Teacher
Relations
by Eula Biss
Posted: March 17, 2008
Photo courtesy of Meryl Schenker and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
In New York City, in the spring of 1999, a story hit the newspapers of a Long Island woman who had given birth to twins--one white and one black. The woman and her husband were white and the black baby was not theirs, at least not biologically. The embryo that became that baby had been accidentally implanted in the woman's uterus with the embryo of her biological son, but it belonged to a black couple who were clients at the same fertility clinic, and they wanted their son back. After a DNA test, a custody battle, a state supreme court ruling, and an unsuccessful appeal, it was decided that the black baby was the child of the black couple, legally and entirely.
The story had its peculiarities, like the fact that the fertility clinic had notified the black couple that some of their embryos had been mistakenly implanted in another woman, but did not tell them anything more, so they eventually learned of the birth of their son through a private investigator. But even odd facts like this took on the sheen of metaphor, pointing, for those of us who were looking, to further evidence of a systematic failure of any number of services to reach black people intact, in the form in which they are typically enjoyed by white people. If both babies had been white, I doubt the story would have become the parable it became--playing out in the newspapers over the next few years as an epic tale of blood and belonging.
The fact that the story involved two babies and two mothers and, eventually, an agreement that gave both babies a family and both families a baby would inspire some reporters to use the phrase "happy ending," but the story would resist that happy ending in part because the black baby was initially returned to his biological parents on the strict condition that he would continue to visit his twin brother,...
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