The Riddle of Birth

Scotsman Ronald MacLennan and his wife Margaret, a professional ice skater, separated in 1954. Margaret crossed the Atlantic to live in Brooklyn, where, more than a year later, she gave birth to a daughter. In Scotland, Ronald brought suit for divorce, charging that she must have committed adultery. Margaret's reply: the baby was the result of artificial insemination. Her husband answered that, even if this were true, he had never agreed to her adopting such a course.

Was such an act adultery? A sin, or a triumph of science? Last week these questions were exercising the best legal, religious and journalistic minds of Britain. Hearing MacLennan's suit, Lord Wheatley, a Roman Catholic judge of Scotland's Court of Session, listened to the argument of MacLennan's lawyer that the real essence of adultery is not how it is accomplished, but "the surrender of a woman's reproductive organs to another man." Commented Lord Wheatley: "Of course, it is not another man, but a test tube. She does not know who the man is. How can you have intercourse with only one person present?" In his preliminary ruling, the judge noted: "The idea that adultery might be committed bya woman alone in the privacy of her bedroom is one with which earlier jurists had no occasion to wrestle," concluded that it did not constitute "adultery in its legal meaning."

Lord Wheatley's ruling raised more questions than it settled. Father Paul Crane, a Roman Catholic spokesman, declared: "Human beings are not cattle to be bred by test tubes. Only a pagan world would treat them as such." Britain's popular press disagreed, argued that artificial insemination could bring comfort to women previously unable to conceive. Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the synod of the Convocation of Canterbury on the issue. Whether or not artificial insemination by donor was legally held to be a crime or not, he said, it was a sin in the eyes of the church. "It is something far less responsible and far less human than adultery," he asserted. "It violates the exclusive union set up between husband and wife. It defrauds the child begotten, and deceives both his putative kinsmen and society at large." As for Mr. MacLennan, the Archbishop added: "On the facts of this case, some legislation would seem to be inevitable. If the law gives him a remedy against adultery by his wife, it can hardly deny him a remedy against his wife if she bears into his family a child born out of wedlock and without his knowledge."

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