Secret fathers.

This is an account of the pioneering work that led to modern treatment for infertility. In the late 1940s Drs. Margaret Jackson and Mary Barton, working separately, refined the technique of artificial insemination by donor (A.I.D.), previously only used in veterinary medicine. They defied medical scorn and public condemnation to make it available to women whose husbands were sterile. By this method the women were artificially inseminated with sperm from anonymous donors. The uncertain legal status and sensational nature of this procedure imposed secrecy on all concerned. A.I.D. became such a controversial issue that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, set up a commission to examine it, and the commission concluded that it should be made a criminal offence. This did not happen but it meant that those who had been enabled to have children through A.I.D. suffered under the continuing burden of secrecy. In 1958 the government set up the Feversham Committee to decide whether or not A.I.D. should be declared legal. The committee decided against making it a crime, for the sake of families already involved, but neither did they recommend legalising it. This, of course, did nothing to dispel the climate of secrecy and ethical uncertainty surrounding the issue. A man whose wife had a son by this method describes how the strain of secrecy undermined him, and children born as a result of A.I.D. recall how they were troubled by tension between their parents and the sense of a secret from which they were shut out. Prof. Robert Snowdon, who was a researcher at Margaret Jackson's clinic, contributes to the programme but there is no film of either Margaret Jackson or Mary Barton. There is, however, a sound recording of Dr. Barton speaking at a Eugenics Society meeting in 1958, emphasising the plight of the infertile.