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Artificial Insemination and the Rights of Women, Men, and Children

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Women have adamantly battled for political and social reproductive rights since, in particular artificial insemination, have become mainstream phenomena in the recent decade with a focus on rights of women. In fact, doctors have experimented with the procedure for nearly a century. However, with the women¹s liberation movement of the 1970s, physician-assisted and self-insemination has become more and more popular among heterosexual career women and lesbians.

The Origins of Artificial Insemination

She was a Quaker. The wife of a merchant. The infertility patient of Dr. William Pancoast. She was a woman whose name was never recorded.
Dr. Pancoast, a professor at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, had already examined and …show more content…

Women, usually healthy and fertile, enlist the help of physicians because they do not have access to the one element that will yield them a child. And so, doctors prescribe a cure of sorts- sperm. The procedure allows women increased power to regulate the reproductive processes of their bodies. Ironically, artificial insemination was not created as a method of empowerment for women. Rather for men. Male scientists and researchers developed the technology for eugenic purposes, not to alleviate the pressures of alternative lifestyles of women. That is, to improve the human species.

With the onset of research in genetics in the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists entertained theories of quality control with respect to human reproduction. Scientists such as Francis Crick and Dr. William Shockley believed that the growth rate of the population was increasing too rapidly, and most importantly certain unfavorable demographic clusters were increasing. In short, the wrong classes and races were reproducing with more frequency than was desired by these men. They hoped that future progeny would be of the same superior caliber as themselves. To yield this, they proposed schemes to tax children; to provide cash incentives for sterilization; to license women for the number of children they may bear and men for the sperm they may deposit in seed banks;

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