Doctors' Dilemma

The rights & wrongs of artificial insemination were hotly debated last week by delegates to the Congress of Catholic Doctors in Rome. Up to that time, there had been no authoritative word on the subject from the Vatican.

Said Dr. Jesus Bacala of the Philippines: artificial insemination, in cases where a donor's semen is used without the husband's knowledge or consent, is obviously immoral, obnoxious and illegal. More thorny are cases in which the husband's consent is given. Said Bacala: "The fact that a woman has to obtain semen other than her husband's has an adulterous tinge." Besides, the methods of obtaining such semen involve, said he, either adultery, onanism, or, at the very least "a pollution."

Even among artificial aids for insemination by the husband, Dr. Bacala drew sharp distinctions. Obtaining semen by masturbation or prostatic massage could not be countenanced, he thought. The use of aspiration or testicular puncture was not acceptable. "The only way which presently seems open is that of postcoital artificial insemination between spouses . . . What medical science does [in such cases] is to further pump or inject the semen, coitally deposited, right into the external os, into the cervical canal, hoping that the teeming millions of injected spermatozoa may swim their way up ... to meet an ovum.. This method, utilized to aid nature, might obtain the moralist's permission."

Portugal's Dr. Carlos Santos disagreed: "If God does not give a couple children, it means He does not will them to have children. What Bacala proposes is interference with God's will." But a priest-delegate, Father Salvatore Scionti, thought Bacala was too strict. He favored allowing the withdrawal of semen from the testicles by syringe: "Personally, humbly, I submit that this is no masturbation, no pollution."

The delegates' differences were resolved when they went to Castel Gandolfo. There, Pope Pius XII gave the church's approval to Bacala's views. Obtaining semen by unnatural means was wrong, said the Pontiff, even for married couples. But medical aid to get the semen from the vagina into the uterus, after normal intercourse, was permissible.*

The Pope also had a word for those who fear that analgesia in childbirth is inconsistent with the biblical "In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children." Painkilling in labor, said the Pontiff, is an honest, moral endeavor, "so long as no danger ... results for either mother or infant, and so long as the tender sentiments of parenthood are neither diminished nor destroyed."

-The Pope's position was more strict than the stand of the Church of England (which also opposes the use of donors). A commission appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury held st year: "If, for the insemination of a wife with ner husband's semen, there is no practicable alterative to masturbation by the husband, his act being directed to the procreative end of the marriage, may be justifiable."

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