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Doctors are given go ahead to extract sperm from unconscious man in legal first

BMJ 2018; 362 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k3578 (Published 17 August 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;362:k3578
  1. Clare Dyer
  1. The BMJ

A High Court judge has made an emergency ruling allowing doctors to extract sperm from an unconscious man with a catastrophic brain injury, to store it and use it to try to impregnate his widow after his death.1

In a legal first, Mrs Justice Knowles ruled in the Court of Protection that the move would be in the best interests of the man, named only as Z, who was hit by a van while driving his motorcycle to work on 5 July. He and his wife, Y, who had one child, had undergone tests before starting in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment to …

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