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‘Phantom Fathers’ and ‘Test-Tube Babies’: Debates on Marriage, Infertility, and Artificial Insemination in the British Media, c. 1957–60

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Abstract

This chapter examines how reproductive science challenged conceptions of marriage and family at a time when the disintegration of ‘traditional values’ was feared. The popular media played an important role in articulating the relationship between marriage, family, and technology in late 1950s Britain. The media’s response to a sensational divorce case in 1958 – MacLennan v. MacLennan – encapsulates the importance of popular culture in leading public opinion on the controversial issue of artificial insemination. The way in which the media captured this case and reported on artificial insemination by donor (AID) in its aftermath offers a lens through which to understand both anxieties about marriage and the role of the media in reshaping moral norms during this period. This chapter argues that in actively framing a new narrative of what it meant to have a ‘test-tube baby’, the popular media pushed against public opinion on the issue of AID, and in so doing began redefining the heteronormative family.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Question of Adultery’, Times, 6 December 1957. By the 1950s, artificial insemination by husband (AIH) was largely accepted, but as the MacLennan case shows, AID was still highly controversial.

  2. 2.

    ‘Question of Adultery’.

  3. 3.

    ‘Test Tube Baby Ruling’, Daily Mirror, 11 January 1958.

  4. 4.

    The ruling in the MacLennan case was made under Scottish Law, and therefore could not necessarily serve as a precedent for cases tried elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

  5. 5.

    Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford and New York, 2009), p. 16.

  6. 6.

    Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day! A History of Media and Communications in Britain (London, 2010), p. 204.

  7. 7.

    Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day, p. 210; Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 19.

  8. 8.

    Arthur Christiansen, Headlines All My Life, (New York, 1961), p. 147.

  9. 9.

    Frank Mort, ‘The Permissive Society Revisited’, Twentieth Century British History, 22:2 (2011), p. 278; see also Christiansen, Headlines All My Life, pp. 2–3, 151, 237.

  10. 10.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 40.

  11. 11.

    Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day, p. 149; Lyn Gorman and David McLean, Media and Society Into the 21st Century: A Historical Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2009), p. 142.

  12. 12.

    The British press readership was clearly divided by class and education. On one side were the ‘quality’ or ‘highbrow’ papers – like The Times and Guardian – which had low circulation rates, with a well-educated and high-earning readership. On the other side were the ‘popular’ or ‘tabloid’ papers – like the Daily Mirror and Daily Express – that had mass circulations, with readers who were likely to be less educated and from a lower income bracket. Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 2.

  13. 13.

    Mort, ‘The Permissive Society Revisited’, pp. 279–80.

  14. 14.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 3; Stephen Vella, ‘Newspapers’, in Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (eds), Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History (London, 2009), p. 192.

  15. 15.

    Vella, ‘Newspapers’, p. 193.

  16. 16.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 5–6.

  17. 17.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 10.

  18. 18.

    Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford, 2011), p. 11; Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), pp. 11–12; Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London and New Haven, CT, 2010), pp. 3–4; Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 12, 53.

  19. 19.

    Mort, Capital Affairs, p. 4.

  20. 20.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 12.

  21. 21.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 53.

  22. 22.

    Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL, 2005); Claire Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, History Workshop Journal, 62:1 (2006); Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34:4 (2001); Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003); Pat Thane, ‘Population Politics in Post-War British Culture’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity? Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999).

  23. 23.

    Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, p. 198.

  24. 24.

    Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Postwar British Culture’, p. 93.

  25. 25.

    Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, pp. 99–100.

  26. 26.

    George H. Gallup, The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, Great Britain 1937–1975, Volume 1: 1937–1964 (New York, 1976).

  27. 27.

    Laura King, ‘Hidden Fathers? The Significance of Fatherhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Contemporary British History, 26:1 (2012); Langhamer, English in Love, p. 208.

  28. 28.

    Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain (Chicago, IL, 2012); Gayle Davis, ‘Test Tubes and Turpitude: Medical Responses to the Infertile Patient in Mid-Twentieth Century Scotland’, in Janet Greenlees and Linda Bryder (eds), Western Maternity and Medicine, 1880–1990 (London, 2013). Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Oxford, 1993), addresses artificial insemination, but this discussion is a minor part of her broader narrative.

  29. 29.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 4; Mort, ‘The Permissive Society Revisited’, p. 295.

  30. 30.

