REPORT ON A.I.D.

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29263, 22 July 1960, Page 15

REPORT ON A.I.D.

“Should Be Discouraged” (Rec. 1.30 p.m.) LONDON, July 21 A Government-appointed committee reported today that a majority of its nine members concluded that artificial insemination by donor (A.1.D.) was “not in the interests of society and should be discouraged.” Two pf the members, a man and a woman, dissented and held that, given a stable marriage and careful and expert selection of both applicants and donor, A.I.D. should not be regarded as a discreditable practice. The committee, headed by the Earl of Feversham, recommended unanimously that A.I.D. without the husband's consent should be a new ground for divorce. They also recommended changes in the law which would prevent a husband or wife petitioning for annulment on the ground of impotence where a child had been born through artificial insemination to which the husband had consented, and would oblige a husband to maintain a child born to his wife through A.I.D. to which he had consented. Dismissing as "extremely remote” the possibility of two children from the same donor marrying, the report said even if the use of A.I.D. Increased 20 times, such a marriage would be unlikely to occur more than once in about 50 to 100 years. The majority recommendation that A.I.D. was “undesirable” was based on four main reasons: (1) The risk of emotional difficulties between man and wife. (2) The exposure of children conceived in this way to “hazards to which children ought not to be exposed”—such as disclosure of A.I.D. origin. (3) The lack of a “proper sense of his responsibilities” in a man who is willing to be a donor. (4) The belief that A.I.D. went “beyond the proper responsibilities of a medical practitioner." But the committee was against prohibiting A.I.D. by law. Although the members regarded it as "neither harmless nor justifiable,” they held it should remain "like adultery and fornication, a legal ‘liberty’ which the individual is free to Indulge in without interference ‘ by the criminal law.”