IVF errors and questions of race

Why has the response to the black IVF twins born to white parents been so hysterical?
The Maury Povich show, which is the fourth most popular daytime television chat show in the US, trades on people's anxiety about the biological provenance of their children. The guests - one man, one woman, and one child conceived naturally - submit themselves to a DNA test. Povich pulls the results from a large brown envelope in front of a live audience, as if announcing whether contestants have picked the lucky envelope to win a brand new Chevrolet. Instead, it is a circus of human sorrows. Nearly every test shows that, despite the mother's conviction to the contrary, the man is not her child's biological parent.

In last week's episode, one woman paraded a series of three different men, one after the other. With each, she insisted that he was the father of her tiny baby. Each tested negative. In Britain, it has been estimated that 10% of fathers unknowingly bring up someone else's child. Parenthood, whether artificially assisted or otherwise, does not routinely arrive with a certificate of biological authenticity.

I have twins who were conceived in a laboratory. So how can I guarantee that they really are part of my family? Because I gave birth to them, fed them, and I am rearing them to the best of my ability. There is nothing that can make them more our children. If I discovered that, in fact, they were the result of a stranger's egg being accidentally lodged in the pipette that re-implanted my own, it would, of course, cause some heartache. But it would not - could not - make them less mine.

But my twins and I are white. If the case reported this week of black twins born of white parents at a fertility clinic linked to an NHS trust had been white, like their birth mother, would it have been seen as so freakish? Or is it their colour that we find so disturbing? Reports quote, erroneously or otherwise, that the couple "were shocked to find they were dark-skinned". Their main concern, we are led to believe, isn't whether they are their biological babies, but that they are black.

The cases cited as similar - Donna Fasano in New York and Wilma Stuart in Utrecht - both involve white women giving birth to a black baby. Yesterday, the Daily Mail ran a cartoon with the caption, "I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, Eileen. But why not ring the hospital just to put your mind at rest?" The cartoon was of a mother taking her child to nursery - except that her child was a chimp. Having a black baby when you are white is as monstrous as giving birth to an animal.

Like a game of Misfits, we have been treated to extraordinary diagrams of the various permutations by which they could have been produced: black egg and black sperm, white egg and black sperm, black egg and white sperm... The black twins born of white parents at a fertility clinic are already condemned as IVF freaks. We are asked to recoil at the potential horrors of meddling with nature's tried'n'trusted methods.

Calls have been made to tighten up protocols in clinics, to ensure that such a "tragedy" (as the twins' birth has been referred to without exception) does not recur. At the same time, experts admit such simple human errors are unavoidable; they must happen two or three times a year without anyone noticing. There have been other documented blunders, but where both the mother and child have been white. It's only when such errors confound racial boundaries that we feel such a desperate need to eradicate them.

The case of these twins will, it seems, end up in court. Legally, the woman who gives birth to a child is the mother, whether or not it is genetically hers. But paternity is open to legal interpretation. Sadly, arguments may end up revolving around which man provided the sperm. But the issue shouldn't be whose minuscule drop of bodily fluid went towards the forming of these disputed babies, but who wants them. It is possible that both couples do. Ironically, this only goes to prove that their genetic make-up and colour is not of prime importance to either couple.

Whether conceived late at night in a double bed or under the glare of fluorescent lights in a petri dish, you cannot have a cast-iron guarantee of a child's genetic origins. But parenthood isn't about establishing this scientific truth. It's about bringing up baby, hopefully well, wherever they came from.

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