No ‘Rainbow Families’: Canadian Fertility Clinic Refuses to Match White Patients With Nonwhite Donors

BY: STEPHEN A. CROCKETT JR., theRoot

A Canadian fertility clinic doesn’t want to create “rainbow families” so it refuses to match clients with donors of different ethnicities, claiming that children should be able to easily identify their “ethnic roots.”

A 38-year old white woman named Catherine (she didn’t want to give her last name) told the Calgary Herald that she was looking into the process of in vitro fertilization and was shocked when the Regional Fertility Program, a Calgary clinic, told her that she could only use sperm donors who were also white in order to avoid “creating rainbow families.”

“I was absolutely floored,” she told the newspaper.

Catherine believes that because of the clinic’s policy, many of the same men have been chosen by different patients in the area, which was one of the reasons she cited as having wanted to broaden her search to include other races.

“Frankly, it’s appalling how many people have the same donors, probably because of this policy,” she told the Herald. “A friend of mine just went through this process and used the donor that I would have picked.”

Dr. Calvin Greene, the administrative director at the Regional Fertility Program, told the newspaper that his stance on race mixing is firm and noted that the policy has been in place since the 1980s.

“I’m not sure that we should be creating rainbow families just because some single woman decides that that’s what she wants,” Greene told the Herald. “That’s her prerogative, but that’s not her prerogative in our clinic.”

Read more here.

Read more Breaking News here.