Let men donate sperm when they die, say doctors

MEN should be allowed to donate sperm alongside their organs and other body parts after they have died, doctors have said.

There is currently a huge shortage of sperm donors in Britain, and the UK needs to import semen from countries such as Denmark, which ships an estimated 3,000 samples each year, and the US, which sends 4,000.

Now, doctors writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics have called for men to be able to donate their sperm at death.

Dr Nathan Hodson, of the College of Life Sciences at the University of Leicester, said: “Many people hope that after death their bodies will be used to benefit others. It is both feasible and morally permissible for men to volunteer their sperm to be donated to strangers after death in order to ensure sufficient quantities of sperm with desired qualities.”

Unlike women who are born with their eggs, sperm is continually renewed which is why men are able to father children far later in life.

Women have successfully used the semen of dead partners to become pregnant because sperm is viable for up to 48 hours after death. It can be collected either through electrical stimulation of the prostate gland or surgery, and then frozen until required.

The doctors accept that people may think infertility is not serious enough to warrant sperm donation after death, but they argue that other transplants, such as corneas, are also not strictly necessary but can be hugely beneficial.

However, Allan Pacey, professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield, said it felt like “backward” step when society had moved so far towards uniting sperm donors with their children.

He said: “I’d much rather that we invested our energy in trying to recruit younger, healthy, willing donors who stand a good chance of being alive when the donor conceived person starts to become curious about them.”