Until there is federal legislation on the status of cryogenic offspring, individual US courts will be forced to rule in such cases and critical questions will remain unanswered.
In the case of the military, for example, should every soldier have the option to freeze his sperm? (Female soldiers certainly will not, as the process of generating, harvesting and fertilising eggs and then storing the embryos is complicated and expensive).
Should partners be the only people to have access to frozen sperm? What if the parents of a deceased man want to hire a surrogate mother to conceive their grandchild? How many children could be created from one deceased man's sperm and after how many years - or decades - could his offspring be produced?
The wishes of the deceased should be paramount, argues Anne Reichman Schiff, associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh.
"Posthumous conception recasts the content and contour of the deceased's life," Schiff wrote recently. "And when it occurs without the person's consent, it deprives the individual of the opportunity to be the conclusive author of a highly significant chapter in his life."
In other words, a young man killed in a car crash may never have wanted to become a father and a decision by his parents to have his sperm surgically retrieved and frozen after death in order to create children could be "ego-driven", in the view of Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law at Harvard University and author of Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility and the New World Order in Child Production.
Then there are the profit-driven reproductive technology companies who, Bartholet believes, try to convince clients that reproduction in one form or another is inherently better than adoption.
Bartholet, herself an adoptive parent, posed a fundamental question on a recent Boston talk show: "Is it moral to create children artificially when there are already children in the world who need homes?"
In a consumer society that is suffering a bad case of the wartime jitters, however, most people want to be reassured by science, not scolded by conscience.