Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era

CHAPTER 5. Artificial Insemination and the American Man

Chapter 5 Artificial Insemination and the American Man In December 1953 Science Digest featured an article by popular science writer Watson Davis titled “10,000 Test-­ Tube Babies.” As the title indicates , Davis estimated that in the preceding fifteen years, approximately 10,000 American children had been conceived through the process of artificial insemination with donor semen, or aid. For women whose husbands were infertile, Davis explained, aid was becoming an alternative to adoption that would enable them to experience the joys of biological motherhood by being inseminated with the semen of an anonymous donor.1 In just three pages, Davis sketched the legal, medical, and moral parameters that surrounded the use of donor insemination as a means of circumventing male infertility. Davis made note of the judicial and legislative questions raised by the procedure— ​ including whether or not aid was tantamount to adultery and the child therefore illegitimate— ​ and mentioned the positions that various organized religions took on the matter. The bulk of the essay, however, was devoted to highlighting the great joy that donor insemination brought to the carefully screened couples. “The childless couples who seek this route to lewis—final pages 113 114 artificial insemination and the american man children are made happy,” Davis noted. “They love their children in many cases even more than husbands and wives who do not need an unknown donor who furnishes his hereditary material.”2 Despite Davis’s reassurances that children born of aid were “healthy, normal and loved,” there remained an underlying nervousness in his essay that suggested there was something decidedly unnatural about the creation of families “by this method.” Davis explained to possibly anxious readers that human artificial insemination bore little resemblance to the methods employed in cattle breeding and was a “medical skill, developed over about a decade , [that] serve[d] an urgent human need.” The need for aid was so great because “there [was] more sterility among human beings, both male and female, than most people realize.”3 Donor insemination, then, was a simple solution to a common problem. For readers who might remain somewhat squeamish about the impregnation of a married woman “by an anonymous donor, a young male who never meets the mother and never knows whether children are produced,” Davis turned to renowned fertility specialist Sophia J. Kleegman to illustrate how the selection process worked. “Not every childless man and wife who want a baby by this method are accepted as patients,” Davis explained.4 In fact, Kleegman was rather particular about whom she would and would not accept as a patient. As Davis noted, Kleegman had to be “convinced that the family will provide an environment in which the child will be wanted and loved” before she would agree to inseminate a woman. The feelings of the husband were especially important. “The child is not of the husband’s seed,” Kleegman stressed, “but it must be of his heart.”5 The selection of the perfect donor who matched the physical and personality attributes of the husband would help to cement this bond. In e≠ect, Kleegman ’s screening process ensured that, in the interest of protecting the safety and well-­ being of the larger community, only “normal” and “healthy” couples would be chosen for the procedure. Although Davis’s article appeared in a popular magazine rather than a professional journal, his statements mirrored much of the discussion of artificial insemination that occurred in American medical journals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This is not surprising, given that Davis was a founder of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and had a deep personal and professional commitment to providing the general public with accurate, understandable, and useful scientific information. During this period, as artificial insemination as a treatment for marital infertility lewis—final pages 114 artificial insemination and the american man 115 was becoming increasingly available to American couples, two forms of the technique were used. Homologous artificial insemination (aih), which utilized the husband’s own semen, raised only the occasional medical eyebrow. By contrast, heterologous artificial insemination— ​ the donor insemination discussed by Davis— ​ fomented great debate, as physicians sought to identify and resolve the complex legal, moral, and ethical questions attached to the technology.6 In an era in which science and technology were lauded for improving the lives of Americans and a strong cultural mandate for parenthood existed...