blog.bioethics.net

Deep in the Heart of Texas: A Bar Fight, A Mother's Wish, and Posthumous Sperm Donation

Really, this isn't an SNL skit, I promise.

A woman's 21-year-old son dies in a Texas bar fight. The bereaved mom wants the son's clearly virile and tenacious genes to live on in the next generation and fights to have his sperm collected and stored so that someone may carry his seed. She says, on the one hand, that it was always his wish to have children and wants his wishes to be carried out. When the physicians refuse, mother Evans goes to the judge to get her son's sperm out of his body and into a surrogate. She wants someone to carry her grandbaby. Now!

It has been reported today in Live Science, that a judge has ruled that the mama's wishes (and purportedly son's) have carried the day.

Harvesting sperm from dead donor's is nothing new to the bioethics debate, of course, and questions about in whose interest it is done and how clearly preferences are articulated is well-trod ground. It's simply the imagery of the son killed in a Texas bar fight and the impassioned mother who wants her son's genes to live on that gives this story so much color. Moreover, it seems much clearer, from the story in the Austin American-Statesman, that this case is much more one of the mother's preferences to "keep a piece of him" with her, as she was even quoted as saying in the Texas newspaper as saying. "I want him to live on," Mrs. Evans said.

So how far will we go to in the posthumous collecting of sperm to satisfy the emotional and psychological needs of family members? Not to mention what a surrogate would be asked to go through and the future child, effectively a replacement for a lost son.

The Texas courts have erred here in a serious way. They have acceded to the wishes of a grieving mother in tremendous pain and sorrow. My soap opera characterization above notwithstanding Nikolas Colton Evans' death was a tragedy, but it does not justify harvesting his sperm so that his mother can create a replacement child and mislabel it as her son's wishes to have his own children some day or her own wishes to be a grandparent.

Nikolas Colton Evans' life was cut tragically short in a bar fight and he will never get to exercise his own reproductive choices in life. This does not mean his mother gets to exercise those choices for him after his death.