{"id":58819,"date":"2019-09-04T02:43:13","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T02:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58819"},"modified":"2019-09-05T00:20:05","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T00:20:05","slug":"women-in-philosophy-cramblett-race-disability-and-liberatory-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58819","title":{"rendered":"Women in Philosophy: Cramblett, Race, Disability, and Liberatory Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women in Philosophy: <\/strong><\/em>Cramblett<\/strong>, Race, Disability, and Liberatory Politics<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Blog of the APA<\/a>
\nThe American Philosophical Association<\/a>
\n2019-08-14<\/p>\n

Desiree Valentine<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
\nMarquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting<\/a> on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donor\u2019s sperm<\/a>. As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank<\/em><\/a> alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donor\u2019s sperm, but they had specifically chosen a white donor with blonde hair and blue eyes and the sperm they received had been from a black donor. Both women were white. The couple gave birth to a black\/mixed-race child in 2012 and claimed that their daughter\u2019s race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all-white community to difficulties dealing with their daughter\u2019s hair. The couple sued for \u201cwrongful birth<\/a>\u201d and \u201cbreach of warranty,\u201d citing emotional and economic difficulties.<\/p>\n

Clearly, there are legal issues at stake\u2014the particular sperm bank was negligent in their handling of the transaction. But the claim of \u2018wrongful birth\u2019 brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughter\u2019s blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett<\/em>, and moreover, that she should be compensated for \u2018damages\u2019.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, many commentators reacted with outrage, disbelief, and dismay\u2014outrage that a mother would sue on account of having a non-white, but healthy child, disbelief that this claim could even be legally articulable, and dismay at the fact that one day this child would learn that her mother implicitly claimed that she should have never been born because she was black\/mixed race.<\/p>\n

While obviously problematic (the case was thrown out by an Illinois Circuit Court Judge in 2015), the fact that this case was legally and thus on some level, socially and culturally intelligible, sets the stage for an array of philosophical interventions. For my purposes here, I\u2019ll focus primarily on the problems and possibilities of various conceptualizations of race and disability that are illuminated by a politically-aware and historically-situated reading of Cramblett<\/em>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But the claim of \u2018wrongful birth\u2019 brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughter\u2019s blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett, and moreover, that she should be compensated for \u2018damages\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,414,2039,1467,8,6941,26,394,4481,20],"tags":[30205,30206,20807,5488,17990,18094,260,30207],"class_list":["post-58819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-family","category-health-medicine","category-law","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-social-work","category-usa","tag-american-philosophical-association","tag-blog-of-the-apa","tag-cramblett-v-midwest-sperm-bank","tag-illinois","tag-jennifer-cramblett","tag-midwest-sperm-bank","tag-ohio","tag-wrongful-birth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58820,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58819\/revisions\/58820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}