A 62-year-old woman in Australia has won the right to remove her dead husband’s sperm — but faces an ongoing battle to be able to use it.
The woman – who has not been identified for legal reasons – was looking into conceiving a child via surrogate when her 61-year-old husband died suddenly at their West Australian home on December 17, the ABC reported.
She presented an “urgent” case before the Supreme Court the following evening, and Judge Fiona Seaward allowed her to remove sperm tissue from her husband’s body, which is still in storage at the mortuary in Perth, the outlet explained.
But using reproductive cells after death is against the law in Western Australia – so he had to apply to the Reproductive Technology Council to use sperm in another state where it was legal, the ABC said.
The couple had “talked about having another child” after their 29-year-old daughter drowned on a fishing trip in 2013 and their 30-year-old son died in a car accident in 2019, court documents seen by The Post state.
The 61-year-old died suddenly at the couple’s home in Western Australia. aradaphotography – stock.adobe.com A court in Western Australia ruled in favor of the woman. Getty Images
Although the wife had been told she could not get pregnant due to her age, the husband’s sperm had previously been tested and deemed suitable for in-vitro fertilization, where the female egg is fertilized by the male sperm in the laboratory before being implanted in the carrier.
The woman’s cousin, who is in her 20s and lives in the Philippines, even offered to be the couple’s surrogate, the court said.
At the time of the man’s death, however, the couple was still struggling with legal obstacles to surrogacy, which would require them to stay in the Philippines for a while, the document explained.
In court, Seaward ruled that there was no reason to believe the dead man would have objected to having his sperm removed at the autopsy, ABC said.
The couple had planned to use the man’s sperm to conceive a child using IVF, the woman said. Joshua Resnick – stock.adobe.com
But the judge also questioned why the decision had not been approved by hospital representatives.
According to the grieving wife, she tried to have the extraction handled shortly after her husband’s death, but was forced to seek an emergency order when the facility did not appoint a “designated officer” to handle the request, court documents said.
“It is disappointing that it seems that, once again, an applicant has been required to attend court urgently and in a traumatic situation to obtain an order that could have been … granted in a faster and more orderly way,” wrote Seaward in his final decision, per ABC.
Experts in reproductive health, however, are generally divided on the issue of fertilization after death.
It is unclear what the woman will do with her husband’s sperm, as postmortem fertilization is illegal in Western Australia. Monkey Business – stock.adobe.com
“Medically it’s all feasible,” University of Western Australia reproductive medicine professor Roger Hart told the ABC.
“But it’s whether it’s the right thing to do … the counselor, the psychologist would be the best person to make that judgment,” he said.
“The woman has to use donor eggs, because she is 62 years old and she also plans to use a surrogate … It is the use of sperm after death, so the child will not know the father. There will be an egg donor to ask the sperm to fertilize the eggs, and we will transfer the embryos to a surrogate, so there are several steps,” Hart explained of the lengthy process.
There are also risks with using older men’s sperm, he added.
“We know that sperm from older men, either after death, or from fresh sperm has a higher rate of chromosomal abnormalities in the sperm, which poses a greater risk to the child being born … So this is another thing that will be experienced by the woman. counseling about it,” Hart concluded.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
