When Mardochée Julien-West and her wife decided to become moms through in vitro fertilization, they knew they definitely wanted Black babies. They just didn’t know how hard that would be.
Julien-West remembers first looking donors at a cryobank in 2020. When she and her wife Yevette filtered the search for Black men, their options dwindled from hundreds of choices to only two.
“We were just mind-blown,” Julien-West told USA TODAY this week. “There are Black lesbians, there are Black queer people, there are straight people who have fertility issues. There’s just a huge demand so it was insane.”
“I remember feeling angry, resentful and robbed,” she said.
A lack of Black donors is nothing new, experts say, but an increased demand for them in recent years has turned a small problem into a big one, causing families to wait for years for the right donor, spend thousands of dollars in the process, and often make compromises on the race of their children.
“I want people to be angry about this,” said Alyse Mencias, clinic relations manager with the Seattle Sperm Bank. “It’s so specific to Black families who aren’t able to have children who look like them, who match the rest of their family. As a Black woman here, it’s frustrating to see that.”
A harsh reality
For Julien-West and her wife, the choices at the cryobanks they searched were so limiting, they decided to make a compromise on the race of their donor, settling for a man who was half white, half Black.
“We kept telling ourselves, ‘Well at least he’s partially Black,’” recalled Julien-West, a 30-year-old behavior therapist. “It was hard and frustrating to see how limited the options were and a harsh reality of having to compromise our priority list.”
Julien-West got pregnant with the mixed-race donor but then she had a miscarriage. The couple wanted to try again but the man they had chosen had stopped donating, putting them back at square one.
The couple’s decision to compromise on the race of their child isn’t uncommon. It’s also what Jewel Grant did. The 49-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist said that when she was choosing a donor, her No. 1 priority was that he be very smart. Her No. 2 priority was that he be Black.
“I like chocolate babies,” said Grant, who is single and lives in metro Atlanta. “My choices were limited … I said, ‘If I’m gonna spend all this money, you’re gonna be smart. Point blank period. If I’m gonna spend all of this money, you better have something extraordinary about you.'”
She ended up choosing a man who was half Black and a B-plus student whose parents are a doctor and a lawyer.
“I had settle,” she said. “When I made the first pass and noticed that there wasn’t any Black people, I was like, ‘Oh, OK, so what’s your second and third option?’ It is disheartening.”
Grant now has a 6-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl through donor sperm and is planning a third.
What’s driving the problem?
Experts say there are many reasons why sperm banks don’t have more Black donors.
For one, sperm banks historically have been run by white people who were targeting white donors and white clients. Additionally, Black people have a long history of mistreatment in the name of medicine and science. The Tuskegee Study, for instance, involved the U.S. government denying treatment to hundreds of poor, Black men who had syphilis so that researchers could study its ravages on the human body.
“The Black community in particular rightfully has a long history of distrust of the medical system due to a long history of racism in this country and unethical experimentation on Black patients,” said Jennifer Eaton, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Brown University.
Dr. Danielle Lane, a fertility specialist and medical director at at the Lane Fertility Institute in San Francisco, thinks that some of the requirements that cryobanks have are too strict for many Black men.
For instance, the vast majority of cryobanks require potential donors to provide three generations worth of medical history, something that’s not always possible for Black people in particular.
“Not only do our families not have three generations of medical history, and by the way, that’s not always because the family is quote, unquote ‘broken,'” she said.
Many cryobanks also require donors to have college degrees, which Lane said also eliminates a wide swath of men.
“It’s interesting because we don’t require that of egg donors,” she said. “If you think about what the egg donor goes through compared to what the sperm donor goes through, I’m not sure why we think there’s that a necessity … It really is irrelevant and not only is it irrelevant, it’s actually problematic for folks that are trying to expand the diversity of their sperm donors.”
Solutions
Many cryobanks have only recently been trying to find solutions to the shortage of Black donors while others ramped up previously minimal efforts because of high demand.
California Cryobank for instance, has been marketing directly to Black men, opened up more facilities in more diverse areas and eliminated a rule that disqualified a potential donor if he had sickle cell disease, said Scott Brown, senior director of global sperm sales at the cryobank.
Anecdotally, he said the efforts seem to have led to an increase in potential donors but the efforts are too new to illuminate how it’s impacted those who get accepted.
“It’s always a challenge to get enough donors of color applying to our program,” he said, recalling how the cryobank tried to target Black university students about a decade ago and got zero interest. “We’re doing everything we can.”
‘Thankful’
After nearly four years of looking for the perfect donor, compromising on the race of one donor, surviving the heartbreak of a miscarriage, Mardochée Julien-West finally got pregnant with the perfect, Black donor nearly a year ago.
She and her wife became mothers to a beautiful baby boy, and Yevette Julien-West is pregnant with their second child, with the same donor.
It’s been a gut-wrenching journey but worth it now that they have their perfect family.
The couple went through so much and felt so alone at times that Mardochée Julien-West decided to dedicate much of her TikTok account to sharing her journey and helping women in similar situations.
“I spent a lot of time growing very frustrated, which is why I started talking about it on my page,” she said. “I can’t be the only one struggling with this.”
Although the miscarriage was such a painful experience, Julien-West said she took it as a sign that she and her wife deserved the donor of their dreams.
“I really just need to have a brown baby,” she remembers thinking. “Now I’m grateful because of my son. If you see my son, he looks just like me — color wise, face wise. Like, I gave birth to me.”
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