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It seemed fail-safe that the procedure would remain forever secret. Nine years earlier, TIME ran a story about the legal status of donor-conceived children with the lacerating title Artificial Bastards? Records were heavily coded, then destroyed. In 1954, a court ruled that donor insemination constituted adultery on the part of the woman, whether or not the husband had granted consent. The trauma and shame surrounding infertility was intense. Once a woman had become pregnant, the couple might be told that her blood levels showed she must have already been pregnant when she first came to the institute, furthering the possibility that two otherwise rational people could bury the truth from their family, their friends and themselves. Couples were told to have sex before and after the procedure to further the sense that the (often completely sterile) husband could be the father. Back then, the medical establishment took great pains to allow couples to believe what they wanted about what they were doing. There was a commonly used term for this: confused artificial insemination.Ĭonfused is right. A practice of the day was to mix donor sperm with the intended father’s sperm, in order to keep alive the possibility that the child was biologically his. There, they were told that a “treatment” was available to help solve my dad’s infertility. They went to the now long-defunct Farris Institute for Parenthood near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. My mother, nearing 40, was desperate to have a child. My father was part of a large family that took seriously the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.
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In 1961, my parents, Orthodox Jews who married later in life, were having trouble conceiving.