An Australian court authorized a 62-year-old widow to extract and store her recently deceased husband’s sperm, although it clarified that the ruling does not constitute approval for its use in the conception of a baby.
The woman, who is not identified for legal reasons, requested an urgent hearing on December 18 before the Supreme Court of the state of Western Australia, the highest judicial instance in this jurisdiction, to allow the postmortem extraction of her husband’s seminal fluid. .
Her request responded to the fact that the hospital in the city of Perth, where the body of her husband, who died at the age of 61, was found, had not agreed to the woman’s request to extract the sperm, notes the ruling issued on the 21st. December by Judge Fiona Seaward.
During the hearing, the woman argued that both she and her husband had planned to extract the sperm to have another baby, since the two children they had during their forty years of marriage died last decade in separate accidents at the ages of 29 and 35. , respectively.
Another argument suggested that a young cousin of the woman who lived in the Philippines had offered herself as a surrogate, but the laws of the Asian country forced the man, identified as Mr. H., to live for a period of time in the nation, to which added obstacles such as the restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic that still persist in the territory.
In issuing her ruling in favor of the woman, Judge Seaward, who reprimanded the hospital for not acceding to the plaintiff’s request at a “traumatic” moment, despite ruling in favor, stressed that “the sperm and tissues removed and preserved associates shall not be used for any purpose without an order of this Court.”
“As I made clear during the hearing, these orders are limited to permitting the removal of sperm and do not constitute authorization for the sperm to be used by the applicant, and do not in any way consider whether the applicant can or would meet any legal criteria about it,” the judge noted.
The woman could now request that her case be transferred to another Australian jurisdiction, such as Queensland, since Western Australia does not allow posthumous fertilization in order to use her husband’s sperm, which previous analysis has shown is strong enough to procreate.
