A 62-year-old Australian woman has won the right to extract her late husband's sperm, but faces an ongoing battle before she can use it.
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was considering using a surrogate mother when her 61-year-old husband died suddenly at their home in Western Australia on December 17. ABC reported.
She brought an “urgent” case to the Supreme Court the following evening, with Justice Fiona Seaward granting permission to remove the sperm tissue from her husband's body, which was still stored in a Perth mortuary. The paper explained that
However, the use of post-mortem reproductive cells is against the law in Western Australia, so an application must be made to the Reproductive Technology Council to use sperm in another state where it is legal, the ABC said.
According to court documents seen by the newspaper, 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. “Ta”.
Although the wife was told that she was unable to conceive due to her advanced age, the husband's sperm was pre-tested and determined to be suitable for in vitro fertilization. In in vitro fertilization, a woman's eggs are fertilized by a man's sperm and then implanted into a carrier.
The woman's cousin, who is in her 20s and lives in the Philippines, volunteered to be a surrogate mother for the couple, the court heard.
However, at the time of the man's death, the couple still faced legal obstacles to surrogacy, which would have required them to live in the Philippines for some time, the document explains.
Mr Seaward told the court there was no reason to believe the deceased man objected to having his sperm removed post-mortem, according to the ABC.
But the judge also questioned why the decision had not yet been approved by hospital representatives.
The grieving wife said she tried to have her husband removed immediately after his death, but was forced to apply for an emergency order because the facility did not appoint a “designated official” to respond to her request, court documents said. are doing.
“It is disappointing that the applicant appears to once again be required to appear in court on an urgent and traumatic basis in order to obtain an order that could be granted in a more expeditious and streamlined manner. Yes,” Seaward wrote. According to ABC, the decision is final.
However, reproductive health experts generally disagree on the issue of postmortem fertilization.
“Medically, it's all achievable,” Roger Hart, professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Western Australia, told the ABC.
“But the question is whether it's the right thing to do…the best person to make that decision would be a counselor or psychologist,” he says.
“The woman needs to use donor eggs because she is 62 years old and she is also planning to use a surrogate mother. This is the use of post-mortem sperm, so the child will never know the father. “We have an egg donor who inseminates those eggs with sperm, and then we transfer that embryo into a surrogate mother, so there are several steps,” Hart explained of the lengthy process.
There are also risks to using sperm from older men, he added.
“Sperm from older men, whether post-mortem or fresh, has been shown to have higher rates of chromosomal abnormal deletions within the sperm, putting them at higher risk for the offspring they produce. … So these are other issues that women suffer from,” Hart concluded.
