Posthumously conceived children – a looming legal and social security minefield

Before the works of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley highlighted the potential horrors of babies created in laboratories, artificial insemination had already taken root in the scientific world.

The first recorded case of artificial donor insemination certainly looked like it came straight out of the pages of a science fiction novel. In 1884, the Philadelphia physician William Pancoast began treating a 31-year-old woman who could not conceive. Following numerous examinations, Pancoast found that the problem lay in the husband’s sperm count.

His approach, however, was not as simple. The patient was put under chloroform and inseminated with a rubber syringe in front of six medical students. The source of the semen was the medical student Pancoast determined was the most attractive. The result was a healthy pregnancy, but the story around the procedure and the biological father remained shrouded in secrecy.

In 1909, one of the students present that day, Addison Davis Hard, published a letter in Medical World describing the case: “At that time, the procedure was so novel, so peculiar in its human ethics, that the six young men of the senior class who witnessed the operation were pledged to absolute secrecy… A joking remark by one of the class, ‘the only solution of this problem is to call in the hired man’, was the probable incentive to the plan of action that followed.”

Since then, of course, the procedure, alongside other artificial reproductive techniques, has become commonplace. In South Africa, there are fertility clinics and sperm banks in almost every major city. In fact, in some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that up to 30% of couples are infertile, much higher than the global average of 9%.

In some cases, posthumous conception is considered ethically and morally reprehensible.