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IVF Child Conceived With Dead Man's Sperm is Ruled by Court to be His Child

TAKAMATSU, July 16, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The moral labyrinth created by the IVF industry is producing some of history's more memorable legal decisions. A Japanese court has ruled that the child born of IVF using a dead man's sperm is, in fact, the man's child. The child was conceived in a lab after his father died of leukemia. When the child's mother tried to register the birth, the local government refused to allow it on the grounds that the father had died more than 300 days before the birth date. The normal length of human gestation is about 270 days.

The woman filed a lawsuit to have her son legally recognized as the child of his father. The first court denied the suit on the grounds of "common sense" saying it was impossible to recognize the father-child relationship in such a case. The Takamatsu High Court overturned the lower court ruling.

Gillian Long, Research Director for Campaign Life Coalition who monitors the Japanese scene said, "The situation is so convoluted now with all the re-defining of what a human being is, what marriage is, what a parent is, that we now need court decisions reached by lawyers with no scientific competence to tell us what ought to be obvious to any fifth grader."

The deceased man had signed a statement that he did not want his sperm used to impregnate his widow after his death. Under the Japanese Civil Code a child has a right to be recognized as the child of his father up to three years after the father's death. However, the law makes no provision for the problems created by the new technologies.

"What is so hard to understand about all this, is that tomorrow a different court somewhere is going to decide that some other IVF child has no rights at all," Long said. Japan has just decided that with cloning for stem cells, those people are not people either. Some time, the law is going to have to make up its collective mind about what a human being is and what human rights really are."

Further coverage from Mainichi Daily News:
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20040716p2a00m0dm009000c.html

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