Baby Is Born Using Sperm From Dead Father

In the first known birth of its kind, a woman has had a baby using sperm retrieved from her dead husband, raising ethical questions over whether a man must give his consent to be a father.

The sperm was retrieved 30 hours after the man’s death and then frozen for 15 months before use. His wife, Gaby Vernoff, became pregnant in July 1998 and delivered the girl March 17 at a Los Angeles hospital.

Bruce Vernoff of Los Angeles was in his early 30s and happily married when he died unexpectedly of an allergic reaction. He and his wife had no children. But Gaby Vernoff asked that her dead husband’s sperm be retrieved and preserved, said Dr. Cappy Rothman, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Century City Hospital.

“I just did it because the family was in so much stress and so much grief. I did it for them because they were in so much pain,” Rothman, a male infertility specialist, told Associated Press in a telephone interview from Panama, where he was attending a medical conference.

Rothman led a team that went to the coroner’s office and extracted sperm from Vernoff’s epididymis, the coiled tubes behind each testis, where sperm produced in the testicles mature. How long sperm can survive in a corpse depends on the temperature of the body, Rothman said, setting the range at 12 hours to 30 hours.

One medical ethics expert argued that the procedure should not become a standard medical service.

“Is it appropriate to consciously bring a child into this world with a dead father?” asked Alexander M. Capron, professor of law and medicine and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at USC.