When TV news reporter Dylan Lyons was killed in Florida at the beginning of this year, his fiancée was devastated. She knew that Lyons, who had dreamed of having children with her, would have wanted his legacy to continue, so she reached out to a urologist who was able to retrieve sperm from Lyons’ body. Now, Lyons’ fiancée is planning to go through IVF to conceive his child.
Around the world, such stories, about grieving women fighting to use their dead husband’s sperm to get pregnant, occasionally crop up. Conservative thinkers condemn the technology for being “unnatural” and for bringing children into “fatherlessness.” Others find the topic uncomfortable to discuss because it mixes sex and death. Still, experts say that requests for the practice, first reported in a 1980 case study, have increased over the years, although there aren’t hard statistics. The method itself is simple—usually involving a small surgical procedure—but those requesting the practice face many ethical barriers.
In the US, many institutions follow a 2018 set of guidelines from the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The ASRM guidelines are straightforward about some issues: If there is clear, informed, written consent from the deceased regarding their wishes for postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR), the practice is ethical. Likewise, if the deceased made clear they did not want the practice performed, any requests will be denied. There is also a clear preference for spouses over other family members making this request.
But it’s rare to have “explicit donor permission,” according to David Magnus, director at Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. No one expects to die in unforeseen circumstances. And though it’s standard to ask folks for preferences regarding organ donation in the event of death, people are not usually asked about PMSR. Unless a couple had taken part in a fertility program in which they had to explicitly declare their intentions for their genetic material after death, it would be the exception that someone could provide hard proof of consent.
Another barrier is the typical cut-off point for the procedure: 24 hours after the time of death. However, a recent clinical report from the University of Miami found that sperm could be viable for up to 106 hours (more than four days) after death. With this development, PMSR could become an option for more people, thus raising more ethical questions, including how we can determine implied consent and whether those in the depths of grief can make such monumental decisions.
In 2004, Gulam Bahadur, a consultant clinical andrologist and lab director based in the United Kingdom, described posthumous reproduction as one of “the most challenging, difficult and sensitive [ethical conundrums encountered] in any field of medicine, entailing complex moral, ethical and legal concerns.” Like any other decision involving the dying and dead, it’s never one that should be taken lightly.
Most societies agree that the dead should be treated with respect and that we should act in good faith to carry out what the person would have wanted. This is evident in the care taken with corpses, the existence of wills, and the honoring of “deathbed” wishes. Because protecting the interests of the dead is so important, some people doubt there can ever be implied consent when it comes to posthumous choices. In fact, according to the ASMR, jurisdictions that prohibit the practice “regard the retrieval as an impermissible violation of the body of the deceased,” much like other crimes that might be committed against the dead.
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