Women in Philosophy: Cramblett, Race, Disability, and Liberatory Politics

by Desiree Valentine

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donor’s sperm. As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donor’s 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’s race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all-white community to difficulties dealing with their daughter’s hair. The couple sued for “wrongful birth” and “breach of warranty,” citing emotional and economic difficulties.

Clearly, there are legal issues at stake—the particular sperm bank was negligent in their handling of the transaction. But the claim of ‘wrongful birth’ brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughter’s blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett, and moreover, that she should be compensated for ‘damages’.

Unsurprisingly, many commentators reacted with outrage, disbelief, and dismay—outrage 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.

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’ll 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.

First, the historical problems:

While many discussions of this lawsuit in popular media addressed the racist/racially insensitive elements of the case, almost all evaded the specific legal genealogy of the claim ‘wrongful birth. Historically, ‘wrongful birth’ emerged and has primarily been cast as a negligence claim against a physician who failed to adequately inform a pregnant individual of the likelihood of their child having a congenital disorder, birth defect, or other disability. These cases implicitly assume that had the pregnant individual been properly informed, they would have chosen to end the pregnancy; hence, the normatively laden terminology of ‘wrongful.’ As many disability activists and scholars have helpfully shown, the governing logic of ‘wrongful birth’ claims is that certain (disabled) individuals should not exist. But because the overriding assumption in the larger bioethical sphere is that disability is an inherent disadvantage, when advanced in the context of disability ‘wrongful birth’ is not understood as problematic relative to eugenic logics based on race, which have much longer and more widely been regarded with ill repute (at least prima facie). Thus, there was much consternation in the media surrounding the racial dynamics of this case, but very little surrounding the disability-related aspects.

When disability was recognized as a part of the case, it was positioned as heightening the racial offense. Take for example Gayle King’s comments on a morning talk show in response to a legal correspondent who noted wrongful birth’s’ “grounding in disability”; King replies, “That makes it even worse,” signaling a sort of “repulsion” to the idea of “saddling race next to disability” (Kearl, 308).

Reading this repulsion generously, one might appeal to the intertwined history of racism and ableism. For, as Eli Clare reminds us, “Black people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in the Americas were declared defective as a way to justify and strengthen the institution of slavery” and “Immigrants at Ellis island were declared defective and refused entry to the United States” (23). Clearly, comparing race and disability is historically rooted in oppressive logics which should be contested. And yet, King’s repulsion without recognition (and condemnation) of the eugenic logic ‘wrongful birth’ wields in the first place ends up using ableism to buttress concerns about racism.

Against popular responses to Cramblett that either disregard the connection to disability or position it as heightening the racial offense, I want to ask: how can we think comparatively about race and disability in a way that is not reduced to oppressive historical legacies? Thankfully, decades of scholarship in both critical race and critical disability studies have laid the groundwork for such an endeavor. Far too often are these fields left distinct, generating a ‘whitening’ of disability studies and the occlusion of disability concerns from theorization on race.

Work in critical race and disability studies has gone to great lengths to reconceive ‘race’ and ‘disability,’ respectively—typically arguing against standard biological renderings of such categories, instead emphasizing their social and political production. Specifically, disability studies has distinguished faulty medical/individual models of disability that understand disability as something inherent in an individual biological body from social and political models that position ‘disability’ as an effect of social and material conditions structuring an environment. Similarly, biological understandings of race have waned in popularity giving rise to various social and political readings of race and racism.

What is interesting about Cramblett is that against standard ‘wrongful birth’ claims which conceive the locus of harm to be in the individual child (via a medical model of disability), it embraces sociopolitical understandings of race to make its case. As Cramblett and her partner told CBS news reporters, “they love their 2-year-old daughter, Payton, very much and wouldn’t change anything about her. But they are concerned about raising her in the predominantly white community where they live.” It is not the child’s race itself that is inherently harmful, they alleged, but the institutional and interpersonal burdens that arise from raising a black child in an oppressive, anti-black context. For example, the lawsuit described how the town Cramblett and her partner ‘now “ironically”’ moved to is all-white and “too racially intolerant” and far from any area where Cramblett can take her child to get a “decent haircut.” Additionally, Cramblett worried about her “unconsciously insensitive family members,” and noted her “limited cultural competency relative to African Americans, and steep learning curve” given the fact that she “did not know African Americans until her college days.”

Cramblett in effect sued for ‘wrongful racism’; she did not receive the whiteness bargained for and so sued under terms suggesting she is due compensation for the fact—not that there is racism—but that she now has to deal with it personally. One might question, for example, why the couple supposedly didn’t feel any qualms about raising a white child in a town that is “too racially intolerant.” ‘Wrongful birth’s’ transition into the realm of race significantly marks a recognition of the social, political, and environmental issues sustaining racism and its associated harms, but the problem here is the site of redress—the white mothers—rather than the environment lending credence to their case in the first place. Cramblett describes a personal loss that relies on structural analyses to articulate, all the while refusing to vilify those structures as problems in themselves.

So, what possibilities can we take from a case as contemptible as this?

