How the U.S. helped imprisoned Cuban spy impregnate his wife

Up until last week, it looked like Gerardo Hernandez would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Part of a spy cabal known as the “Cuban Five,” Hernandez had been in federal prison since 1998, where he was serving out two consecutive life sentences for espionage.

But in a prisoner exchange to free detained American contractor Alan Gross, Hernandez and two other members of the “Cuban Five” were released. At a public homecoming event, Hernandez was seen rubbing his wife Adriana Perez’s pregnant belly. He returned home just in time for the birth of their child, who they’d conceived long distance with the help of U.S. officials.

Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office confirmed Monday that the Democrat from Vermont had brokered the binational artificial insemination. In February of last year, Perez had heard that Leahy, who’d long been working to repair U.S.-Cuban relations, would be travelling to Havana with his wife, Marcelle. Perez asked for a meeting.

“She was probably 42 or 43 and she had no expectation her husband was ever getting out prison — he was serving two consecutive life sentences — and she was desperate to have a child,” Leahy aide Tim Rieser told NBC News. “Senator Leahy and Marcelle Leahy are parents and grandparents, and they sympathized with her on a human level and they wanted to help her, and they did it for her.”

Conceiving while incarcerated is, no doubt, complicated. Not just logistically but legally. A prisoner’s right to procreate has never really been addressed on a federal level; instead, it is left up to the states and courts, which, before the advent of artificial insemination, could curb inmate procreation by restricting conjugal visits. But as conjugal visits have become a thing of the past (only six states permit them, and federal prohibit the practice) so, too, has the need for them. Now, thanks to technological advances in reproductive health, a couple doesn’t need to be in the same room — or even the same country — to get pregnant.

With the help of State Department and Bureau of Prisons officials who, Rieser said, “understood that the Senator’s purpose was purely humanitarian” and “were also asking the Cubans to do things that would help improve the conditions of Alan Gross,” Leahy arranged to have Hernandez’s sperm flown from the U.S. to Cuba. That's where Perez would undergo the insemination procedure, paid for by the Cubans. Following one failed attempt, Perez became pregnant.

“The feeling now, in a word? Delirious,” Hernandez told Granma, the official Cuban newspaper. “I’m not even going to say love. Delirious is what defines it better.”