ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION
SIR,—Our Peers have recently been discussing in the House of Lords the legal implications of this revolting practice which, established between the two great wars in pagan Russia and Germany, is presumably now legally permitted in this country. But no protests on the score of morality appear to have been made against the iniquity by any of the speakers in the debate. It may be left to the imagination to explore all of the neces- sary technique involved in the process, and the degrading evils imposed on all concerned, but it is not difficult to estimate some of the fruits of the practice. In the first place, there can be no guarantee that the experi- ment will be successful, and again one can easily estimate the eventual reactions of the husband who has a child introduced into his home by this method, even if he has been a consenting party. Obviously, too, no married man can in the future be reasonably sure that his child is his own if the evil becomes at all common. One can only speculate what the likely reaction will be on the mother, who does not know who the father of her unnatural child is.
There can only be sympathy for a couple who are denied the joys of parenthood under natural conditions, but they have the obvious remedy of adopting one of the many unwanted children who now need a home, and can have the joy of a family in this way. Unmarried women may also enrich their lives by the same method, as many of them now do. But to adopt the methods of the stockyard with human beings is revolting and unnatural, and what is unnatural is always evil. Our pseudo-scientists are offending the laws which govern creation in countenancing practices of this kind, and nature always punishes an infraction of her laws, because, as we believe, we live in a moral universe, although we sometimes forget this. Parenthood under these conditions can only bring unhappiness.
It is not unnatural that decent citizens hesitate to discuss in public this bestial and unsavoury subject, but moralists should not refrain from raising the strongest protest against an evil which can only bring sorrow in its train, while medical men and psychologists should also tell of what they believe the fruits of it will be, as a result of their own experience. Legislation should provide also that the act becomes a criminal one, as
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