SPERM taken from a dead man have been used for the first time to establish a
pregnancy. This seems sure to intensify calls for reproductive technologies to
be more tightly regulated.
The man died suddenly, and his family asked for his sperm to be preserved. A
team led by Cappy Rothman, a urologist at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles,
obtained a sample by removing the epididymis鈥攖he tubes where sperm mature
and are stored鈥攕queezing the sperm out, and freezing them. Rothman has
performed or supervised this procedure about a dozen times. 鈥淚t gives people
hope and lessens the pain of suddenly losing a loved one,鈥� he says.
This is the first time one of the families has asked for the sperm to be
used. After being defrosted, they were injected into eggs harvested from the
man鈥檚 wife, one of which successfully implanted in her uterus. The woman is now
one month pregnant. She and her family have asked to remain anonymous until the
end of the third month.
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Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia, fears that regulations are lagging behind the technical advances
that have made posthumous reproduction possible. 鈥淭hese technologies make it
possible to steal reproductive tissue from you without your consent,鈥� he
says.
In Britain, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act requires a man to give
his written consent if his sperm are to be used when he is dead. Diane Blood,
the Nottinghamshire widow who eventually became pregnant using sperm taken from
her husband as he lay in a terminal coma, did so in Belgium only after a lengthy
legal battle to win the right to take the sperm abroad.
But in the US, the first attempts at regulating posthumous reproduction are
only just emerging. A bill now before the New York state legislature proposes
that a man must have given written consent for his sperm to be retrieved after
his death, and that the request for this to be done may only come from his wife
or partner
(This Week, 21 March, p 23).
Rothman agrees that legislation may be necessary to control the use of dead
men鈥檚 sperm, but he argues that restrictions on retrieving the sperm impose an
unnecessary burden on grieving relatives. Nevertheless, he accepts that the
procedure isn鈥檛 always appropriate. If the dead man clearly didn鈥檛 want
children鈥攆or instance if he had had a vasectomy鈥擱othman says he
would not retrieve a sperm sample.