The first recorded artificial insemination, in 1784, was performed on a dog
In 1784 the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani achieved a pregnancy in a dog without mating, the first recorded artificial insemination. Six years later the Scottish surgeon John Hunter helped a linen draper's wife conceive. The technique has since become routine both in fertility clinics and on cattle and pig farms.
Artificial insemination means placing sperm into the cervix or uterus to achieve pregnancy without intercourse, with fertilisation still happening inside the body, unlike IVF. Its early history includes some ugly episodes. In 1884 a Philadelphia professor, William Pancoast, used sperm from what he called his best-looking student to inseminate an anaesthetised woman who was never told; the case surfaced in a medical journal 25 years later. In 1916 the Australian eugenicist Marion Piddington proposed a conscription of the virgins, inseminating the sweethearts of fallen soldiers with sperm from supposedly desirable donors, a scheme that was poorly received.
Clinics developed more soberly. In the 1930s the British obstetrician Mary Barton ran one of the first clinics offering donor insemination, and her husband Bertold Wiesner fathered hundreds of children through it. Sperm banking grew out of research at the University of Iowa from the 1950s by Jerome Sherman and Raymond Bunge. Donor anonymity has since frayed: in 2016 a teenager used her donor's cryobank number on a registry to find half-siblings, who formed a group calling themselves the 5010ers.
Two main methods are used. Intracervical insemination is the simplest, depositing semen near the cervix, and the vagina naturally filters out everything but sperm. Intrauterine insemination places washed sperm straight into the uterus through a thin catheter, bypassing the cervical mucus that can slow sperm down. Washing matters because unwashed semen contains prostaglandins that can trigger painful cramping. Intrauterine insemination is generally considered more efficient and is now the most popular clinic method, especially for single women and lesbian couples using donor sperm, though one meta-analysis found no difference in live births between the two.
Timing is everything, since an egg can be fertilised for little more than twelve hours after release. Clinics track ovulation with kits, ultrasound or blood tests, and fertility drugs raise success rates at the cost of more twins and triplets.
Source: Artificial insemination
