Once the investigation has established when ovulation is due, the woman goes to the doctor. He has some donor’s semen available, which has either been produced within the preceding two hours by masturbation, or has been donated earlier and has been ‘snap frozen’. Rather more pregnancies follow insemination with fresh semen, but the organizational problems are greater.
The doctor takes the donor’s semen and injects it gently with a syringe into the woman’s upper vagina and over her cervix. The woman lies on her back for about thirty minutes and then goes home. The procedure is repeated the next day or the day after that.
The organization of an A.I .D. programme is the problem. Ideally the donor, who provides his semen, should resemble the husband to some extent. This is understandable. A tall, blond Scandinavian man married to a similar woman might be disconcerted if the donor was a short, dark Southern European and the child resembled the donor rather than the mother. For this reason a well-organized Donor Insemination Service has to have a large panel of donors, one or more of whom has physical characteristics which can be matched as closely as possible with those of the husband. A donor should be removed from the list when his sperm has produced six pregnancies, to avoid the possibility, however remote, of his progeny mating.
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