Inspired by a thread in Life1 on usage of sperm banks, I was curious to know the Islamic stance on infertility treatments, such as in-vitro fertilization, sperm banks, surrogate mothers, and any i may be forgetting. Another question, if a single woman decides to get pregnant via a sperm bank, is that religiosuly wrong? Just curious…
Re: Infertility
well sara.....religously, treatment of infertility is not wrong 2ndly if single women decides to get pregnant via sperm bank this is wrong religously coz in islam sex before marriage is haram and also a having a baby before marriage is haram so this is also haram if osme one wants to preggy via sperm bank...
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Do you have sufficient evidence to back up your fatwa that having a child before marriage is haram? Sex before marriage IS not allowed, but in the scenarios I gave above, sex does not necessarily come into the picture. One does not need to have sex in order to be impregnated via artifician insemination. Would adopting a child before marriage be also "haram" according to you?
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sara this is totally diff thing Adopting a child....and this is not haram coz u just adopt it.... its not came from ur own body just u adopted it....and u may visit askimamonline.com and post ur Q i hope there u find ur best A....
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Right here… 
Sarah: it is agreed upon by all school of thoughts that using a sperm of a man other than husband is haraam hence a child born out of such sperm is considered as walad-uz-zinaa
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Considered what?
Would this be sort of like zinna in a way even though the act of fornication never took place?
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and for those who want a fatwaa, here is one:
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A 'semen bank' carries out the function of obtaining seminal ejaculates from healthy fertile donors, and preserving them at a very low temperature (cryopreservation). The donors are medically checked to exclude diseases communicable by semen (lately AIDS-aquired immuno deficiency syndrome-has been added to the check list). The donors and recipients remain unknown to each other and written consent is taken from the recipient and her husband. Although the procedure can put an end to the problem of the fertile wife of an infertile husband, it stands unacceptable to Islam. From the point of view of jurisprudence, Islamic law would not consider this practice as adultery since it lacks the legal specifications (the crime of adultery legally materialises if four unblemished witnesses testify to have witnessed the complete act of coitus entailing introduction of penis into vagina), but morally it is considered nearly as sinful, and is legally punishable but not with the punishment of adultery. The child is not the fruit of the marriage contract and therefore robbed of its right to legitimacy. The woman and her husband are agreable, it is true. ..but the right of the child to legitimacy is not theirs to pamper with. The procedure also entails the lie of registering the baby as the son or daughter of a man who is not the real father. It leads to confusion of lines of genealogy whose purity is so dear to Islam. It lies to the child about, and denies him or her, the knowledge of their real father. It absolves the real father of being responsible for his own "flesh and blood". It enhances the chances of inadvertent brother-sister marriages in a community. It violates the Islamic legal system of inheritance. And on top of that, it would play havoc with the science of population genetics trying to deduce modes of inheritance by analysing family pedigrees.
This is one such article on the matter...there are a few others...and they all seem to say it is haram...
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Alright thanks, that's what I felt it was to be, haram, and the same reasons for it being haram are also the same reasons i had for thinking it was wrong as well :)
I can't see any good points with it. If one is so desparate to have a child they should adopt, there's so many unwanted children in this world, why not make someone's life better instead of making antoher baby adn populating the world even more. If geneology is such an issue, that you would tell the kid about it when they're older, well, how would you feel if someone said your father was some sperm donor?
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Well, I have to clarify something here, which people are confused on. When I raised the topic in Life 1 - I was talking about women who have had trouble finding rishtaas and haven't gotten married - would like to have a child of their own and are willing to just get the sperm and raise the kid on their own.
The case scenario I gave is not one of infertility - i.e. that the woman is married and her husband cant give viable sperm.
I'm talking about women who have been spurned away from society for whatever reason and haven't landed a rishtaa - like really badsoorat females, or working women who nobody was comfortable with, etc etc.
We can all pretend to live in an idealized society, but the fact is that many women are out there and no one is marrying them. I have 2 such aunts - one was engaged and the guy ran off, and the other could never find anyone suitable. They did get rishtaas, but the rishtaas were not ones that were up to par, and both girls were really intelligent and also wanted someone intelligent in return. They also wanted to work, which potential families were not comfortable with at that time.
I'm sure there are lots of girls like that out there now who haven't gotten a rishtaa or can't get decent ones that they're happy with.
So they must live their life single, and never know the joy of having a child?
