The Women Who Used Their Dead Husbands’ Sperm To Have Their Child

It may not be common for women to have children using their dead husband’s sperm, but there are women who do, so the memory of their husbands live on.

One such case was that of baby Angelina Liu, who was born last week and whose police officer father was gunned down more than two years ago.

Angelina’s mother,  Pei “Sanny” Xia Chen, decided to preserve the sperm of her husband, Wenjian Liu, at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn in the US, where he was taken after he was fatally shot in December 2014.

Chen and Wenjian Liu had been married for two months and had planned to start a family.

An expert told the New York Post that Angelina is just one of less than 10 children born in the US through a procedure called a post-mortem sperm retrieval, where the sperm of a male can be extracted while he is on life support or for up to 24 hours after the heart stops beating.

Another was a woman, who wants to remain anonymous, who, aside from agreeing with doctors to donate her husband’s organs at the Manhattan hospital where he died unexpectedly of a heart condition in 2004, also requested that his sperm be harvested so they could still have a child.

The woman, from New York, said that she and her husband had been trying to get pregnant and over two years after her husband’s death, she was able to have his child through in-vitro fertilisation.

“I believe I had a right to do this because he was my husband, I was his wife and I knew he wanted this,” the woman told the New York Post.

She said that she only told her son about his conception after about 10 years, and recalled how her son was touched. “It meant a lot to him that his father and I loved each other so much that I went to such great lengths to have him,” she said.

Now, the memory of her beloved husband lives on in her son.

However, whether to grant such retrieval requests has opened up an ethical debate for hospitals as they grappled with questions such as the intent of the deceased.

University of Wisconsin urologist and president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology, Dr. Daniel Williams said that a lot of hospitals and ethics committees try to determine whether the deceased man wanted children, and some require that a living will be produced that specifies that intent. “Most men don’t have something like this in writing,” he said.

The hospital suggests women wait at least a year to go through with a pregnancy, which must be done through in-vitro fertilisation.

Officials from Woodhull Hospital, which is part of the city’s public hospital system, would not comment on whether they had guidelines about sperm retrieval.

Sources: News.com.au