    Earlier rulings involving artificial insemination included: Orford v. Orford (Toronto, 1920); R.E.L. v. E.L. (London, 1948); Ohlson v. Ohlson (Chicago 1954); and Doornbos v. Doornbos (Chicago, 1954). On the Orford case see McLaren, Reproduction by Design, pp. 110–18; on the RCMD, see ‘The Great Marriage Muddle’, Daily Mirror, 21 March 1956, p. 1.

  31. 31.

    This chapter is based on evidence from the press archives of the Eugenics Society (Wellcome Library), the Ministry of Health (National Archives), and the newspaper databases of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Guardian, and The Times.

  32. 32.

    Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 264.

  33. 33.

    ‘My Test Tube Baby’, Daily Mirror, 7 December 1957.

  34. 34.

    Arthur Christiansen was Editor of the Express from 1933 to 1957.

  35. 35.

    ‘For the Primate – A Story of Two Happy Wives’, Daily Express, 16 January 1958.

  36. 36.

    ‘A Story of Two Happy Wives’.

  37. 37.

    ‘A Story of Two Happy Wives’.

  38. 38.

    Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 189.

  39. 39.

    ‘A.I.D. Baby Looks Like Us’, Daily Mirror, 19 February 1958; ‘The Phantom Fathers’, Daily Mirror, 21 February 1958; ‘A Quiz for A.I.D. Fathers’, Daily Mirror, 20 October 1958.

  40. 40.

    ‘My Wife is Having a Test Tube Baby’, Daily Express, 20 January 1958.

  41. 41.

    ‘My Wife is Having a Test Tube Baby’.

  42. 42.

    Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, pp. 449, 454.

  43. 43.

    ‘AID: Right or Wrong? Nine Out of Ten Say WRONG’, News Chronicle, 13 February 1958; Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, pp. 120–1.

  44. 44.

    Hugh McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings – A Mother Talks of A.I.D. Twins’, News Chronicle, 5 February 1958.

  45. 45.

    McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings’.

  46. 46.

    McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings’.

  47. 47.

    McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings’.

  48. 48.

    McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings’.

  49. 49.

    McLeave, ‘The Phone Rings’.

  50. 50.

    ‘Which Girl is the Test Tube Baby’, Daily Express, 12 March 1958.

  51. 51.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7, ‘A Blessing or a Sin?: Transcription of Granada TV Programme Re Artificial Insemination’, 16 January 1958.

  52. 52.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  53. 53.

    ‘Test Tube Babies “Not So Evil” Says Bishop’, Daily Mirror, 17 January 1958.

  54. 54.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  55. 55.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  56. 56.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  57. 57.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  58. 58.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  59. 59.

    ‘Test Tube Babies on the State’, Daily Sketch, 17 January 1958.

  60. 60.

    Wellcome Library, London, GC/193/E/15/7.

  61. 61.

    Some controllers disapproved of this openness, with one saying in 1948 that ‘it was “acutely embarrassing” to hear a discussion of the menopause in the early afternoon’. Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 40.

  62. 62.

    ‘Disease Education by the B.B.C.’, British Medical Journal, 22 February 1958, p. 450.

  63. 63.

    ‘A.I.D. Baby Looks Like Us’.

  64. 64.

    ‘A.I.D. Baby Looks Like Us’.

  65. 65.

    ‘A.I.D. Baby Looks Like Us’.

  66. 66.

    ‘Strong Conflict of Television Play’, Times, 5 May 1958.

  67. 67.

    ‘Strong Conflict of Television Play’.

  68. 68.

    A Question of Adultery (or The Case of Mrs Loring) (dir. Don Chaffey, 1958): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3qojbq. Accessed 6 December 2016.

  69. 69.

    ‘Maybe It’s Just a Question of Cliches’, Globe and Mail, 28 February 1959, p. 13.

  70. 70.

    Report of the Departmental Committee on Human Artificial Insemination, (London, 1960), p. 1.

  71. 71.

    Report of the Departmental Committee, p. 82.

  72. 72.

    National Archives, London HO 342/5, ‘Departmental Committee on Human Artificial Insemination: Consideration of the Committee’s Recommendations’, 1960–1961.

  73. 73.

    Report of the Departmental Committee, p. 71.

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    1. Historica Canada, Ontario, Canada

      Hayley Andrew

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    1. Hayley Andrew
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    1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

      Gayle Davis

    2. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

      Tracey Loughran

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    Andrew, H. (2017). ‘Phantom Fathers’ and ‘Test-Tube Babies’: Debates on Marriage, Infertility, and Artificial Insemination in the British Media, c. 1957–60. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_12

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_12

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