In 1884, a merchant and his Quaker wife, unable to become pregnant, visited the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia where they met with Dr. William Pancoast. After a series of tests, Dr. Pancoast discovered the husband to be azoospermic, or sterile, while the wife was found to be perfectly fertile. Uncertain of how to treat the couple, the doctor consulted with his class of six medical students, one of whom suggested that they use the semen from the “best looking” man among them to inseminate the woman. Dr. Pancoast agreed and called the wife in once more for a final examination. He anesthetized the woman with chloroform and, with a rubber syringe, injected his student’s semen into her while his six students observed.
It was only after the birth of her son nine months later - the first ever reported human DI pregnancy in the United States - that Dr. Pancoast confessed to the merchant what he and his students had done. The husband, by most accounts, responded positively but asked that the doctor and his students keep the secret from his wife. They agreed, and she was never told.
Without realizing it Dr. Pancoast and his six anonymous medical students set a precedent that day in 1884 for the practice of DI that has continued until this day.[1] But what right do semen donors have to anonymity? In this case, does the donor’s right to anonymity outweigh the mother’s right to know with whose semen she has been inseminated? Does the donor’s right to anonymity also outweigh the unborn child’s right to know who his true father is?
I suspect the identity of the “true” biological father was kept secret for three reasons: 1) It was initially kept secret from both the husband and wife to protect Dr. Pancoast and his students from recriminations in case the merchant and/or his wife found their decision to inseminate her to be dishonorable or criminal; 2) The husband wanted to protect his wife from the potential shame of knowing she’d been inseminated, unknowingly, while passed out, by an anonymous man and; 3) Not wishing to lose face in his wife’s eyes the husband did not want his wife to know that he was incapable of impregnating her. In any case, the chief motivating factor in maintaining donor anonymity in this first ever use of human DI in the U.S. was - unambiguously – fear; each actor in the scenario was afraid that what they had done might be perceived as wrong and sought to protect themselves from wrongdoing by cloaking themselves in secrecy.
It is an important story and one of the most frequently told in the literature of DI. It’s almost become a kind of origination myth. Each author tells the story in a slightly different way, from a slightly different perspective, like the many apostles each representing Christ[2] in their own subjective voice. In the absence of any federal or state legislation since 1884, the decisions made by Dr. Pancoast and his six anonymous students have, remarkably, set the standards for a medical practice that has become increasingly common and even, in the past few decades, highly commodified.
What was the husband’s special relationship with the doctor that he was let in on the secret and his wife was not? And what about the six anonymous medical students? Who are they in this modern techno-myth? They are like the Council of Anonymous Masturbators standing in the background, bearing witness to this unique form of medicalized rape. They know whose semen it is. It is the “best looking” man’s semen and they are hiding his identity to prevent him from having to take any responsibility for the creation of new life, thus setting the stage for the practice of contemporary DI. The commemorative coin would show the bust of a featureless man and would read:
Celebrating 125 years of Donor Insemination!
Creating Life and Avoiding Responsibility!
Had the Quaker woman been told, on her way to the doctor’s office, that she was going to be drugged and impregnated with an unknown man’s semen with a rubber tube would she have consented? What right did Dr. Pancoast have to experiment on his patient?
As if to assuage its own guilt over grossly misusing that Quaker woman, the American Medical establishment convinced itself (and nearly everyone else) that donor insemination is a boon for women’s freedom. Thanks to Dr. William Pancoast and his six brilliant (and handsome) medical students (who shall remain dignified in their anonymity) women now enjoy a liberation and freedom of choice never before known in the history of the world. They are so free that they don’t even need men any more.
Dr. Pancoast, his six students and the Quaker woman’s husband kept their secret to themselves for the next 25 years. But, in 1909, the cat was, as they say, let out of the bag. Addison Davis Hard, one of Dr. Pancoast’s medical students (often speculated to be the “best looking”[3]) visited the donor offspring, then a twenty-five year old businessman living in Philadelphia, and revealed to that young man the story of his true conception.[4] Soon after, Hard published a letter in the American journal Medical World, in which he unveiled their collective secret to the world. An excerpt from Hard’s letter:[5]
From a nature point of view, the idea of artificial impregnation offers valuable advantages. The mating of human beings must, from the nature of things, be a matter of sentiment alone. Persons of the worst possible promise of good and healthy offspring are being lawfully united in marriage every day. Marriage is a proposition which is not submitted to good judgment or even common sense, as a rule…Artificial impregnation by carefully selected seed, alone will solve the problem. It may at first shock the sensibilities of the sentimental who consider that the source of the seed indicates the true father, but when the scientific fact becomes known that the origin of the spermatozoa which generates the ovum is of no more importance than the personality of the finger which pulls the trigger of a gun, then objections will lose their forcefulness and artificial impregnation become recognized as a race-uplifting procedure.
In the massive controversy that followed, the Jefferson Medical College, and all parties involved, took a considerable PR hit. Some claimed Addison Davis Hard was playing a joke. Some defended him, claiming that this procedure would in fact help limit unwanted pregnancy while others argued against AI as grotesque and absurd. But, most importantly, “The eugenicists were quickly on the scene and in the process divided the medical profession by their claims that the improvement of the genetic stock of America was now possible.”[6]
[1] The main difference today, of course, is that women know they’re being inseminated when they go to the doctor - but donor anonymity is still the norm.
[2] Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Jesus was the product of The Immaculate Conception. If a woman never has intercourse with a man but becomes pregnant via DI would she still be considered a virgin?
[3] Ladies and gentleman, America’s first semen donor!
[4] If Hard was, in fact, the donor father it’s interesting to note in this origination myth that it was the anonymous father who sought out the donor child – not the other way around. Clearly, no matter what anyone says, this is a two-way relationship. How many sperm donors are there who, having jerked off for money in college, found themselves, later in life, wondering - really wondering - where their children are, who their children are?
[5] Courtesy of Elizabeth Noble’s Having Your Baby By Donor Insemination.
[6] From R. Snowden and G.D. Mitchell’s The Artificial Family.
1 comment:
The so-called feminists who use DI and claim they don't need a man and then raise the child themselves are delusional. Where did that sperm come from anyway? The child grows up without a father. Horrible. Crimes against your own child.
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