“Race mixing” is still off-putting for some, including Calgary, Canada’s Regional Fertility Program whose staff made a habit of telling women to select sperm that was from the same ethnic pool as their own. No cellular race-mixing here!
But once one appalled white woman shared her story of being told she “could receive sperm from only white donors,” writes Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, it got real up in Drake’s stomping grounds. Come to think of it, this facility probably doesn’t like Drake because, well, he’s biracial. Anyway, the program quickly changed their tune but not their website, which said the following until earlier this week:
“It is the practice of the Regional Fertility Program not to permit the use of a sperm donor that would result in a future child appearing racially different than the recipient or the recipient’s partner.”
Oops.
According to Matt Gysler, former president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, since Regional Fertility is a private practice, they can make their own rules. But after local news media heard about their Jim Crow sperm mandates and reported the story, the public, to Regional Fertility’s surprise, wasn’t so into their rules.
Then the Fertility folks tried clarifying that their website, not their program, was behind the times. Except they didn’t fix the site to reflect their new stance until sometime earlier after Monday morning. And then came the inevitable ‘but … but … all our best babies are black!’ moment where the clinic spokesperson said:
“For more than a year, patients of the Regional Fertility Program have had the choice of egg or sperm donors of any ethnicity. Unfortunately, this change in policy was not updated on our website, which is currently under construction. This was an oversight and that older policy has now been removed.”
So Regional Fertility has been a fan of biracial babies and, you know, people since 2013? Does Champagne Papi know about this?
Image via Getty.