Artificial Bastards?

From November 1942 to January 1944 Frank Hoch of Chicago was away from home, in the Army. When he was discharged and went home, he found his wife Lorraine two months pregnant. She told him his only rival was a test tube, but he sued for divorce anyway. Last fortnight in Chicago, Circuit Judge Michael Feinberg granted Frank Hoch his divorce--but on other incriminating evidence. Artificial insemination, he ruled, is legally insufficient for a divorce on grounds of adultery.

Judge Feinberg's ruling established the first U.S. precedent in a curious legal problem. The first reported case of human artificial insemination occurred in England in 1790, when Dr. John Hunter, consulted by a "linen draper in the Strand" suffering from a deformity of the urethra, decided to inject the draper's wife with semen by means of a syringe. The operation produced a normal pregnancy. Since then moralists have viewed the process with increasing alarm, while visionary eugenists have hailed the prospects (e.g., the indefinite perpetuation of great men through preservation of their frozen semen for generation after generation of selected mothers). Today, however, most doctors are interested in artificial insemination only as a remedy for otherwise barren marriages.

When both partners are fertile, but coitus or conception is prevented by some structural abnormality, artificial insemination may be a simple means to parenthood. The complications--legaland moral--set in when the wife of a sterile husband is impregnated by semen from another man.

Adultery? Blackmail? Clinically, such inseminations have been notably successful. Johns Hopkins' Dr. Alan Guttmacher has reported success in no less than 20 out of 36 attempts. But the problem of possible charges of adultery against the mother, illegitimacy against the child, blackmail by donors of semen remains unsolved. For their own as well as their patients' protection, U.S. doctors usually seek refuge in a rigmarole of anonymity and secrecy.

Britain's only legal precedent (Russell v. Russell) holds that "fecundation ab extra" is adulterous. But there has been no British legislation on the subject. As the American Medical Association's legal department recently observed: Society has formed no opinion and enacted no law regarding artificial insemination."

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