ABSTRACT
It is widely held that some 10 per cent of married couples who wish to have children are unable to do so by reason of infertility; the reasons for the condition are divided roughly equally between husband and wife. The process of diagnosis may reveal a medical cause – often, in the case of infertility, in the form of a hormonal deficiency; substitution therapy would then be the first preferred treatment. Some forms of treatment of childlessness which involve gamete manipulation or donation depend for their success on sophisticated and expensive medical technology; others are comparatively simple and scarcely involve professional expertise. With one major exception – surrogate motherhood – treatments for the childless woman fall into former category; substitution of sperm by donation is, by contrast, easily accomplished. The answer to non-parenthood may then lie in artificial insemination by the husband's or partner's sperm (AIH or AIP).
