Deciding the level of melanin via sperm donor is nothing compared to the decision to raise a fatherless child

I wish I could sit down and have coffee with this woman …

I am a single black woman who is considering having a child. Since I don’t have a partner, I would essentially be choosing everything about my child’s other parent, including race. Which is a big issue for me. If I choose a black donor, I’d be consigning my child to the racism that I face every day. I’m proudly black, but because I am black I understand how difficult it is to navigate life as a black person. While I understand that being biracial comes with its own set of issues (like people asking “What are you?”) it still provides certain levels of privilege that I don’t have access to. If I choose a donor with lighter skin than mine, how can I then teach my child to be proud of their black roots? How would I explain that to my very black family?

… where I could be honest with her about her focus on ‘race’ being, frankly, inconsequential.

Without much more information than the quote, I’m going to make some assumptions here. Ms. ‘Black’ is probably in her late thirties, early forties. She finds herself at a point in time when her drive to be pregnant is acute and her window in actually being able to become pregnant is rapidly closing. I certainly understand the overwhelming, primal nature of that drive to become pregnant. It borders on an almost physical obsession. It dominates a woman’s life. Ask couples with fertility issues how becoming pregnant crowds everything else out. Even with women who easily become pregnant, wanting to have another child after the first can be emotionally overwhelming. This has to be acknowledged.

Both Mothers and Fathers are important to children

Yet, as human beings, we are called each day to our most important struggle — not with the outside world, but with ourselves. We are beings driven by a powerful, emotional nature. Hunger, avarice, sexual drives would result in great cruelty towards others if not fenced in by rationality, principles, values, and ethics.

I would appeal to Ms. Black’s rationality. “Are you prepared to raise a fatherless child?”

Everything Larry Elder says in this video is as applicable to white or brown children as it is to black children. The first thing any child deserves is to be born to both a mother and father. Men and women are fundamentally different and, as such, a child in an intact family setting will grow up being emotionally intimate with both a member of their own sex as well as one of the opposite.

I must put a disclaimer here: I’m not at all saying that single mothers are incapable of raising children. The majority of children raised in single parent homes, regardless of reason, will be fine. However, the majority of young people or adults who end up in gangs or as criminals will come from dysfunctional, single-parent families.

This is about trying to have the ideal situation in which to raise a child, especially if the decision to become pregnant has not yet occurred.

Ms. Black, if becoming a parent is your desire, there are many children who need a good home right now. Please consider fostering or adopting a child who has no home. Please make this about what is best for the child, not about your understandable, but emotional, desire to be pregnant. Race is not important, fathers are.