Life After Death

In the news: an Israeli woman whose 22 year old son was killed by a Palestinian sniper has won a four-year legal battle to be allowed to create her own grandson using sperm she had asked to be extracted from her dead son's body. Over 200 hundred women responded to the woman's advertisement for a surrogate mother to carry her dead son's child to term, and the lucky winner will be inseminated with his sperm, which has been in liquid nitrogen for the past four years.

When you start to think about this incredible conundrum it's easy to understand why the legal argument has taken so long to settle. The man didn't have a partner and had no immediate prospects of having children. Did he even want children? Despite his mother saying her son's voice spoke to her when she was holding his photograph, telling her there was something she could do for him, there's no real evidence one way or the other. In life, parents often urge their children to present them with longed-for grandchildren, and many children resist the pressure because either they are not ready to procreate, or they never want to. In death, they cannot protect either their wishes or their genotype. If someone were to remove your sperm without your permission while you're alive they would be guilty of assault. When you're dead apparently you have no such protection.

Many people shy away from being sperm donors because they will have no control over the lives and upbringings of what are effectively their children. They may be condemning them to lives of extreme poverty, deprivation, degradation, abuse, indifference. You may make these decisions for yourself while you are alive, but apparently it makes no difference once you're dead.

What kind of relationship will the mother have? Is she just a surrogate? Does she want to bring the child up, or be involved at least? Is she being paid? It will be her child too. What rights will she have? Is she being coerced into signing them away?

What about the child? How will he or she cope with the knowledge that their germ was plucked from their dead father's loins and used to fertilise someone who not only didn't love their father, but had not even ever met him?

Science can do remarkable things, and the boundaries of what we can and cannot do are being pushed back further and further every day. I strongly believe that it is our right and our duty to use the intelligence with which we have been blessed to understand the world better, find out how things work, and change those things that are bad for the better. But this macabre case, perhaps more than any other, has pointed up for me the difference between what we CAN do, and what we SHOULD do. If our moral and ethical sciences don't keep better pace with our biological and chemical ones, then decisions like this one, driven by the raw emotional wants of distraught bereaved parents, will come to haunt us.