Mother Forces Daughter To Become Pregnant

A UK mother forced her daughter to become pregnant
so she could have a fourth child.
Image: Shutterstock

A United Kingdom woman was recently sentenced to five years in prison for child cruelty. Her crime: forcing her daughter to get pregnant so she could have another child. The woman, who has not been identified by name, was unable to have her own biological children due to health problems. She had already adopted three children—two with her husband and one after they divorced—but she wanted a fourth.

The woman was denied a request to adopt a fourth child, however. So she turned to her then thirteen-year-old daughter, asking her to become pregnant so she could have one more baby girl. The daughter told investigators she was “shocked, pretty shocked” when her mother asked her to become pregnant. She thought, “if I do this… maybe she will love me more.”

The daughter, “A,” was thirteen when her mother began having her artificially inseminate herself using syringes of semen and douches prepared for her. She inseminated herself seven times over the course of two years. The first semen donor came to the house, and the six times following that the semen came from Cryos International sperm bank in Denmark.

Because the mother wanted a girl, she forced A to use acidic douches filled with vinegar, lime juice, or lemon juice and eat a “special diet” because she thought it would help influence the baby’s gender.

Investigators believe A became pregnant for the first time at age 14 but miscarried the baby. She again became pregnant at sixteen, with she and her mother spreading the story that she had had a one night stand with a boy and subsequently become pregnant.  

She eventually gave birth to a baby boy, and shortly afterwards midwives became concerned by the mother’s interactions with A. They called her “pushy and insensitive,” and recalled her attempts at preventing breastfeeding because she didn’t want “any of that attachment thing.”

The midwives eventually alerted child protection when they noticed the daughter’s reluctance to give the baby over to her mother. Over the previous few years, social services had been alerted four times over concern for the children’s welfare, but no immediate concerns were found.

This case has brought to light several issues that the British government is working to solve, including the requirements for attaining donor sperm through Cyros and home schooling laws. The mother had kept her children in extreme isolation for several years, and they had not even seen their adoptive father for a decade.