Gravity and Insemination

This past Thursday researchers in Amsterdam published in the British Medical Journal that 15 minutes of lying down after artificial insemination could be very helpful.

Artificial insemination has been around for a long time, ever since Arabs used it for horses in the 14th century and Dr. John Hunter in England performed a successful human procedure in 1790 via syringe. By 1941 over 10,000 women became pregnant through the procedure, and by 1955, it was 50,000.

This new discovery about helping insemination along reminds me about this Friends episode, where one of the quirkier characters, Phoebe, lies upside down on a couch in hopes of increasing chances of pregnancy. Back then (1998), we laughed.

I think before we became used to the idea of artificial insemination and started thinking about it, couples would usually stay prostate post-natural insemination. So we never thought about gravity and insemination. Maybe it was just something nature intended all along, and it wasn't until we humans came up with test tube babies that we needed to rediscover things that came so naturally.

But I have wondered about long-term consequences of frozen eggs and sperm, of growing embryoes in a petri-dish a couple days before planting it into a person. How could something so unnatural turn out okay? Well so far it seems the world's first test tube baby, Louise Brown, is alright, having just had her own baby, naturally, three years ago. But scientists have observed in 2004 (yes, almost half a century later we started doing this stuff) that birth defects happen 1.4 to 2 times more often in what they call births through "assisted reproductive technology."

I suppose a cleft lip doesn't do much to discourage a couple desperate to be parents. We've got plastic surgery. And maybe cerebral palsy isn't so discouraging either. We've got private nurses and drugs. And spontaneous abortions? Maybe we'll come up with more drugs to get rid of those too someday.