Life after death: posthumous sperm procurement. Whose right to decide?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are a growing number of cases in Australia whereby women have been granted legal rights to posthumous sperm procurement (PSP) from their deceased partners. The 1998 landmark case of ‘AB/YZ’ was the first request granted for PSP (AB v Attorney-General, Unreported, Supreme Court of Victoria, Gillard J, 21 July 1998); however, at that time it was illegal in Victoria to use the sperm of a deceased man for fertility treatment (section 43, Infertility Treatment Act, Vic 1995). Despite amendments to section 43 of the act, several of AB/YZ's requests to export the sperm to another state for assisted reproductive therapy (ART) were denied, until 2005 when permission was granted [YZ v Infertility Treatment Authority (2005) VCAT 2655]. It is unknown whether AB/YZ has achieved a pregnancy, but the 7 years that it took for her request to succeed demonstrated the complex legal processes involved. To date, at least two live children have been born in Australia through PSP (www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/a-matter-of-life-and-death/story-e6frg8h6-1226613250144#). Posthumous sperm procurement (PSP) must be performed 24–36 hours postmortem. It involves epididymal aspiration, percutaneous testicular biopsy, and/or removal of the testes. Although a relatively simple procedure, it raises numerous ethical and medico-legal issues, including the rights of the deceased, the question of informed consent, the best interest of the child, and the motivation of the applicant (Bahadur G. Hum Reprod 2002;17:2769–75). It is undoubtedly a challenging situation for clinicians, exacerbated by the fact that its request is typically made urgently. In Australia, complex judgments between different jurisdictions further complicate matters. As ART continues to advance, requests for PSP have become increasingly common globally, with numbers in the USA increasing by 60% from 1997 to 2002 (Bahm S et al. Fertil Steril 2013;100:839–43). The ethical challenges posed by PSP have led to strict regulations globally. Canada, France, Germany, and Sweden deem it illegal, regardless of the deceased's advanced directive. The USA has no formal legislative regulations, and its use is guided by professional societies. In Australia the law allows for a coroner to authorise tissue to be removed for medical purposes; however, for PSP some states (Victoria and New South Wales) require prior written consent. South Australia and Western Australia forbid it, whereas others (Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory) have no legal requirements. The 2007 Australian National Health & Medical Research Council Ethical Guidelines on ART state that posthumous use of gametes requires advance consent, but has no guideline regarding PSP (www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/attachments/e78.pdf). The UK requires written informed consent prior to both PSP and sperm storage, thereby ensuring that couples discuss and make advanced formal plans. Australia has made great progress in terms of the legal precedents permitting PSP and supporting women in achieving the joys of motherhood, in spite of losing their loved ones. The current legislative regimes were not designed to deal with PSP, however, and clearer, accessible, and consistent laws are needed to support clinical and legal stakeholders when faced with such requests (Kroon B et al. ANZJOG 2012;52:487–90). With the increasing number and complexity of requests for PSP this has become a significant medico-legal challenge in modern obstetrics. None to declare.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".