A woman has sued a Chicago-area sperm bank after she became pregnant with sperm donated by a black man instead of a white man as she and her partner had intended.
The Ohio 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 on 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.
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.
Telephone messages at Midwest Sperm Bank were not returned. It’s unclear who its attorney is.
Cramblett said she and Zinkon love their 2-year-old daughter, Payton, very much and wouldn’t change anything about her. But they are concerned about raising her in the predominantly white community where they live.
