A 62-year-old grieving widow in Australia has recently won the right to extract sperm from her dead husband. Sadly, the couple had lost their two adult children in separate accidents, and this move was the woman’s final attempt to have a child with her husband, whom she was trying to conceive with when he died at 61 on December 17. The couple had been married for 39 years.
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It’s reported that the widow, who currently remains unnamed due to legal reasons in Australia, was given the green light to have sperm extracted from her husband who died suddenly at the couple’s home in Western Australia on the morning of December 17. The very next day after her husband’s tragic passing, the woman pleaded her case in the Supreme Court during an “urgent” hearing.
Justice Fiona Seaward eventually granted the grieving widow permission to have spermatozoa tissue removed from her late husband, whose body had been stored at a morgue in Perth, Australia. During the hearing, the woman argued that for years she and her husband had regularly discussed having another child together after their firstborn, a 30-year-old son, died in a 2019 car accident after their second child, a 29-year-old daughter, drowned in a 2013 fishing trip.
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After sharing the tragic losses of not one, but both of their children, in addition to the loss of her longtime partner, the grieving widow told the court that before the man’s passing, she had been told by a fertility expert that at 62 she was past the age to have a child.
However, after further testing of her husband’s sperm, doctors determined that he was a suitable candidate for IVF (In-Vitro Fertilization, where a female egg is fertilized by male sperm in a lab before being implanted in the carrier). So, together, the couple began planning on using an overseas surrogate to carry their third child using the man’s sperm.
During the woman’s “urgent” hearing, the court learned that her cousin, a 20-something-year-old in the Philippines, had even volunteered to become the couple’s surrogate. Up until the man’s death, however, the couple had been dealing with tons of legal obstacles surrounding the surrogacy, which would have required them to live in the Philippines for a while.
And to continue making matters even more tragic, despite winning her case and having a viable surrogate, the grieving widow will no longer be able to do anything with her late husband’s sperm. According to a law in Western Australia, posthumous fertilization with sperm is banned. So, the woman is now facing another battle in being able to use her dead husband’s extracted sperm, and will next need to apply to the Reproductive Technology Council to use the sperm in another state where it is legal.
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