PIERRE, South Dakota (LifeSiteNews) — The South Dakota House passed legislation on February 9 to make it a crime to use a doctor’s or stranger’s sperm for artificial insemination without a woman’s written consent.
House Bill 1164 makes it a class 5 felony for a physician to “Knowingly cause the use of reproductive material from a donor if the patient did not give written consent to receive the reproductive material from the donor”; or “Intentionally cause the use of the licensed health care provider’s own reproductive material without the patient’s written consent.” Class 5 felonies are punishable by five years in jail and/or a $10,000 fine.
In addition, the bill would make offending physicians vulnerable to civil suits from any patient who gave birth to the child of a donor to whom she did not consent, the patient’s surviving spouse, the resulting child’s intended parent, the resulting children themselves, and any donor whose sperm was used without his consent or contrary to the terms of his consent.
HB 1164 passed the state House 65-0, with five lawmakers not voting either way. It now moves to the Republican-dominated state Senate for consideration.
The bill is meant to tame an often-overlooked, yet very real, issue in the fertility industry in which, whether through incompetence or deliberate misconduct, couples who struggle to conceive find themselves with babies unrelated to either parent without their knowledge or consent.
“[M]any fertility doctors have been accused and convicted of fraud for using their own semen to artificially inseminate patients,” Jonathon Van Maren wrote for LifeSiteNews in 2023. “Dr. Donald Cline of Indiana conceived at least 60 children at his fertility clinic (he was convicted of fraud); Dr. Cecil Jacobsen of Virginia fathered a minimum of 15 children in this fashion (he was also convicted); and at least 10 other American doctors have been accused, in court, of what is being referred to as ‘fertility fraud.’”
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Fertility fraud, in turn, is just one of many ethical pitfalls in the broader world of ART (assisted reproductive technology). The in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, for instance, entails the conscious creation of scores of “excess” embryonic humans who are killed. Human lives are also treated like commodities to be bartered over. It has been estimated that more than a million IVF-created embryos are in frozen storage in the United States, and that as many as 93% of all embryos created through IVF are eventually destroyed. A 2019 NBC News profile of Florida fertility doctor Craig Sweet acknowledged that his practice has discarded or abandoned approximately a third of the embryos it has placed in cold storage.
Nevertheless, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in a 2024 wrongful death suit that frozen embryos qualified as children; this thrust the issue into the national spotlight. Most national Republicans rushed to declare their support for IVF (with just a handful of exceptions). Leading the charge was President Donald Trump, who cast himself as a “leader on fertilization” and even promised to enact a new federal entitlement to IVF, whether through direct subsidy or insurance mandate (though he also suggested he would support religious exemptions to the latter).
The White House eventually backed away from the idea of mandating IVF but said it still wanted to find a way to deliver on Trump’s campaign pledge. Last October, Trump announced he had struck a deal to reduce IVF costs and increase IVF “access” by (among other actions to lower prices for fertility drugs) creating a new benefit option specifically covering IVF and other fertility treatments for employers to offer their employees.
As the argument over restricting such practices rages on, some groups advocate trying to alleviate the harm already done by promoting so-called “snowflake adoptions,” the adoption of already-conceived “excess” embryos at risk of staying frozen indefinitely or eventually being destroyed. Others, however, argue that such adoptions are a morally-impermissible form of surrogacy under Catholic doctrine. Over the years, LifeSiteNews has published a series of articles representing the debate from both perspectives.
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