Artificial Insemination Poses No Problem to Our Society

Artificial insemination will never constitute a serious problem to our society, Carle C. Zimmerman, associate professor of Sociology, said yesterday, in referring to the debate in the House of Lords last week on the subject.

Members of the Upper House of Parliament are greatly disturbed over a recent British court decision that children conceived by artificial insemination are illegitimate. (In the United States, the artificially inseminated children are legitimate if both parents consent to the operation, Zimmerman stated.)

At the height of the debate, Lord Merriman posed this possible situation: under the pending plan, doctors are prepared to limit the number of inseminations from one donor at one time to 100. But "what is going to happen to the next generation" twenty years from new, Lord Merriman asked, when these half-brothers and half-sisters fall in love and want to be married?

To such questions, Zimmerman scoffs that "the problem is not one of great social importance. The majority of the people will not be able to afford artificial insemination, and most people," he concluded, "are sterile by the time that they get around to trying it."

Lord Brabazon argued that by its very nature, donors are not apt to be too numerous. "Anybody who desires a large family completely unknown and without sympathy, love, and personal contact with a woman, must be well on his way to a lunatic asylum," he said.

Science has long approved of artificial insemination, Karl Sax, professor of Botany, and director of the Arnold Arboretum, said when asked for the scientific opinion. Long successfully used to breed superior livestock, the results are perfectly harmless and safe.

In fact, artificial insemination has been seriously suggested as a means of produring a new super race here in America. H. J. Muller, Nobel Prize winner, and President of the American Genetic Society, in his book called "Out of the Night," recommended that the sperm of a group of selected men be injected into American women, producing a conglomerate mass of "perfectly human specimens."

In this case, the objection voiced in the House of Lords over what will happen to the future generation is valid. Sax stated. It would pose a dangerous problem to any nation. Harmful recessive traits would begin to appear in the succeeding generations, creating a general decline in the strength of the nation.