Reproducing Race

More than a million children in the U.S. each year are conceived with donated sperm or eggs. Sperm banks and egg vendors offer online ordering and direct shipping of donor materials that prospective parents can shop for based on SAT scores, personality tests, and celebrity likeness.

"[W]hat we try to do is give [parents] as much choice as possible," explains Dr. Cappy Rothman, co-founder of the world's leading sperm bank, California Cryobank. "If our customers wanted high school dropouts," he adds, "we would give them high-school dropouts."

What many of these (mostly white) parents want is a child who will look like they do. This means picking a donor who is, like them, white.

So sperm banks and egg vendors try to make race-matching easier. Most separate donor directories along lines race and offer online drop-down menus to filter donors by race. Some even color-code the samples they store and ship: white for a white donor, black for a black donor, yellow for an Asian donor, and red for donors of "unique or mixed ancestry."...