Our obsession with cheating death leads us deeper into an ethical swamp
by Philippa Taylor, TCW:
A 60-year-old woman has been granted permission to take her dead daughter’s frozen eggs to a US fertility treatment clinic, to fertilise them with donor sperm and then (assuming success) to carry the embryos and (she hopes) give birth to her own grandchild.
Or should I say her own child?
Because on the one hand this child would be the woman’s son/daughter, but on the other, the child would also be her grandson/grand-daughter.
More of that shortly, but first some brief background.
A 28-year-old woman,dying of cancer, had her eggs frozen during her treatment. News reports on the case state that the young woman told her mother that she wanted her to have her child instead. However, this was not clearly put in writing, hence the legal battle.
The fertility watchdog (HFEA) refused to release the eggs to the mother on the grounds that the daughter had not provided full written consent. It seems that although the daughter had filled out a form agreeing to the eggs’ storage and use, she had not specified how her eggs would be used after her death, including whether they should be taken abroad or fertilised with a sperm donor.
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