How docs help make the miracle

There are actually some people in very high-risk fields who bank their sperm in advance just in case something like this happens. In those instances, they would bank a full sample for intrauterine insemination. If the woman is ovulating, they will thaw the sperm, and at her peak ovulation time, she shows up to her gynecologist and the sperm is thawed. Then they put the sperm in a catheter and they insert that into her uterus. That's the lowest tech way to do it. It costs about $1,000 for the procedure, and the success rates are about 20%. If the man's sperm quality is not good enough or sometimes when you thaw the sperm it doesn't work as well as fresh sperm, they can use a technique called in vitro fertilization. IVF takes weeks to prepare the woman for egg retrieval. That's why it's customary for men to bank multiple samples. They combine the sperm and the egg in a laboratory, and then, if it works, if there's appropriate fertilization, after about five days, the embryo is able to be transferred to the woman so she can get pregnant. What happens is you wait for the uterus, for her endometrial lining, to accept the pregnancy. The embryo is incubated and potentially frozen. Sometimes it takes a month for the uterus to be ready. Then we follow it very closely like any pregnancy. Using frozen sperm for in vitro fertilization, success rates for pregnancy are much higher – 70% to 80% – if the female has normal fertility status. The whole procedure costs about $25,000 to $40,000. Even after a murder, we can obtain usable sperm post-mortem. There is a 24-hour window of time where we can collect sperm from someone and use that. That has been done in the past. There is an ethical issue with that: The man has to have given written consent before he dies, or there has to be evidence that the couple was actively trying to get pregnant at the time of his death. In a case like this one, it’s great that we have the technology available so that Officer Wenjian Liu’s wife can recover some degree of her husband's legacy. Mills is a fertility specialist and director of the UCLA Men's Clinic.