disease-disposed offspring".
Posted on 01/25/2016 9:26:45 AM PST by wagglebee
The use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) is so common nowadays that it’s easy to forget how quickly social attitudes have changed. The Atlantic recently published a feature about the early days of artificial reproductive technology under the headline “The First Artificial Insemination Was an Ethical Nightmare: The 19th-century procedure involved lies, a secrecy pledge, and sperm from a surprise donor”.
The implication is that that contemporary ART is far more ethical than it was in the bad old days.
Let’s look first at the origins of ART. The first pregnancy after artificial insemination apparently took place in England in 1790. The eminent surgeon John Hunter used the sperm of a “linen draper” to impregnate his wife. A doctor in France claimed that he had achieved eight successful pregnancies in the mid-1800s. An American doctor named Marion Sims attempted it several times in the 1860s with one pregnancy (which miscarried). He had to abandon his experiments after a public outcry.
All of these procedures involved the sperm of the husband. The first successful pregnancy after artificial insemination by donor was the topic of the article in The Atlantic. It took place in 1884 in Philadelphia but was not reported until 25 years later.
The patient was a married woman who had been unable to conceive. After examining her thoroughly, the doctor, William Pancoast, realised that the problem probably lay with the husband. It turned out that he had become infertile after a bout of gonorrhoea before he was married.
Without seeking the consent of either husband or wife, the doctor anaesthetised the wife and inseminated her with the sperm of the best-looking of a small group of medical students, who were all sworn to secrecy. Pancoast eventually told the husband who, surprisingly, was delighted with the result. The woman never found out how she had become pregnant.
No report was made of this medical landmark until 1909. One of the medical students, Addison Davis Hard, by then a physician in Minnesota, published an account of the event in a medical journal. “That boy is now a business man of the city of New York and I have shaken hands with him within the past year,” he wrote.
The main purpose of Dr Hard’s contribution to the journal was to portray artificial insemination as a eugenic boon, “a race-uplifting procedure”, which would produce children of “wonderful mental endowments” instead of “half-witted, evil-inclined, disease-disposed offspring”. “Persons of the worst possible promise of good and health offspring are being lawfully united in marriage every day … Artificial impregnation by carefully selected seed, will alone solve the problem.”
In his opinion, a personal relationship with the biological father was of no importance whatsoever to the offspring: “The origin of the spermatozoa which generates the ovum is of no more importance than the personality of the finger which pulls the trigger of a gun … It is gradually becoming well establisht [sic] that the mother is the complete builder of the child.”
So there you have it: the whole ideology of assisted reproduction in one of its earliest defences -- the irrelevance of the institution of marriage, eugenics, the irrelevance of the father, faith in technology and trust in doctors.
And one more thing. Who else could the father of this “business man of the city of New York” have been but Dr Hard himself? The pompous prose and the pseudo-scientific eugenic speculations cannot disguise 25 long years of yearning to hug that son he had so casually generated. ART cannot change human nature.
Has anything really changed since 1884? ART is increasingly divorced from marriage. Single women and lesbians shop for donors who will confer wonderful eugenic endowments upon their offspring. Many children become “genetic orphans” who will never know their fathers. To say nothing of the thousands of people who suffer the heartache of broken kinship links. Sperm donation always has been and always will be an ethical nightmare.
As a PS, the first significant article about artificial insemination by donor was published in the British Medical Journal in 1945. The authors, Austrian-born Bertold Wiesner and his wife Mary Barton and a colleague, described their experience at a London fertility clinic as a positive solution for male infertility. Many years later it emerged that Mr Wiesner himself was the father of perhaps two-thirds of the children produced at the clinic – probably about 600. No one knows how many because his wife had destroyed most of the records. Donor insemination may blight the lives of children, but it seems to corrupt the character of the donors.
And this is what the left has wanted all along.
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That headline is a microagression.
I’ve always been against it.
Dr. Hard is providing the sperm?
Honestly you just can’t make this stuff up.
Some babies grow in a peculiar way
It changed, it grew, and everybody knew
Semi-mojo
Who’s this kinky so-and-so?
It’s fairly straightforward, actually.
I'm sorry.
5.56mm
Husband/wife in vitro is one thing but moral issues aside its a bad idea to produce a child who will only have a one sided medical family history.
Adoption would be my preference.
So you have no problem murdering babies in the womb. If a child is conceived by artificial insemination from a donor other than the father, the woman is committing adultery. However the unborn child is innocent and should not be aborted. Good luck at the White Throne of Judgement.
That should be other than the husband.
*********************
Agreed.
Tacky, but I laughed.
It all fits. You have to look at the whole overarching project: the deconstruction of sex. That is, breaking apart of male and female, sex and gender, intercourse and fertility, structure and function, into fragmentary pieces, and then cobbling them together again into some different design as to ourselves seems most useful.
The artificial human reproduction technologies are morally flawed because they separate the act of marital lovemaking from the conception of the child. It is not a healing of, but a replacement for the human sexual design. It doesn't "heal infertility": before the "treatment" the couple were unable to conceive via natural intercourse; after the "treatment" they are still unable to conceive via natural intercourse. The underlying disability hasn't been cured or healed, it hasn't even been addressed.
Artificial insemination splits sex off from procreation, leaves it out of the fertility equation. This renders the sexual act insignificant and inconsequential, and transfers the real significance and consequence to a laboratory production process and a commercial transaction.
My heart goes out to people who have medical fertility problems. I would urge them to seek true healing solutions which respect and restore the spousal one-flesh nature of human procreation. One place to start is Natural Procreative Technology: NaProTech (LINK) They hold out the hope of real healing for the infertile.
That's because there's a huge difference between being anti-abortion and pro-life.
Being anti-abortion is a talking point used by GOP politicians and Pro-Life, Inc. to get votes and money. It has NOTHING to do with ending abortion and everything to do with perpetuating an issue.
Being pro-life is about realizing that God alone is the Creator of life and that He alone should determine when we are conceived and when we die.
5.56mm
I said nothing of the kind. The rest of your comment, I agree with.
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