Aaron Halbert is a white evangelical and proud new father of three Black daughters, who his white wife gave birth to.

“This past Sunday, my gorgeous wife – a white evangelical, like me – gave birth to our beautiful African-American triplet daughters whom we adopted as embryos,” he wrote in an op-ed Thursday.

The couple is already parents to two adopted children, a 3-year old Black son and 2-year-old biracial daughter.

Halbert, who did not mention the names of his wife or children in the essay, explained his personal relationship with racial diversity from growing up “as a child of evangelical missionaries in Honduras.”

“I was the blue-eyed, cotton-topped white kid who stuck out like a sore thumb, but all the while felt deeply connected to the people there, even though we looked very different,” wrote Halbert, who is currently a missionary serving in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

However, his wife grew up in Mississippi and had a very different view of the world and race and it wasn’t “until she took a few trips to Haiti that the veil of racial prejudice was lifted from her eyes.”

Early on in their marriage they began discussing adoption and specifically asked the agency in Mississippi they were working with to match them with any child except a fully Caucasian one.

After their first two adoptions, they took the next step in adopting two embryos through the National Embryo Donation Center, a Christian embryo bank. But one of the embryos split in two so two became three.

“I felt sheer delight during this pregnancy watching my son and daughter, with his dark brown skin and her with the ringlet hair and slightly tan skin, kiss my white wife’s growing belly,” Halbert wrote. “Each evening they said good night to those three growing little girls in her belly, and now they get to finally say sweet dreams to their baby sisters — face-to-adorable-face.”

He continued expressing the love for his Black children by writing, “There is something beautiful and enriching being the only white face sitting and chatting with some of my African-American friends as my son gets his hair cut on a Saturday morning.”

“There is also something wonderful in the relationship that is built as my wife asks a Black friend on Facebook how to care for our little biracial daughter’s hair,” Halbert continued. “The beauty of a multi-ethnic family is found there, in the fact that the differences are the very thing that make ours richer and fuller. It forces you to think in a new way about the way you think, speak, act and live.”  

(Photo: Kevin Klöpper/Getty Images)