FRENCH ANXIETIES ABOUT THE COUNTRY’S low birthrate, predictable and understandable in the years following the military defeat by Prussia in 1870–71, culminated in the 1890s in a reproductive panic triggered by the statistical fact that deaths began to outstrip births. In comparison, statistics appeared to show that the populations of both England and Germany, France’s two main rivals, were reproducing themselves at a satisfactory rate. 2 Available to the fin-de-siècle Frenchwoman, as she weighed the prospect of having children or not, were two opposing “reproductive” procedures: a fairly new technique of sterilization involving removal of the ovaries rather than a hysterectomy, and artificial insemination, the latter apparently widely practiced by doctors in what we know today as its “bulb baster” form but very sparsely acknowledged or written about. both of these procedures elicited controversy, partly because the social imperative to reproduce was being meddled with, partly because both involved delicate and intimate aspects of a person’s sex life but also partly because both signaled a loss of male power and a diminution of the masculine role. 3 The husband’s participation in artificial insemination was, in