A 62-year-old woman whose 2 kids died in accidents won permission to harvest her dead husband's sperm

• A court in Australia granted permission to a woman, 62, to harvest her dead husband's sperm.
• The couple, married for 40 years, had lost both of their children to seperate incidents.

A 62-year-old woman was granted permission by a court to remove sperm from her dead husband for potential use in posthumous IVF.

Last month the woman made an urgent application to the Supreme Court of Western Australia for the removal and storage of her husband's sperm, a day after he died and while his body was still being stored in a morgue, court documents showed.

Her husband was 61 when he died in December.

The couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been married since 1983.

They had two children, according to the application, but their daughter drowned in 2013, and their son was killed in 2019 in a car accident.

According to the court documents, the couple had been discussing having another child prior to the man's death.

Tests showed his sperm was still viable.

The woman told the court she had visited a fertility expert who advised she was too old to have another child herself.

However, the court documents noted that she has a cousin in the Philippines, who is in her 20s, who volunteered to be a surrogate for her husband's child.

A specialist at a fertility clinic said he was willing to perform the sperm removal procedure if the order was granted, the court documents show.

The clinic did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, sent outside normal working hours, asking whether the procedure had gone ahead.

In granting the application, Judge Fiona Seaward ruled that the sperm could be harvested for "storage for later use in IVF procedures."

However, she said the ruling approved the harvesting and storage of the sperm, but was not authorization for the sperm to be used.

Western Australia prohibits posthumous fertilization.

According to The Guardian, the woman would need to apply to transfer the case to another jurisdiction that permitted such procedures.