Cramblett illuminates the continued intersecting of racism and ableism, against which we must remain vigilant. It also urges us to think creatively about the potentials of comparative sociopolitical analyses of race and disability, especially in the realm of reparative social transformation. As one commentator noted, “Actually, I hope this lawsuit wins. If it does, I am suing somebody.” She goes on to describe, in jest, the potential of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all parents of kids of African descent because of the emotional distress caused by parenting black children in an anti-black, racist environment. We approach the question of reparations in provocations like these, which urges the consideration of political and legal activism for both antiracist and disability activists around the notion of compensation, not for having been born or having given birth ‘wrongfully,’ but for the harms produced by sociopolitical institutions and environments. For example, legal theorist Kimani Paul-Emile makes the argument for blackness being understood as a disability within antidiscrimination law because, as she argues, disability-related tort law’s normative commitments better capture (and better address) racial discrimination since they embrace a social model of oppression, use an identity-conscious lens and focus on impact rather than intent.

In order to guard against generating problematic analogies between race and disability, the comparison of race and disability requires a relationship of juxtaposition. As described by Juliet Hooker, the method of juxtaposition involves placing two seemingly disparate objects side by side and viewing them simultaneously such that “the viewer’s understanding of each object is transformed” in the process. Hooker continues: “Juxtaposition thus allows us to ask: What happens when thinkers and traditions that are viewed as disparate are staged as proximate, what insights are revealed?” This method of inquiry allows for an understanding of the boundaries between social categories “as contingent products of political power” (13, emphasis mine).

Alison Kafer helpfully illustrates this methodology by articulating an expansive approach to disability politics. Reflecting on Bernice Johnson Reagon’s work, Kafer describes how “experiences of disability can be useful not only in informing our understandings about bodies but also our understandings of ethical relations and political practice” (152). Kafer recounts Reagon’s relating her surviving the physically disabling experience of breathing at a high altitude to her experience as a black women surviving ‘white’ spaces that assume certain (black) bodies “play no role or can participate only at great personal risk” (152) This comparison of Reagon’s experience as a racialized and disabled other causes her to reflect on an expanded politics of space and accessibility—one that joins together both critical race and disability politics. In so doing, disability is thought otherwise, as “not just in bodies identified as disabled but in minds and bodies surviving inaccessible spaces, with both ‘access’ and ‘spaces’ broadly defined.” (153). This means “recognizing contestations over whiteness, or economic disparity, or heteronormativity as part of disability studies and disability activism, not merely side projects or subdisciplines” (153).

Additionally, if we refuse naturalizing logics of race and disability, we can explore their ‘ontology’ as ‘political’—that is, we can ask questions such as: what is the ‘being’ of race and disability in political formation and as an organizing feature of our sociopolitical order? What is the field of intelligibility through which systems of oppression work to create and sustain certain patterns of relating and belonging? In Ontological Terror Calvin Warren discusses this ‘being’ of blackness by way of analysis of the 1840 Census, the first of which to enumerate the ‘mentally defective.’ What emerged in statistical analysis was large difference in free states vs. slave states of blacks with mental illness—1 in 144 in free states, 1 in 1558 in slave states. Why this big difference? Its purpose seems to be an ideological move by pro-slavery advocates to claim that slavery was good and necessary for the black, lest they suffer “lunacy under the burden of freedom,” as described by Albert Deutsch, quoting John Calhoun, ex-Vice President of the U.S. and political leader of slave states (473). These statistics, unsurprisingly, were found to be wildly inaccurate, with internal inconsistencies regarding the enumeration of blacks and the ‘insane’ in the north. Towns were reflected as 1) having ‘insane negroes’ when there weren’t any negro residents; 2) having more ‘insane negroes’ than they had negroes; 3) counting white ‘insane’ patients at state hospitals as ‘insane negroes.’

While we could read this as a statistical ‘error’ or clear case of lies and deception, Warren suggests we ought to account for these ‘errors’ philosophically. What he means by this is for us to explore the ‘ontological truths’ generated by the fact that towns ‘materialized’ ‘black insanity’ where there were no black people or how white people were deemed black by way of mental defect. Centering a political ontology of race and disability, we can understand disability (via its interpellation through blackness) operating as a floating signifier rather than something that attaches to ‘disabled bodies.’ Additionally, ‘blackness’ expands its attachment beyond ‘black bodies’ through ‘insanity.’

Ultimately, the juxtaposing of race and disability, inadvertently brought on by aspects of the Cramblett case, helps to build the conceptual architecture of a broad-based liberatory politics. First and foremost, this politics ought to be focused on illuminating and actively contesting the structural conditions of oppression that operate through idea(l)s of normalcy/ability, bio reproductive futurity, and whiteness. ‘Wrongful birth,’ if anything, ought to signal attention to the societal conditions that do not foster the existence and flourishing of non-white, black, and disabled living and instead produce literal and social deaths.

Desiree Valentine is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. Her areas of research include feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, queer theory, and bioethics. She is currently working on a project concerning the intersections of racism and ableism and the prospect of building resistant juxtapositions of race and disability.