IVF by stealth

For all the rules banning sperm donation, the practice is not unknown in Egypt. When my father was in medical school in 1950s Cairo, he was told about a highly successful folk remedy for infertility, practiced by gypsies in rural areas, in which they would give women wads of cotton, which had been impregnated with a “magic potion”, to use as vaginal suppositories. Impregnated is right; as the professor explained, the tampons were a delivery device for some obliging donor’s sperm, the gypsies rightly guessing that the cause of the women’s persistent infertility actually lay with their husbands.