not that one is more important than the other but that one is more possible than the other. A same-sex couple and a baby, regardless of the race of all three people, onlookers know immediately that it's not possible for both parents to be biological parents of the baby, so non-matching races don't disturb a pre-existing assumption. With an opposite sex couple, if the races match the biology is possible, so unmatching races disturbs the presumption of relatedness.
I'm not sure that there's any good reason to put a value on that presumption, but it's a thing that I could certainly see some people valuing, and that same sex couples can't have, so they can't be deprived of by this kind of error.
A good friend of mine has finally been matched with a kid to fost-adopt -- kid is black, my friend is white and single -- and here's hoping Seattle has a sufficiently accepting crowd to grow up in kindly. (It might turn out to be the anti-racefail branch of the steam punks, for which I could forgive any amount of corsets-on-the-outside.)
Cousins adopted three black sibs while living in a even-more-racist than they thought small town and it didn't go well. Re 74, there are things people will say to a white woman carrying a little black child that differ in kind from other insults I'm familiar with, and I think they'd get even more despicable if they thought there had been mixing of vital essences. White Woman Purity Cult is alive and vile.
I can't get past the idea that these parents decided to do this knowing that their daughter would have to live for the rest of her life with the entire world knowing that her parents sued about the circumstances of her birth.
This. I haven't yet read this thread, or not yet past 3, but this is the idea that I cannot get past. The child will know. And never mind the entire world knowing (or, okay, that too), but she will know that her parents sued over her birth, which she will no doubt (and quite rightly) interpret as a lawsuit over the "mistake" of her very existence.
84: If I can do anything to help, let me know! But I've found that with more obviously black-black children there's the assumption that I've adopted internationally but not that I've been polluting the race in bed or anything like that. I've expected to get more of that with Selah, but haven't much so far, though unlike the older girls she passes as mine.
I will ask, Thorn! Friend is about the most on-top-of-it, planning-ahead, find-mentors energetic person I know -- this is the sixth of her life projects any two of which would suffice me -- but who knows what puzzles will come up?
I'm glad you didn't get the toxicity my cousins did. Their marriage didn't survive it and all three of the adopted kids lived with other parts of my family instead of either of them, by the time they got to high school. One of the kids was only rescued by an evangelical Christian family that specializes in very difficult teenagers, which makes me feel kindlier towards evangelical Christians, which is useful.
Some years ago I watched a BBC documentary about a black and a white couple in the UK who had both gone to a fertility clinic and the clinic had mixed up the fertilized eggs. The egg implanted in the white mother but not the black mother, and 9 months later the white mother gave birth to a black baby. A mother of all custody battles ensued, with the issue being whether a child belonged to the family whose genetic material it shared or to the mother who had birthed it. Race did play a role in the decision, since the judge decided it was in the child's interest to be raised by parents of the same race and eventually awarded the child to the black couple. Given all the pain and suffering both families endured, they should have all sued the fertility clinic for millions of pounds.