Having children at any cost? The history of artificial insemination and its condemnation by the Catholic Church helps to shed light on the current debate on opening medically assisted procreation to single women and homosexual female couples.
Having children at any cost? The history of artificial insemination and its condemnation by the Catholic Church helps to shed light on the current debate on opening medically assisted procreation to single women and homosexual female couples.
Nowadays, 2 to 5% of births in Western countries (3% in France) are the result of medically assisted procreation. This covers two main techniques, which consist of manipulating gametes (spermatozoa and/or eggs) outside the human body to achieve conception: artificial insemination and fertilization. in vitro (IVF) with embryo transfer. The first human birth from IVF occurred in the United Kingdom in 1978, before Amandine was born in France in 1982. But when did artificial insemination begin, and what is the history of this technique? This is the subject of The Other Genesisby the Italian historian Emmanuel Betta, professor at La Sapienza.
The beginnings of artificial insemination
Called “artificial fertilization” until the 1940s, artificial insemination dates back to the last third of the XVIIIe century. At that time, European naturalists experimented on animals with various artificial fertilization techniques, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of reproduction. The Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) conducted experiments on frogs in the 1770s. He collected sperm from a male frog and sprinkled it on eggs extracted from the abdomen of a female (extracorporeal artificial fertilization), which resulted in the normal development of the eggs.
It is therefore the physical contact between sperm and eggs that allows reproduction, rather than a “vital force”, as the theory of spontaneous generation wanted. In the 1780s, Spallanzani extended his experiments on mammals, notably dogs (intracorporeal artificial fertilization), with the same success. And in the 1790s, the British surgeon John Hunter (1728-1793) collected sperm from a man, which he injected into his wife’s vagina, in order to circumvent the couple’s inability to conceive. Here again, this artificial fertilization resulted in a birth.
From the 1830s, then 1860s, some European doctors used these experimental results in a therapeutic perspective. Using a syringe, they sought to circumvent the sterility of certain couples where the man or woman suffered from a malformation preventing the sperm and the egg from coming into contact. In the process, these doctors discovered that fertilization required neither sexual relations nor, a fortiorifemale sexual pleasure.
In the 1880s, artificial insemination entered medical textbooks: reserved for couples who did not have a hereditary disease, it was one of the ways to treat certain forms of sterility, even if it was still only on a very small scale. Thus artificial insemination entered the public debate.
The Church’s reaction
At the beginning of the XXe century and into the interwar period, animal and human artificial insemination techniques were improved, particularly under the influence of British and Russian biologists who successfully applied them to horse and cattle breeding on a large scale. In the United States, the annual number of human artificial inseminations increased from a few dozen in the 1900s to a few hundred in the 1930s, and then to over a thousand from the 1940s onwards.
Artificial insemination was then used in Western countries not only to treat the problems of sterility of certain couples, but also — one would believe — with the aim of combating the decline in the birth rate (quantitative objective) and against the degeneration of the human species (qualitative and eugenic objective). Doctors discussed the ethical, moral and legal framework for artificial fertilization, seeking to clarify the rights and duties of the spouses, the doctor and the unborn child. Almost all artificial inseminations were then — just as today — inseminations intramaritalartificial insemination with sperm donor (IAD) being assimilated to adultery: an act which violates the sexual honour of the spouse, and which must therefore only be practiced in secret.
What is the Catholic Church’s judgment on this technique? In 1897, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office issued a decree condemning human artificial fertilization, when it was still an exceptional therapeutic practice. The Catholic Church has since confirmed this condemnation several times, for several reasons.
First of all, artificial insemination, which is tantamount to adultery by the wife, would be contrary to the honour of the husband and to the “professional modesty” of doctors. A fortiorithe Church considers artificial insemination with donor as fornication. Then, even when it is carried out directly by the spouses themselves, the collection of sperm requires that the man commit the “sin of Onan”, which is contrary to sexual morality.
Finally, and most fundamentally, the practice of artificial insemination violates natural moral law and divine law: it is unnatural, as indicated by its veterinary origins and the fact that sperm is not intended to be manipulated. To this day, the Church has never accepted the argument that artificial insemination, by treating certain forms of sterility, allows couples to achieve the main purpose of marriage and thus to respect certain biblical injunctions.
The current debate
Despite its shortcomings – unclear organisation, very uneven coverage of different Western countries and the absence of information on couples who have had recourse to artificial insemination – The Other Genesis is an informative work. Recalling the history of artificial insemination and the history of its condemnation by the Church can be helpful in addressing current debates on medically assisted procreation.
Today, in France, access to medically assisted procreation is reserved for stable couples, consisting of a woman and a man of childbearing age, and whose infertility is medically confirmed. In this context, a debate should open in 2018 and 2019 on the advisability of opening medically assisted procreation to female couples and single women. According to opinion polls conducted by theIFOPit appears that, since at least the 1990s, a majority of French people have been “rather” or “completely” in favor of extending medically assisted procreation to single women, and that, since 2014, a majority of French people have also been in favor of extending it to homosexual female couples.
The Catholic Church’s condemnation of artificial insemination has been largely based on a “naturalistic fallacy,” that error of reasoning which consists in inferring what must be from alone facts. For the Church, artificial insemination must be forbidden, because it does notEast unnatural. Similarly, in current debates, some conservatives are tempted to argue that female couples or single women are not must not to be able to access medically assisted procreation, because, in the absence of male gametes, these people are naturally unfit to procreate.
However, conservatives are not alone in seeking to exploit this type of logical fallacy these days. Some progressives are tempted to make use of another fallacy, called the “moralistic fallacy,” which involves inferring facts from what must be. In this perspective, given that individuals must be treated equally and that medical assistance must be extended to female couples and single women, it is not harmful to the children born from it.
If we accept that, in these debates, it is appropriate to authorize all practices that do not harm children, but only those, then these debates must refocus on empirical questions: what are the practices of medically assisted procreation that, in fact, promote the interests of children or, at the very least, do not harm them? If it seems established that being raised by a female couple (rather than a couple formed by a woman and a man) is in no way penalizing for a child, is the same true of being raised in a single-parent family, by a woman? alone ? And if we take seriously the interests of children born from gamete donation, would it not be appropriate to allow them to lift the secret of the identity of the donor who enabled their conception?
It is on these questions that the social sciences, and first and foremost psychology, are essential to the quality of future debates.