Israeli family to keep dead daughter’s eggs

An Israeli family was granted permission to extract and freeze the eggs of their 17-year-old teenage daughter who recently passed away in a road accident.

Haaretz reported that Chen Aida Ayash’s family agreed to donate her organs after a car hit her, but they first wanted to harvest the eggs from Ayash’s ovaries. The family petitioned the court in their hometown of Kfar Saba. The ruling by the magistrates sets a legal precedent in Israel and around the world. According to a lawyer with 10 years experience with similar cases, this allowance quite possibly marks the first of its kind in the world.

The family also requested that the extracted eggs be fertilized with donated sperm, as embryos have a better chance of surviving the freezing process than unfertilized eggs. Unfortunately, the court denied permission for fertilization at this stage.

''This is a unique case, since this is the first time an Israeli court has approved the extraction and freezing of ovarian eggs from a dead woman,' says Maayan Maor, a spokeswoman for the Meir Medical Centre in Kfar Saba.

'We don't know the reason why Chen's parents wanted it done. We just received the court order and did the procedure.''

The Ayash family has not made a public comment regarding the matter. Additionally, information has not been released regarding the families reasoning for insisting on this procedure.

In Israel, there have been many incidents of sperm being extracted after death to allow a widow to conceive their child. In 2007, the Israeli parents of a deceased soldier were granted permission to extract sperm to create a child with a surrogate mother. Another Israeli family collected the sperm of their deceased son in order to producer future grandchildren.