Wed 15 رمضان 1447 (04 Mar 2026)
Artificial Insemination
Mufti:
Alsayyed Muhammad b. Abdallah Awad Al-Muayyady
Fatwa number: 18683
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Artificial Insemination
Fatwa number: 18683
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Artificial insemination is the placing of a man’s sperm in a woman’s womb in pursuit of offspring. They have tried that either through the woman’s husband: the physician takes semen from a man and places it in the urethra of the sterile husband; then the sterile husband goes and has intercourse with his wife, depositing in her womb what the physician had placed in his urethra—by this, the wife is inseminated, conceives, and gives birth. I myself saw a young man who came to be by this insemination.
Or the woman is inseminated by placing semen in her womb without the mediation of her husband; rather it is discharged directly into her womb, and insemination occurs and she gives birth.
Question: The requested matter is to clarify the legal ruling on whether insemination is permissible or impermissible, and to whom the child resulting from insemination is attributed.?
The answer—and with Allah is success:
Both types of insemination mentioned in the question are impermissible in the ruling of Allah Most High.
The proof is what is known from our upright religion: that Allah Most High obligated the woman to guard her chastity absolutely. He said—Exalted is He: "And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their private parts…" [Al-Nūr:31]. This encompasses guarding against others’ looking at, enjoying, or placing a sperm-drop in her private part; Islam has permitted none of that to anyone except their husbands.
Nor does the husband’s permission for inseminating his wife—whether by his mediation or another’s—justify or render lawful what is forbidden.
- And from what is known is that Allah Most High commanded men to guard their chastity. He said—Exalted is He: "Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their private parts…" [Al-Nūr:30]; thus Allah—Exalted is He—by this verse forbade a man to place his sperm in the private part of a woman who is neither his wife nor his legal bondwoman.
- And if we consider what Allah has legislated in the chapter of chastity, we find that the intended end is preserving lineages and their purity, safeguarding them from mixing and being lost; in insemination there is mixing and loss of lineages, and so on.
Moreover, a sound perspective perceives the ugliness of that, recoils from it, and is repulsed by it.
- As for the child resulting from insemination: he is the child of the woman, not of her husband—whether the insemination was by the husband’s intercourse with her or not—for he was not created from the husband’s fluid; rather, he was created from the fluid of another man.
If it be said: sound Sunnah has come that “the child is [attributed] to the [marriage] bed,” and the marriage bed belongs to the woman whose child came by insemination—as the authentic report indicates.
It is said: In this case the husband and the wife both acknowledge that the child was not created from the husband’s fluid, but was created from the sperm of another man.
- This case is like what the scholars mentioned: if a husband denies what his wife has given birth to at the time of delivery or before delivery and disavows it, and then his wife concurs with him or mutual imprecation (liʿān) occurs between them, the lineage is negated from him, and the newborn is the child of his mother, not of the husband.
Source : Min Thimār al-ʿIlm wa al-Ḥikmah vol.1
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