A modest proposal

Germaine Greer

The recent uproar about the activities of Dr Sopher who artificially inseminated twelve women designated 'lesbian' highlights the disgracefully irresponsible use we make of that priceless natural resource, the nation's sperm. When Dr Rhodes Boyson points out that the State must take action to control the use made of it in the case of lesbians, he Is only gesturing towards the greater problem of haphazard waste. Most sperm is decanted far from a fertile ovum, but even if the concept of a world laved in oceans of dying sperm — for there are said to be four hundred million potential human beings in each ejaculation of a healthy male, whether 'normal' or not — were not itself horrifying,

the problem of those spermatazoa which

find themselves in the vicinity of an ovum must preoccupy every thinking person.

As long as men may go about dispensing the potent liquid as they list, we can have no safeguard against the proliferation of undesirable human beings, or conversely, against the condemnation of millions of innocent children to be brought up by sadists, mutilators, Moonies, murderers, spelling reformers, subversives, proof readers, immigrants, the unemployed, pederasts and pairs of women.

The legislation proposed by Dr Rhodes Boyson in the case of frozen sperm should also apply more broadly. Control of all varieties, frozen or fresh, would solve the problems of absentee parenthood, broken marriage, child poverty and multifarious abortion. If Dr Rhodes Boyson intends to hasten slowly in the matter of husbanding the national resource, I do not, for the matter is a pressing one, and the solution is within our grasp. It must be nationalised.

' What we need to do, quite simply, is to

take a number of samples from all males in, say, their seventeenth year and commit them to the safekeeping of a National Sperm Bank, after which the males must undergo vasectomy. At such time as any male wishes to father a child, he must find a willing female, then both apply for access to his sperm, which may be withheld upon any grounds deemed expedient at the time. Thus, at a blow, all the problems of uncontrolled parenthood are eliminated. Males wishing to become fathers will have to sign contracts binding them to fulfil the duties of parenthood either as defined by the State or as agreed between the contracting parties — the only way left to us now to shore up the ruins of the marriage ethic. Reproductive rights could be forfeit as an automatic consequence of criminal convictions or any other proof of chronic unreliability such as unpaid parking fines or three endorsements on a driving licence.

By this means only, can fatherlessness, justly described by Dr Rhodes Boyson as a 'great evil', be eliminated, provided of course that the other Departments of State could be deterred from the anti-social practices of sending fathers to war and to prison, allowing them to die and so forth. No itinerant workers such as air stewards, diplomatic couriers and the like, ought to be allowed to become fathers. One has only to reflect upon the careers of the many British statesmen whose upbringing was left to groups of women, widows, military wives, grandmothers, aunts and nannies and matrons, to understand at once what an appalling evil fatherlessness is.

Men ought to welcome this solution because it represents the only way that a man can be guaranteed paternity, in that the insemination is controlled and no alien sperm can find its way to the ovum first, provided of course that the civil servants entrusted with this charge fulfil it faithfully.

Moreover, men will not be menaced by the development of Celebrity Sperm Banks which are already being set up by private enterprise, which will supply the sperm of matinee idols and pop singers to their female fans at enormous expense, thus severely reducing reproductive opportunities for poorer and less famous men.

Women will welcome the scheme because all men except the very young (with whom intercourse will be illegal) will be sterile and they will be freed from the necessity of upsetting their metabolism by pow erful, continuous medication, or harbouring curiously designed pieces of metal and plastic in their uteri. Freed from anxiety, pill induced depression, and so on they might take more confident steps towards asserting themselves.

More important in the long run is the fact that this method of state regulation of sperm distribution can eliminate at source all those genetically determined disabilities which place such strain upon the health services; not only serious congenital disorders, but commoner and hardly less costly ones, like myopia, prognathousness and flat-feet. '

Doctors ought to welcome this measure. As the churches lose their power to trammel the anarchic sexual energies of the human race in guilt, the duties of regulation of reproductive behaviour have gradually been hived off on that least qualified of groups for such business, the medical practitioners. Already struggling in the toils of a hypertrophied National Health Service, and further oppressed by the volume of technical information which they are expected to learn and unlearn week by week, the unfortunate doctors are now being asked to decide who shall be allowed to reproduce and who shall not. They are expected to decide for fatherless children in some instances by denying access to abortion, and in others, they are required to refuse access to the source of procreation because the result will be fatherlessness.

The exigencies of National Health practice mean that few doctors have time to check whether their patients are physically able to undergo pregnancy: that they should be expected in the short time at their disposal to come to some conclusion about the social suitability of patients for parenthood is clearly absurd. It is no small commendation of the National Sperm Bank scheme, that it would relieve the longsuffering medical practitioners of some of their more god-like functions and therefore of some of the causes of their own ill-health.

The principal beneficiaries of the scheme would, of course, be the children. No one would be born who was not guaranteed a stable nuclear family and continuing support. Perhaps no one would be born.