And yes, one can adopt - but I already posted a thread in Life2 about adoption, and the enthusiasm was next to nothing for it. Most people argued that its absolutely not the same as having your own child. So why deny this right to the female that no one wants to marry, and that too for stupidly unIslamic reasons? (ex. she's got a job, she's educated aur bholi gi bohath, she's dark in her skin tone, she's badsoorat, she's phsycially disabled, etc)
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It is still zina to conceive a child out of wedlock.
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Why do you think Islam forbids illegal sexual relations? It’s not because God does not want us to have pleasure. It is to prevent us from the concequences. And bearing an illegitimate child is one such concequence.
Heck, forget Islam for a moment. Pick up a good Psychology book and read about kids who are raised by single parents without having an identifiable parent.
Come out of your naive “violation of women’s rights” mode and think through a broader perspective 
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Hunk , do not misunderstand me. I'm not siding with women who go to sperm banks. I'm outlining a particular situation that is common in our society (rejecting women for no good reason), and asking if they should be given the opportunity to conceive anyway. I'm actually not taking sides on this - prior to posting the subject, I had no idea what the religious stance was on it.
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Should someone be given an oppurtunity to conceive a child when they are unable he/she cannot give the child a proper upbringing like a normal family witha mom and dad rather than single parent?
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Sara,
I’m actually reading up on this because a friend of mine has an issue with her uterus and her Fertility physician discussed gestational surrogacy with her…
I think one of the nicest overviews at this link. I found the recent SHIA rulings discussed at the end very very intersting.
Religion and Reproductive Technologies
IVF and Gamete Donation in the Muslim World
Marcia C Inhorn
U Michigan
For infertile couples around the globe, “reproductive health” means achieving a much-desired pregnancy, thereby overcoming the stigmatization and heartbreak of childlessness. At the dawn of the 21st century, achieving pregnancy through resorting to new reproductive technologies has become a global reality. Indeed, since the birth in 1978 of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, new reproductive technologies to overcome infertility have spread around the globe, reaching countries far from the technology-producing nations of the West. Perhaps nowhere is this globalization process more evident than in the more than 20 nations of the Muslim Middle East, where a private in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry is flourishing. For example, Egypt alone (population > 70 million) hosts 50 IVF clinics, while the tiny country of Lebanon (population > 5 million) boasts more than 15 IVF clinics, one of the highest per capita concentrations in the world.
In the Muslim world, religion has profoundly affected the practice of IVF in ways that are not commonly seen in Euro-America. Thus, it is extremely important for anthropologists working in this region to examine the “local moral worlds” of Muslim IVF patients as they attempt to access reproductive technologies according to religious guidelines. In my own research in Egypt and Lebanon, infertile Muslim couples have been extremely concerned about making their test-tube babies in the Islamically correct fashion. To that end, many have sought out the “official” Islamic opinion on the practice of IVF in the form of a fatwa, or a non-binding but authoritative religious proclamation made by an esteemed religious scholar.
In recent years, many such fatwas on a wide variety of reproductive health concerns have been issued in Muslim countries. With regard to IVF specifically, fatwas were issued early on in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the first two countries to open IVF centers (along with Jordan). In Egypt, the Grand Sheikh of Egypt’s famed religious university, Al Azhar, issued the first fatwa on medically assisted reproduction on March 23, 1980. This fatwa—formulated only two years after the birth of the first IVF baby in England, but a full six years before the opening of Egypt’s first IVF center—has proved to be truly authoritative and enduring in all its main points for the Sunni Muslim world. Sunni Islam, it is important to note, is the dominant form of Islam found throughout the Muslim world. Nearly 90% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are Sunni Muslims, with the strictest form of Sunni Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, approximately 90% of citizens are Sunni Muslims.
*t is extremely important for anthropologists working in [the Muslim world] to examine the “local moral worlds” of Muslim [in vitro fertilization] patients as they attempt to access reproductive technologies according to religious guidelines.
What is the Sunni position on IVF? As currently practiced in Sunni-majority Muslim countries such as Egypt, in vitro fertilization is allowed, as long as it entails the union of ova from the wife with the sperm of her husband and the transfer of the resulting embryo(s) back to the uterus of the same wife. However, the use of a third-party donor is not allowed, whether he or she is providing sperm, eggs or embryos. Furthermore, all forms of surrogacy are strictly forbidden.
A global survey of sperm donation among assisted reproductive technology centers in 62 countries provides some indication of the degree of convergence between official Islamic discourse and actual practice. In all of the Muslim countries surveyed—including the Middle Eastern Muslim countries of Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar and Turkey, as well as the non-Middle Eastern Muslim countries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan—sperm donation in IVF and all other forms of gamete donation were strictly prohibited, with these prohibitions mandated by law and/or professional ethical guidelines in all of the countries studied.
