Another milestone has been reached in the field of posthumous assisted reproduction (PAR) with the birth of a child in Israel who was born to a surrogate mother who agreed to be artificially inseminated with a dead man’s sperm in order to give his grieving parents a grandchild.

Bionews.org is reporting that “Baby R”, who is now three weeks old, is the daughter of a man who died six years ago from cancer. Although PAR is no longer a new idea, the way this child was brought about is being called a “new frontier.”

“The baby girl is the result of his parents’ desire to create a genetic grandchild, which they perceive as the dying wish of their deceased son,” explains bioethicists Hila Rimon-Greenspan and Vardit Ravitsky.

They explain that the young man decided to store his sperm while undergoing cancer treatment, which can render a person sterile, because he might want to become a parent someday. Unfortunately, the man, age 30, did not survive the treatment.

“Following his death, his parents felt that this statement, coupled with his frozen sperm, constituted a ‘biological will’, and that it was now their responsibility to make his wish come true,” Rimon-Greenspan and Ravitsky write.

The young man’s parents began searching for a mother for their potential child and found a single woman in their thirties who wanted to have a child but didn’t want to use an anonymous sperm donation. She agreed to their proposal, and the three parties entered into a contract to help them outline their future relationship, which they did with the help of Attorney Irit Rozenblum, the executive director of New Family, an NGO in biological wills.

Even though the parents did not have the son’s wishes in writing, a court allowed the insemination to take place.

The mother, known only as “A”, soon became pregnant. ”

“The excitement was tremendous,” Rosenblum told ynetnews.com. “These are people whose world collapsed six years ago, and now they get this ray of light into their lives. No psychologist could restore their lives in the way this baby did. This girl would not bear the onus of the family’s past; she paves the path into the future.”

“A” keeps photos of the child’s dead father in the living room and says that the presence of his parents in her life is “as close as it gets to the real thing.”

Karen Capato

PAR has been gaining ground in recent years with cases popping up all over the world of family members who use the sperm or eggs of deceased loved ones to bring their children to life after their death.

Just this year a western Australian judge granted a newly widowed woman the right to retrieve and store sperm from her dead husband after he took his own life. The couple had been trying to have children and had recently started IVF treatments at the time of his death.

One of the most famous U.S. cases was put to rest last month when the Supreme Court ruled that Karen Capato, the mother of twins born 18 months after the death of their biological father are not eligible or survivor benefits under Social Security.

In addition to a myriad of legal issues concerning the offspring of children conceived via PAR, the ethical problems are even more compelling.

First, there are typically many questions surrounding consent of donors who often don’t put their desires to have their sperm or eggs frozen in writing. This results in many clinicians refusing to perform the procedure if no written or clear proof of consent of the deceased is available.

And what about the rights of the child? As the Capato case proved, this unnatural way of bringing children into the world too often strips them of their rights. For instance, because PAR usually takes place months or even years after the parent’s death, it becomes difficult to prove paternity of the child, which could abnegate the child’s rights to inheritance.

Most important of all are the moral issues surrounding this kind of assisted reproduction. In Donum Vitae, issued in 1987 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholics are instructed on the vital importance of marital union and the act of sexual intercourse in the procreation of offspring. The absence of these two conditions make it wrong to seek artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer, surrogate motherhood and cryopreservation which is the freezing of gametes for future use. All of these practices violate the dignity of the person.

The Catholic Church is not the only major religion to forbid this morbid practice. As Rimon-Greenspan and Ravitsky write, Judaism also forbids PAR based on its halakhic prohibition which prevents someone from deriving personal benefit from a corpse.

Even the secular world calls for great caution in the use of PAR.

“It is clear that we have little real understanding of the motivating factors behind PAR, which will for generations attract interest and curiosity because they lead to a blurring of the very boundaries between life and death, says the authors of this article appearing in the Oxford Journal on Human Reproduction.

“This unique topic is riddled with complex and sometimes conflicting legal, ethical and moral issues, which should be carefully—and above all sensitively—taken into account.”

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