LONDON - A debate was raging among medical experts yesterday over the case of a woman seeking court permission to have a baby using her dead husband's sperm.
In the first case of its kind in Britain, the 30 year old woman from the Midlands will take her case to the High Court in London tomorrow. The woman insisted yesterday she was only carrying out the wishes of her late husband for the life they had planned together as they had been trying to have a child when he contracted the bacterial meningitis from which he later died.
She wants to be artificially inseminated with sperm taken from her husband in March last year while he was on a life support machine after falling into a coma.
But she has been refused permission to go ahead with the plan by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which says the law would be broken because the woman does not have her husband's permission in writing.