14 DAY TRIAL // In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind legal case, a 59-year-old woman is asking that a judge help her retrieve her dead daughter's eggs and have doctors use them to impregnate her.
The unidentified woman, together with her 58-year-old husband, insists that it was her daughter's dying wish to have her eggs fertilized by a donor and then implanted in her own mother's womb.
Should the 59-year-old woman win this legal battle and be impregnated with her dead daughter's fertilized eggs, this means that she will eventually deliver her own grandchild.
Admittedly, there are a few other cases of elderly women who delivered their children's children. Still, the fact that this 59-year-old's daughter is dead complicates things, both legally and ethically.
“I have never heard of a surrogacy case involving a mother and her dead daughter's eggs. It's fair to say that this may be a world first,” said fertility expert Dr. Mohammed Taranissi.
The woman's daughter died of bowel cancer
It is understood that the couple's daughter, whose identity also remains a mystery, passed away in 2011, at the age of 23, after a long battle with bowel cancer.
Mirror tells us that, according to a public domain document, it was in 2008 that the young woman contacted a fertility clinic in London, UK, and had three of her eggs put in storage.
She signed paperwork saying that she wanted her eggs preserved even after her death but failed to fill in a form detailing how she wanted doctors to do with them.
Hence, any claims that her mother might say she has over them are null and void in the eyes of officials with the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in the UK.
Her parents want the eggs sent to New York, US
Following the young woman's death, her parents contacted a fertility clinic in New York, US. Here, medical experts agreed to try and impregnate the 59-year-old mother.
The reason the couple had to look for a fertility clinic overseas is that doctors in the UK turned them down on the grounds that pregnancies when women are over 50 are risky and unlikely to succeed.
The trouble is that, since her daughter never got around to filling in the form saying how she wanted her eggs used, Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority officials are reluctant to give them up.
They argue that, whatever the 59-year-old might say, the fact remains that there is no bulletproof evidence that the young woman wanted her mother to carry her child.
More precisely, these is no written consent attesting to the woman's wish. Hence, agreeing to send the eggs to the New York fertility clinic would be unlawful.