14-Year-Old Girl Forced to Have Mother's Baby by Sperm Donor

In a move that makes "Mommy Dearest" Joan Crawford look positively saintly, a woman in the United Kingdom has been charged with forcing her 14-year-old daughter to go through artificial insemination so that the mom could have another child.

British High Court judge Peter Jackson said that the mother, a divorced American woman with three adopted children, had a health condition and opted years before not to give birth herself. She tried to adopt a fourth child and was denied, so she came up with "a wicked and selfish" plan to get another baby to raise, the judge said.

The mother, who was not identified, bought sperm from a Denmark-based company over the Internet, and ordered her oldest adopted daughter, then just 14 and a virgin, to inseminate herself with a syringe. One time, she had a man come by the house to provide a donation, the court documents reveal.

According to court papers released on Monday, the teen, identified only as "A," was shocked by her mother's plan but felt obligated to do it, out of gratitude for having been adopted herself. "If I do this… maybe she will love me more," Jackson quoted her as saying.

She also thought that refusing wasn't an option. "My mum is a very determined person and she does her best not to let anything get in her way if she wants it," the teenager also said, according to Jackson. She also said that she was "not brave enough" to tell her mother she didn't want to go through with the plan, which included a strict diet and painful washes with vinegar and lemon juice in order to increase her chances of conceiving a girl.

As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the poor girl had do it over and over again for two years. It took seven tries and one miscarriage before the teen became pregnant at 16; she gave birth to a baby boy in July 2011, when she was 17.

Midwives attending the birth sensed that something was wrong when the mother tried to prevent "A" from breastfeeding the newborn, saying "we don't want any of that attachment thing." They noticed that "A" was reluctant to hand the baby over to her "pushy and insensitive" mother, and called child protection services when the mother tried to take the baby from the maternity ward.

All four children, including the teenager and her baby, are now in foster care while the mother serves a five-year jail term for child cruelty. Given that her daughter has to live with the emotional and psychological scars for the rest of her life, five years doesn't seem like nearly enough.