Dov Fox

The, the earliest reported case of fertility fraud took place in 1884.

This is Dov Fox.

He teaches law and directs the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego.

A couple, an older man and a younger woman, sought help from a doctor called William Pancoast in conceiving.

Um, uh, criminally, uh, it was not, uh, it didn't count as a, a, as a, uh, an assault or a battery.

I- in, in part, a number of complicated questions, but basically, you know, by and large, these patients had consented to being inseminated with sperm for the purpose of reproduction more broadly, and things had happened outside of the body with the transfer of the sperm into the egg and then back into the body without any physical harm or damage that could be shown from a resulting X-ray or a psychiatrist's note, a medical report, and so that complicated proof that an existing law, uh, had been broken.

[Instrumental music] Dov Fox says that even apart from the difficulty in showing that any tangible harm has been caused, there's this historical idea in United States courts that if a child is the end result of any action, it can't be a harm.

You know, going back to the 1940s, there was a, a doctrine in the United States, uh, many states adopted this principle of, uh, babies are a blessing.