Lidia ar-Rimawi did it. She is almost seven months pregnant now and feeling terrific. Besides an easy pregnancy, she is thrilled that she pulled it off.

"We challenged the Israeli authorities," Rimawi told me in the living room of her home in Beit Rima in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "We challenged the jailer."

Plus, she says, having his wife pregnant with his son has boosted her husband's morale.

But she gives barely a hint about how the sperm was smuggled from prison. She'll only say she carried it out herself and that there was a plastic bag involved.

Rimawi and her husband, Abdel, (sentenced in Israeli court to 25 years on charges of attempted murder) already have a daughter, who was eight months old when her father was arrested. But by they time Abdel is released, Rimawi says they'll be too old to have more children.

She was inspired to try artificial insemination with smuggled sperm when she heard about another Palestinian woman who had successfully done it. That is the only birth so far credited with smuggled sperm, though doctors at the Razan Medical Center in Ramallah, which has donated its services to this effort, say 10 more women are currently pregnant.

The center's Dr. Omar Abdel Deyhem says when the first woman came with this idea they told her she should be sure to publicly declare her plans, so no suspicions would be raised if she became pregnant while her husband was still behind bars.

Muslim religious leaders have issued fatwas in support of smuggling sperm, calling it a new way to protest the Israeli occupation. Sheik Sayed ar-Rimawi, the local religious scholar who approved Lidia's plans, said this is a "very important means of resistance, against an occupation that not only imprisons Palestinians, but also wants to end their ability to reproduce."