The little girl whose birth brought "anger, disappointment and fear"

[Ms. Toad]

8. People of color, unfortunately, are treated differently because of how they look

and when their children in families where at least one parent looks like them come home with yet the latest racial injury, they come home to someone who has already been through the experience, and who "get it" without the child having give racism 101 explanations or to convince the parent that whatever happened really was about race.

It isn't about complaining about bigots or not having children of color because bigots exist - it is about the very real racial isolation their child will feel because she lives in a home and a family that doesn't look like her, and hasn't had the experience of looking like her, in a world where skin color matters.

I have 3 Native American siblings. Although I was not aware of it while we were growing up, as adults they have shared with siblings and our parents some of racial isolation - and race baiting - they experienced growing up. And that was in a home where our parents were attuned to racial differences and spent a lot of effort on trying to celebrate their communities of origin.

As a lesbian couple who decided to have a child, my spouse and I knew that any child we raised would experience discrimination because of who her parents are. In choosing donor insemination rather than adoption of a non-white infant, the experiences of my siblings played a large role - piling familial racial isolation on top of having two moms, in a community which is at least of average imperfection in the realm of race would not have been in the best interest of the child. If we lived (or wanted to live) in a diverse urban community, being intentional about surrounding ourselves with a community who looked like - and could support - a non-white child in ways we could not, our choice might have been different. But I would not have brought a non-white child into our white family unless I was willing to make that commitment. Whether you agree with our priorities or not, living in a community near our (sometimes unintentionally racially insensitive) family, and having a piece of property large enough for our child to run, play, and climb trees, etc. were higher priorities for us - so we chose donor insemination (with a white donor) over adoption (where the child would almost certainly have been non-white.

For us, it had nothing to do with not wanting a child of color for any other reason than we were not willing to make the kind of changes we felt would be necessary in our lives to fully support a child who does not look like us, who will be discriminated against in ways we would not necessarily even be capable of recognizing as discrimination.

Had our donor turned out to be non-white - our emotional reaction would have been very similar to this couple. We would have made the necessary changes to care for the child who was on the way, but the changes were ones we had already considered and rejected when we chose to use donor insemination rather than adoption to create our family, and even as committed to doing the right thing as we would have been, I know from the experience of my siblings, that the impact of racial isolation even among the most well intentioned family is real and harmful.