A Brief History of Donor Insemination

1677 - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist from Delft, considered to be the father of microbiology, discovers sperm, along with his pupil Johan Hamm, with the use of a magnifying lens. They refer to the sperm as animalcules.

1779 – Italian biologist and physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani is the first to perform artificial insemination, using a dog. He kept the two animals in separate rooms to avoid natural mating and when the female dog showed signs of being in heat he collected semen from the male dog next door injecting the semen into the female dog’s womb. She became pregnant, and sixty-two days later, three healthy puppies were born. Spallanzani also observed the effects of cooling and freezing human sperm, now a common storage technique.

1790 - John Hunter, British physiologist and surgeon, is the first to record a pregnancy and delivery of a child conceived by artificial insemination with a husband’s semen.

1838 - A Frenchman named Girault used a hollow tube to blow sperm into a vagina.

1865 - De Haut published a pamphlet on Artificial Insemination in France but discontinued his experimentation due to public disapproval.

1866 - American gynecologist J. Marion Sims reported fifty-five intrauterine injections performed on six women enjoying only a four per cent success rate. Sims, a controversial doctor, said to have performed unethical and sometimes brutal surgery on slave women, was later elected as President of the American Medical Association in 1875.

1866 - First reported successful artificial insemination (with husband’s semen) in the United States.

1883 – Francis Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, coins term eugenics, meaning good breeding.

1884 – World’s first case of human donor insemination, performed by Dr. William Pancoast Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. The procedure is kept secret until 1909.

1886 – Paolo Mantegazza, a well known Italian neurologist, physiologist and anthropologist makes world’s first proposal for a sperm bank.

1909 – Addison Davis Hard, one of Dr. William Pancoast’s students, publishes a letter in American Journal Medical World, disclosing the details of the 1884 DI procedure, setting off a debate among lawyers, philosophers, theologians and medical practitioners.

1914 - Giuseppe Amantea, an Italian physician and physiologist, devised first artificial vagina thought to have greatly advanced artificial insemination technology.

1938 – Twenty-four articles on human artificial insemination are written and published in the United States.

1938 - First cattle breeding organization in the United States to use artificial insemination begins operations in New Jersey.

1941 - It is estimated that 3700 human donor inseminations occur in the U.S.

1945 - A string of medical committees are established in the U.K. concerning the ethical and moral dimensions of human donor insemination. The first report in the British Medical Journal condemned Donor Insemination calling it a “criminal offense.”

1949 – Pope Pius the XII rejects donor insemination on moral grounds.

1960 - The Feversham Committee deems the practice of donor insemination undesirable.

1970 - The Peel Report comes out in favor of Donor Insemination.

1985 - The Warnock Report states: “The protection of the public, which we see as the primary objective of regulation, demands the existence of an authority independent of Government, heath authorities, or research institutions. The authority should be specifically charged with the responsibility to regulate and monitor practice in relation to those sensitive areas which raise fundamental ethical questions. We therefore recommend the establishment of a new statutory licensing authority to regulate both research and those infertility services which we have recommended should be subject to control.”

1980’s - In the United States it is estimated that up to 100,000 children are the product of D.I. each year, 20,000 a year in California alone.

1987 - It is estimated one million DI children are living in United States.

1988 – A study done by the Congressional Office of Technology - commissioned by then Senator Al Gore - reveals a surprising lack of testing among semen donors for sexually transmitted diseases. According to the study, as reported by The New York Times, “…more than half of the 1,558 physicians surveyed said they did not check prospective donors for the AIDS virus; nearly three-quarters did not test for syphilis, gonorrhea or hepatitis, and about half did not perform any tests for genetic defects.” Then what are they screening for? “What many doctors do instead of testing is require prospective donors to answer questions about their life style, such as ‘Are you homosexual?’ and ‘Are you sexually promiscuous?’ These doctors say that since a majority of donors are university or medical students, who are presumably knowledgeable about health matters, their answers can be trusted.” Do you get the feeling that there’s a lot of winking and nudging going on in the DI world? It is the most comprehensive U.S. survey of procreative industry to date.