Thanks to everyone who joined the debate! You are welcome to keep it going in the comments section if you have more to say. We will have a new topic for debate on Monday.
The purpose of this post is just to sum up what we as a VCOM community came up with, and to point those interested in this topic to more fleshed out arguments by the experts. The issue of posthumous sperm collection has been widely debated throughout the world, and different countries have passed various laws about it. Even in our small community we have not been able to reach a consensus. Overall, the commenters on this blog seem to fall into two general camps- those who think that not giving the sperm to the fiancee would violate her reproductive rights, and those who believe that giving her the sperm would violate Mr. P's autonomy (through lack of consent). As seems always to be the case in bioethical debates, it is a question of conflicting rights. Other issues discussed in the literature concerning this subject include: child welfare, paternity/inheritance legalities, terms of storage, physician obligation, religious objections, persistent vegetative status vs death, etc.
Articles*
1. Strong C, Gingrich JR, Kutteh WH: Ethics of postmortem sperm retrieval: Ethics of sperm retrieval after death or persistent vegetative state. Human Reproduction 15 (4):739-745, 2000. full article here
2. Orr RD, Siegler M: Is posthumous semen retrieval ethically permissible? Journal of Medical Ethics 28: 299-302, 2002. full article here
3. Stanford University website on infertility has an interesting section on posthumous reproduction.
*These provide a good overview. For those of you with abundant spare time, just type "posthumous sperm retrieval" into PubMed. You'll get at least 19 hits.
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