UK woman allowed to export dead daughter`s eggs to US for treatment

  10 September 2016    Read: 1362
UK woman allowed to export dead daughter`s eggs to US for treatment
A woman wanting to use her dead daughter’s frozen eggs to give birth to her own grandchild has been granted permission to export them to the US for treatment.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has ruled the eggs can be taken to a clinic in New York to be used with donor sperm, following a recent Court of Appeal decision which ruled in her favour.

The 60-year-old woman wants to carry out the dying wishes of her daughter, who died of bowel cancer in 2011, aged 28 , by raising her child.

The HFEA previously said the eggs could not be released from storage in London because the daughter, known as AM, did not give her full written consent.

But the UK fertility regulator said the “exceptional and unique circumstances” of the case meant special permission would be granted for the eggs to be sent to America.

They concluded it was unlikely that the daughter would have refused consent had she been given proper information by her parents, Mr and Mrs M, about the plans before she died.

The HFEA said: “Our Statutory Approvals Committee reconsidered this case in the light of the Appeal Court judgment.

“They agreed, in the exceptional and unique circumstances of this case, to grant special directions to export AM’s eggs to the USA.

“This has been a difficult case, above all for Mr and Mrs M, but as the judge made clear, such issues of consent are the cornerstone of the law and needed to be carefully considered.”

Mrs M told the BBC she and her husband were “very pleased that the HFEA have now agreed to release our beloved daughter`s eggs for export to the US".

She added: "It is our hope that others who find themselves in a similar situation to ours will not now have to go through the protracted heartache that we have had to endure."

The woman and her 59-year-old husband have spent five years trying to win their case and the mother lost a High Court case last year before subsequently overturning the decision at the Court of Appeal.

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