Having said this, it is very important to point out how things have changed for Shi’ite Muslims, particularly in Iran and Lebanon, since this global survey was published in 1997. Shi’a is the minority branch of Islam found in Iran and parts of Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and it is much in the news because of the US-led war in Iraq. In the late 1990s, the Supreme Jurisprudent of the Shi’ite branch of Islam, Ayatollah Ali Hussein Khamanei, who is the handpicked successor to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa effectively permitting donor technologies to be utilized. With regard to both egg and sperm donation, Ayatollah Khamanei stated that both the donor and the infertile parents must abide by the religious codes regarding parenting. However, the donor child can only inherit from the sperm or egg donor, as the infertile parents are considered to be like “adoptive” parents.
For infertile Shi’ite Muslim couples, third-party gamete donation is even more complicated than this fatwa would suggest. Because of the Shi’ite practice of ijtihad, or individual religious reasoning, some Shi’ite religious authorities continue to denounce sperm and egg donation, prohibiting it for their followers. Others accept egg donation as being like polygyny (which is permitted in Islam), but decry sperm donation for its implications of polyandry (which is not allowed). In Iran itself, Ayatollah Khamanei’s position on sperm donation was reversed when the Iranian parliament made sperm donation illegal in 2003. However, embryo donation from one married couple to another is allowed in Iran, because embryo donation insures that all parties are married, and it is akin to adoption, which is allowed in Iran, unlike any other Middle Eastern Muslim country. Egg donation is also allowed in Iran, as long as the husband conducts a temporary muta marriage with the egg donor, thereby insuring that all three parties are married. Such muta marriages are allowed in Shi’ite Islam and have been encouraged in recent Iranian history, but are not recognized by Sunni religious authorities. In addition, Iran is the only Muslim-majority country in the Middle East to have allowed surrogacy in a very recent turn of events.
As a result of these unprecedented Iranian religious rulings favoring third-party gamete donation and surrogacy, infertile Shi’ite Muslim couples in Iran, as well as in Shi’ite-majority Lebanon, are beginning to receive donor gametes, as well as donating their gametes to other infertile couples. For the Shi’ite religious authorities, IVF physicians and infertile couples who accept the idea of gamete donation, the introduction of donor technologies has been described as a “marriage savior,” helping to avoid the “marital and psychological disputes” that may arise if the couple’s case is otherwise untreatable.
In Lebanon, Shi’ite fatwas allowing egg donation have, in fact, been a great boon to marital relations. There, both fertile and infertile men with reproductively elderly wives (those with poor ova quality) are signing up on waiting lists at IVF clinics to accept the eggs of donor women. Some of these donors are other IVF patients, and some are friends or relatives. And in at least one clinic, some are young women being recruited from the US, who may unwittingly serve as anonymous egg donors for conservative Shi’ite Hizbullah couples! Furthermore, quite interestingly, in multi-sectarian Lebanon, the recipients of these donor eggs are not necessarily only Shi’ite Muslim couples. Some Sunni Muslim patients from Lebanon and from other Middle Eastern Muslim countries (as well as minority Christian couples), are quietly saving their marriages through the use of donor gametes, thereby secretly “going against” the dictates of Sunni Muslim orthodoxy.
Indeed, new reproductive technologies have brought great joy to thousands of infertile Muslim couples who have borne test-tube babies over the last 20 years since these technologies were first introduced in the Sunni Muslim world. Furthermore, the more recent globalization of these technologies to the Shi’ite Muslim world has fundamentally altered understandings of the ways in which families can be made and the ways in which marriages can be saved through the uses of donor technologies. Paradoxically, the most conservative, male Shi’ite religious leaders in Iran have been the ones to adopt the most “adventurous” attitudes toward third-party gamete donation. In doing so, they have offered reproductive fatwas with real potential to transform infertile gender relations in ways heretofore unanticipated in the Muslim world.
For infertile Shi’ite Muslim couples already benefiting from donor gametes in IVF clinics in Iran and Lebanon, the donor children they bear represent the happy outcome of the “brave new world” of third-party gamete donation as it enters the Muslim world in the 21st century. For those of us in anthropology who study the social and cultural implications of the new reproductive technologies, the striking and rapidly evolving case of the Muslim world reminds us why religion does, indeed, matter in reproductive health, particularly as we enter a religiously troubled new millennium.
Marcia C Inhorn is the director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also a professor of anthropology, public health and women’s studies there.
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I think adoption is great option…i would say it is better a child have a parent than none at all…
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i am looking for some reviews about HSG and laproscopy........ my friend was diagonosed by blocked fllopian tubes..........