Dead Men Reproducing: What Are The Ethical Or Moral Ramifications?

In the John Irving novel, The World According to Garp, a comatose man sires the protagonist, Garp. Garp’s mother, a flinty nurse who wants a child but no husband, straddles the man, a brain damaged sergeant, who suffers (or enjoys) bouts of automatic arousal, and becomes impregnated.

She raises Garp herself, with the sergeant fading from the story, a convenient and passive means to an end.

However, the spectacle of a woman pilfering the sperm of a dead man, or one in a persistent vegetative state without his express, and informed consent is no longer restricted to the fictional world of a novel published in 1978. As reproductive technologies continue to develop, so do the numbers of men who freeze their sperm for future use — athletes, soldiers going to war, and cancer patients, for example.

A New York Times article in 1994 reported on the 1991 case, of a lawyer named William Kane, who froze 15 vials of sperm for his girlfriend, Deborah Hecht, to use after his suicide. Kane duly killed himself. When his children by a former marriage expressed displeasure at the posthumous creation of new siblings — new potential sharers of their inheritance — they filed suit. After years of wheeling through the courts, Hecht eventually won three vials of Kane’s sperm, which represented 20 percent of his estate. Finally, in 1997, at the age of 42, she received all of them. She won largely because Kane’s wishes were written and explicit. He wanted Hecht to have his children even though he would not be there to raise them.

However, not all cases are so straightforward; physicians can now extract sperm from an unconscious man who is either dead or brain-dead. They can collect the sperm manually, surgically, or through electro ejaculation, which includes an electric shock that ejects the sperm. Viable sperm lasts up to 36 hours in a dead body.

In 1995 in England, for example, Diane Blood asked to have the sperm of her comatose husband frozen without his informed consent, which doctors did, but the Human Fertilization, and Embryology Authority in that country denied her attempt at pregnancy, according to a 1996 article on BMJ.com. The determination that presumed consent, which is the assumption that Mr. Blood would want his wife to have his children in the event of his death — did not constitute grounds for sperm retrieval. Diane Blood ultimately went abroad to Brussels to have in vitro fertilization, and she successfully bore two sons, according to a 2002 article on Independent.com.

In Israel, they accept presumed consent, although suspect, unless the deceased explicitly states he does not want progeny after his death. If a man is in a loving relationship, not necessarily marriage, his partner may have his sperm extracted.

Guidelines established by Israel’s attorney general in 2003, justify the practice by noting that no one has the right to force parenthood upon a dead man, according to an article on Questia.com titled: Posthumous Reproduction Guidelines in the Israel Journal by Vardit Ravitsky, for The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 34, 2004. Nowhere do the guidelines discuss the well-being of children born into families without fathers.

In the United States, there are no laws governing the practice of posthumous sperm retrieval, despite the efforts of former New York Senator Roy Goodman to introduce a bill that would have made informed consent imperative before sperm retrieval. However, the numbers are also hard to come by, according to the University Of Pennsylvania, Center for Bioethics, at least 14 clinics in 11 states retrieve sperm, but this leaves something of a vacuum when deciding what to do.

For example, what if it is not the wife, but rather the mother, and father who want a grandchild from their deceased son? This is precisely what an Israeli court allowed two parents to do, when their son, a soldier, was shot dead, leaving no will, or spouse. His family argued that he longed to have children, and an Israeli court granted them the right to inject his sperm into a woman of their choosing. However, a 2003 article from JWeekly.com titled, Israeli parents unable to harvest dead son’s sperm, court decides, illustrated that this is not always the case.

What are we to make of “sperminators?” asks Timothy Murphy of the University Of Illinois, College of Medicine.

Josephine Johnston, a research associate at the Hastings Center, an ethics institute in Garrison, NY, has misgivings about posthumous sperm retrieval. “Before we make someone a father after they’ve died, we should be very sure this is something consistent with his wishes.”

The matter of sperm retrieval is uncomplicated when a man leaves specific instructions, but things grow murky in the realm of presumed consent, when there is no written document. If we apply this to tissue donation across the board, as it is in Spain, it means unless you specifically express your desire not to be an organ donor, your body will be harvested whether you like it or not. This is illustrated further in a April 2010 article titled: New York To Be First Organ Donor Opt-Out State?, on the HuffingtonPost.com, which states that New York Assemblyman Richard Brodsky is pushing for the allowance of “presumed consent,” as it is in Spain and a few other countries.

However, how can we presume consent in creating a new life? Is it enough to say, however strenuously, “He really wanted a family?” Maybe he did, but maybe he wanted a family with a father. If a dead or comatose man is still individual enough to “donate” his sperm, don’t we also have to protect his other rights?

Do we have the right to force him to create one or more lives without his actual consent?

Sources:
William Kane: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/29/us/15-vials-of-sperm-the-unusual-bequest-of-an-even-more-unusual-man.html
http://www.bmj.com/content/313/7069/1351.2.extract
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/six-years-on-diane-blood-is-pregnant-again-659977.html
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=MrvGJJy1yLTtjvNJyD5V0J2yvRTDGYMbkq1YQBhP6NCvh2dGg3R9!904834373!-1311377005?docId=5006818819
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/21217/israeli-parents-unable-to-harvest-dead-son-s-sperm-court-decides/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/new-york-to-be-first-orga_n_554234.html