Giving Birth After Death

Sign of the times of the day:

The family of Chen Aida Ayash, a 17-year-old schoolgirl who died after being hit by a car last week, was granted a petition to have her eggs harvested and frozen, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

The ruling raises the possibility that, for the first time, a mother could give birth after her death, a development that raises legal and ethical questions that are likely to trouble conservatives in Israel and elsewhere in the world.

Few countries have legislation covering posthumous egg harvesting, although the extraction of sperm from the corpses men who have given consent prior to death has become fairly common. There have been dozens of such cases in the United States alone.

Last year, judges and doctors in the US turned down a petition filed by another family to extract eggs from the ovary of a brain dead air hostess on the grounds that she had expressed no desire to have children before she was struck down with a heart attack.