It’s a fair bet that most wives, asked to list the things they feel are jointly owned with their husbands, would tick them off in a trice: the house, the car, the furniture, the wedding gifts, Fido and Puss and that ghastly etching they both hate but it’s worth a few bob. There’s a woman in Surrey, however, who wishes to add a little extra to her list of what she calls her ‘marital assets’: her husband’s sperm. Not just the bit she wants to use for her own procreation, either. All of it. Every last tiny tadpole.
The thrust of her case is roughly this. During a period when — at least according to her — her husband was going through a bonkers patch, he took himself off to a fertility clinic wherein he donated some sperm without telling her. So vexed is she that she has written to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to ask that rules be amended to disallow such a unilateral decision on the part of a married man — and still more vexed is she that the HFEA has not seen fit even to acknowledge her letter.
On the face of it, you can see its point. The manner in which Man spills his copious seed is — surely? — a matter for him. Besides, the quid pro quo could very possibly be that men might seek the right to ‘own’ and control a woman’s reproductive system — and who, this side of sanity, would care to open that can of legislative worms?
The trouble is that, as the law stands today, Mrs Surrey actually has a point. Since 2005, when anonymity for sperm and egg donors was made illegal in Britain, every child born by donor insemination may, upon his or her 18th birthday, demand and be given the name of the donor and his last known address (there’s no getting around this: watertight proof of both is required before donation).
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