of a sterile Quaker merchant, which may be the first insemination procedure that resulted in the birth of a child. Instead of taking the sperm from the husband, the professor chloroformed the woman, then let his medical students vote which one of among them was "best looking", with that elected one providing the sperm that was then syringed into her cervix. At the husband's request, his wife was never told how she became pregnant. As a result of this experiment, the merchant's wife gave birth to a son, who became the first known child by donor insemination. The case was not revealed until 1909, when a letter by Addison Davis Hard appeared in the American journal Medical World, highlighting the procedure. Since then, a few doctors began to perform private donor insemination. Such procedures were regarded as intensely private, if not secret, by the parties involved. Records were usually not maintained so that donors could not be identified for paternity proceedings. Technology permitted the use of fresh sperm only, and it is thought that sperm largely came from the doctors and their male staff, although occasionally they would engage private donors who were able to donate on short notice on a regular basis. In 1945, Mary Barton and others published an article in the British Medical Journal on sperm donation. Barton, a gynecologist, founded a clinic in London which offered artificial insemination using donor sperm for women whose husbands were infertile. This clinic helped conceive 1,500 babies of which Mary Barton's husband, Bertold Weisner, probably fathered about 600. The first successful human pregnancy using frozen sperm was in 1953. "Donor insemination remained virtually unknown to the public until 1954". In that year the first comprehensive account of the process was published in The British Medical Journal. Donor insemination provoked heated public debate. In the United Kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury established the first in a long procession of commissions that, over the years, inquired into the practice. It was at first condemned by the Lambeth Conference, which recommended that it be made a criminal offence. A Parliamentary Commission agreed. In Italy, the Pope declared donor insemination a sin, and proposed that anyone using the procedure be sent to prison. Sperm donation gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. In many western countries, sperm donation is now a largely accepted procedure. In the US and elsewhere, there are a large number