CANBERRA (Web Desk) – A woman has given birth to a healthy baby boy who was born using sperm collected from his father 48 hours after he died.
The boy’s mother had to fight the Supreme Court of Australia to get permission to ‘harvest’ her late husband’s sperm when he was killed in a motorbike accident.
Doctors were unsure whether it would be successful because it took the courts two days to decide whether the mother should be allowed to use his sperm to conceive.
It isn’t the first time that sperm has been taken from a dead man to create a baby, but it is 18 hours longer than has been done in the past.
IVF expert Steve Robson told Fairfax: “On a professional level this has been, from my perspective, a love story, and it has been incredible to be involved with helping a woman who has so much love and courage. As a group we were impressed with the amount of love this woman had, and her tremendous endurance against all the obstacles she faced.”
The mother had to go to Canberra from Adelaide to have the procedure because it is illegal in Adelaide.
Professor Kelton Tremellen added: “One reason was that I thought it was going to be a waste of time, and the other was I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. In the end I decided I would do it because I felt it wasn’t a battle she should have to fight at that point when she had just lost her husband.”
